Peter Hitchens' thick-headed nonsense:
Most cannabis users don’t find it such a marvellous experience that they’d be prepared to risk six months at hard labour for a second offence of possession … After a brief flurry of convictions and imprisonment, during which the actual unyielding severity of the new law would be demonstrated, use would fall with amazing rapidity. My opponents know this. They know they would be too scared to carry on possessing under those circumstances. That is why they get so cross with me. Because my plan would work, and deprive them of their pleasure.
Ah, yes, because incarceration for drug possession has worked so well in America. Pete Guither sees the Hitchens post as a good example of the drug warrior mindset:
It’s baffling to read someone like Peter Hitchens. He’s an anomaly – a true believer who is fully convinced his opponents have been addled in the head, thereby allowing him to dismiss criticisms quite easily. He’s convinced (likely through a “moral” argument) that all marijuana users are automatically damaged (as opposed to casual alcohol users), that their damage ends up making them less productive to society, so that society is therefore damaged as well by marijuana use, and that he is bound to attempt to protect civilization from that damage.
None of these premises stands up to scrutiny.
The Dish 