In response to Kathy Gyngell: Jumping to conclusions about legalising cannabis is premature, The Duke of Umberland, England wrote:
I may say that the work of teaching at Cairo University was not an arduous job, essentially for three reasons. One was that the students didn’t understand English; the second that they were nearly always on strike or otherwise engaged in political demonstrations, and thirdly they were often stupefied with hashish. So I had a lot of leisure on my hands.
Incidentally, to be serious for a moment, it seems to me a most extraordinary thing that at that time you wouldn’t have found anybody, Egyptian or English or anybody else, who wasn’t absolutely clear in his mind that hashish was a most appalling and disastrous addiction. So you can imagine how strange it was forty years later for me to hear life peeresses and people like that insisting that hashish didn’t do any harm to anybody, and was even beneficial. I see that in Canada it is going to be legalised, which will mean one more sad, unnecessary hazard comes into our world.
Malcolm Muggeridge: The Great Liberal Death Wish (1979)
