The drugs ‘report’ that proves a sack of spuds is smarter than our MPs

HERE are some MPs who definitely ought to be chucked out by the voters whenever we get the chance: Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes), Luciana Berger (Liverpool Wavertree), Ben Bradshaw (Exeter), Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East), Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot), Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) and Dr Paul Williams (Stockton South).

Their parties are not important. It is their actions that matter. In all cases, you’d be better off being represented by a sack of potatoes, or a tub of lard.

Even a particularly dim King Edward or Maris Piper would not be ignorant and rash enough to think that the decriminalisation of drugs was a good idea, as these MPs – members of the Health and Social Affairs Committee – said it was in a ‘report’ last week.

Look, our drug possession laws have not been enforced for decades. They cannot be the cause of the problem. And drug abuse is a voluntary crime, not a compulsory disease, as these fools constantly pretend. All its consequences were

I WOULD be ashamed of myself if I did not mention the treatment of Julian Assange, a person I do not know and do not especially like. Yet his crimes, and those alleged against him, do not seem to me to justify his being held in Belmarsh high-security prison as if he were a violent criminal. A free country should not behave like this. f reely chosen by t he abuser. Cancer sufferers would love to be able to give up having cancer. But they cannot.

I have read the document they grandly call a report. I doubt they even know the arguments against the fashionable surrender position which they took and endorsed.

I strongly suspect they do not know that Japan and South Korea, law- governed democracies and among the most advanced societies on earth, successfully reduce and prevent drug use by enforcing their laws against drug possession.

Maybe they were gulled by the racialist argument that these countries have a different ‘culture’ from us. In fact they have pretty much the same culture as this country had before the drug lobby got to work here in the late 1960s. But, of course, they focus on Portugal, the supposed drug paradise, where the drug laws (though feeble) are on paper significantly tougher than here ( drug abusers can have their passports taken away and be banned from pursuing their professions, as well as facing significant fines). There they saw what they wanted to see, which did not include a 40 per cent increase in the use of marijuana since decriminalisation in 2001.

I wonder if they were given pause when, on September 30, Rui Moreira, the mayor of Porto, Portugal’s second biggest city, made a startling U-turn on the issue. He called for the reintroduction of criminal penalties for drug use in public spaces.

Did they make any serious effort to find out about any opposition to decriminalisation? Would it have helped if they had?

I rather doubt it. The problem goes deeper than knowledge.

A few years ago I and some allies tried to state the anti-drug, proenforcement case to the Home Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, who at least had the manners and sense to invite witnesses who might not agree with what I am sure they were already planning to say. It was as close as I have ever come to a mystical experience. As I spoke to these lawmakers, I was both in the room and not in it. I provided the fruits of years of research on actual drug law enforcement and public policy.

THE MPs could plainly hear me. But t here was no human contact. For all the impression I was making on their minds, I might as well have been speaking Martian. And their report said what all these reports say: ‘Give Up!’

There is hardly a voice to be heard, either in Parliament, or the BBC, or in most major newspapers, against this literally mad policy of permitting the free use of terrible mind-destroying, family-destroying poisons. Yet in the real world of our cities, where the stink of dope is seldom absent and the crazy violence grows and grows, millions know from grim experience that they are wrong.

How can these MPs claim to be our representatives? And what is it that makes them so receptive to the wicked, dangerous and greedy drug legalisation lobby.

I’d like to see a report on that.