YOU might imagine that with all the troubles this country and its capital city are facing, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, would be here getting to grips with them. Not a bit of it. The Left-wing former human rights lawyer and Blair-era MP is in the sunny headquarters of addle-pated woke ideas, California, to look into legalising cannabis.
In Los Angeles Mayor Khan has visited dope farms, dope shops, a dope ‘dispensary’ and consulted police officers and public health officials about the legal trade in the mind-altering drug.
Eleven states in America plus Washington DC have legalised the recreational use of cannabis, and it appears that envious eyes on this pauperised side of the Atlantic are examining the potential tax yields of selling a dangerous and neurotoxic drug to the public. The state of California alone collected more than £649million in dope taxes last year, the sum rising every 12 months since they legalised the use, possession, sale and growth of cannabis in 2016. True, that’s small potatoes compared with the £500billion Britain blew on its Covid-19 misadventure, but you have to start somewhere. Thankfully, the present government is opposed to decriminalising drugs, but in Britain what the government says about drugs is not very important; it is the police you have to watch, and they are already well on the road to de facto legalisation.
Khan clearly seeks to make this trend official. He has no direct powers to decriminalise drugs in London, but that is neither here nor there – the aim is to strengthen a legalisation consensus among the Left-wing civil administration which really runs Britain, and bring to a head a confrontation about illegal drugs that has been festering for decades. Additionally Khan, as Mayor, is the police and crime commissioner of the capital and can set the agenda of policing policy. That gives him a lot of scope where drugs are concerned.
Khan has established – with public money – an entity called the London Drugs Commission to ‘start a conversation’.The commission will focus on ‘the effectiveness of drug laws in Britain’; for that, read legalisation.
Guess who Khan has installed as chairman? None other than Charlie Falconer – Lord Falconer of Thoroton to afford him his full pomp – Sir Anthony Charles Lynton ‘Tony’ Blair’s old mucker and pal of the present Labour leader (and former Director of Public Prosecutions) Sir Keir Starmer.
Announcing the commission, Khan said he believed it would help ‘tackle drug-related crime, protect Londoners’ health and reduce the huge damage that illegal drugs cause to our communities’.
Before the commission even starts you can bet your last pound on what it will finish up advocating. This will be going only one way: in addition to the launch of the Drugs Commission, Mayor Khan is considering a separate plan that would allow people in London aged between 18-24 to carry up to three bags of cannabis and avoid prosecution. A trial of the plans, if approved by City Hall, will run in three London boroughs later this year.
De facto legalisation would help Khan politically in a number of ways: he gets a highly destructive social pathology off the statute book and into the la-la land of neo-Marxist sociology; as mayor he could no longer be confronted by his huge failure and that of his police force in tackling drug crime in London – because the crime would simply no longer exist. London has often been shown to be the cocaine capital of Europe but, surprise, surprise, in the past few years the city has refused to participate in the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction’s survey.
Decriminalisation would also mean Khan and future Labour mayors could forever avoid confrontation with ethnic minorities about drug policing, a long-running problem going back to the Brixton riots in 1981 and beyond. There are votes in that for Labour. It would also mean another nail in the coffin for western bourgeois life, the destruction of which is something the disguised revolutionaries of the Blair era have always been very keen on.
Khan certainly has the breathtaking cheek of his old boss Blair. Legalisation will not, as he claims, ‘tackle the huge damage caused by the drug trade’ because the harm lies in the drugs themselves. Cannabis has strong links with schizophrenia, psychosis, violent episodes, depression and other mental disorders.
Even proponents of the drug in its highly influential lobbying arm, known as Big Dope, openly admit it causes paranoia, which is a serious shift in consciousness and not something to be laughed at. Doctors in districts where dope use is high have become adept at spotting the common sight of people in Accident and Emergency suffering from cannabis psychosis. In a city with casualty departments swamped by people having failed to find the genus known as the lesser-spotted general practitioner, the last thing anyone needs is a rise in psychotic patients presenting.
Apart from the scientifically established medical risks of cannabis, there are the social and cultural ramifications of legalisation to be considered.
Children in struggling families and from deprived backgrounds and areas face enough barriers to advancement without the authorities sending out a message that taking drugs is okay. That a politician such as Khan, who purports to be concerned with the disadvantaged, is even considering the legalisation of cannabis shows a grotesquely irresponsible and expedient outlook. Then there are the many tragic cases of promising young people with no disadvantages at all who destroy their minds and futures and even end up as killers through cannabis which, incidentally, some research has found to be a ‘gateway’ drug to other narcotics.
Smartasses often contend that there is nothing wrong with cannabis legalisation because Britain is awash with drugs anyway. This observation is based on the mistaken belief that the police have until now been ‘fighting drugs’ and failing. This is not the case. Policies of containment and defeatism have been prevalent from the Home Office downwards for decades. The idea has long been to criminalise the trader, not the customer: in other words attempting to disrupt supply while encouraging demand – another example of our authorities abandoning common sense.
The idea which the London Drugs Commission will evidently push is the liberal-Left delusion that legalisation will stop criminals being interested in the drugs trade. This is nonsense, as the US is starting to discover. Many states which have legalised dope have seen a rise in cannabis offences related to smuggling and unlicensed propagation and harvests, as criminals cash in on the lower prices of illegal and therefore untaxed drugs. Gangsters will also still be dealing all the other street drugs, so the idea that decriminalising cannabis will somehow make London less crime-ridden is specious to say the least. An insult to the intelligence is a better way of putting it. Of course, where violence and mania is concerned, it matters not whether the drug was bought legally or illegally, as this site shows.
Lord Falconer said of his new role: ‘We need rigorously to identify what is the best approach to reduce harm to our communities. A national debate is long overdue. We aim to make recommendations to bring about effective and lasting change (my emphasis).’
As you can see from that last sentence, the Left is about to start pushing us further down a path to more chaos, misery and madness, and indeed for many it will be a road of no return.
