David Cameron has rejected the call for a Royal Commission on the UK's drugs laws. This request did not come from a bleary-eyed, teen stoner sporting a T-shirt that with an alien head and the logo 'Take Me to Your Dealer', which might explain his refusal. No, this proposal came from a House of Commons select committee on home affairs, none of whose members wore T-shirts saying 'Adihash', 'Coke Is It' or 'Marijuana - Millions stoned' in the style of the McDonald's logo. One MP was wearing a T-shirt under his business shirt with a picture of a small fat-faced dog with a diagonal red line through it, strapline 'Say No Pugs'. What that proves is anyone's guess, perhaps that this MP genuinely thinks comedy tees are funny or that he failed to do the washing and had to substitute this weak dog joke top for a vest.
Whatever the select committee may or may not have been wearing, under or over their business dress, did not apparently influence Dave's decision to dismiss this plea out of hand. He gave three reasons in a short interview. As he was pressed for time, I have helpfully filled in what he was trying to express.
1. 'We have a policy and it's working, drug use is coming down'
What I meant to say was the government has a policy of ignoring its own scientific advice and that of senior police officers. We prefer instead to stick with prohibition because we are terrified of hostile articles by the likes of Melanie Philips or Richard Littlejohn in the tabloids. Strangely despite my obsession with opinion polls, in the case of drugs' laws, I prefer to ignore the views of over 70% of the population.
Drug usage has come down a little bit, so I will pretend that there's some connection between our policy and the outcome. Quite why it's taken 30 years for the identical policies to have effect I won't bother to explain and if drug use were to go up again, I will be very quick to deny any link between consumption and policy. As I have conveniently avoided discussing the counterfactual, you don't have a chance to compare what might have happened in the UK with different policies. I won't do this, because the example of Portugal in recent years disproves my original point.
2. 'We need to do more to keep drugs out of our prisons'
Rather than answer your question about the need for a Royal Commission, I have instead mentioned an different issue which is the systemic smuggling perpetrated by our prison officers. This relates to drugs prohibition in exactly the opposite way I'm suggesting, as were drugs decriminalised, no prison warder need smuggle the substances inside nor would there be any inflated profits by virtue of their illegality.
Not letting facts or logic upset my polemic, I have instead used the simple, yet effective, trick of saying certain words close to each other. This creates an entirely artificial and fallacious choice in your mind thanks to verbal proximity: support for a Royal Commission equates with supporting more drugs in prisons. This is absolute nonsense, but as I've said it with the sort of serious face usually reserved for the death of an elderly family pet you might just buy it. To be honest, the only kind of person who would actually support the crazy idea of more drugs in prisons would be a prison officer. He's hoping to save enough to buy that static caravan he's always dreamed of the Pembrokeshire coast.
3. 'We need to focus on [the above] than a very long term Royal Commission'.
I'm going to stick with the same basic formula for point 1 and 2, which is to say things one after another which have no connection in the belief that most people are too stupid to spot logical flaws. This is pretty much what passes for serious debate in this country about drug policy.
You might have thought that as a rightwing free-market advocate running a Coalition that desperately needs to raise runds the pure economics of legalisation might appeal to me. Nope. I would much rather be consistently and hopelessly wrong that embrace any hint of the complexity such issues present in the real world.
And I won't trouble myself with the inconvenient fact that if the UK drug laws were as rigorously enforced on rich white males as they are on poor black males, yours truly along with many of his cabinet colleagues and associates would have a criminal record.
Now if you'll excuse me George Osborne and I are rather busy at the moment trying to do more damage to the UK economy than any other individual in the last 100 years. We are currently joint 3rd with Goering.
