THE observant payer of taxes will have noticed that the civil administration in this country likes to use the money it harvests in ways that are deleterious to civilised life. In short: we’ll mess up the country, and you’ll pay for the privilege.
Last week it was reported that the government and local politicians are continuing this trend with a textbook example: the Home Office has granted Bristol City Council a licence to operate a testing service for illegal drugs. Yes, someone who has just picked up their stash of heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, speed or other pill or potion, can sidle up to this new service and have their drug tested for contaminants in the hope that when they smoke, snort or swallow the substance it will not kill them. After an hour these criminals who have broken the law by purchasing illegal drugs will get the test results. They will also get, drum roll, ‘an individually tailored, non-judgemental healthcare consultation with a medical professional’. So that’s what you have to do to see a quack without waiting three weeks: take up drugs as a hobby.
Bristol is financing the service but it is to be run by a group called The Loop, a not-for-profit organisation that works towards ‘harm reduction’ by testing illegal drugs at festivals and then advising their consumers if, you know, taking them could be a bit iffy. The group, one of whose partners is an outfit known as The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, a ‘community group’ in Bristol that promotes ‘activism’ and what used to be known as vandalism but is now called ‘street art’, contends that by providing a team of professional chemists and healthcare workers they are reducing the damage caused by drugs.
The logic of this is questionable to say the least. The trend for drug testing and harm reduction has been going on for at least a decade yet, as Office for National Statistics figures reveal, in 2011 there were 2,652 drug poisoning deaths (the majority, two thirds, were men – there’s male privilege for you), while in 2020 there were 4,561, a 71 per cent increase against a background of increasing appeasement and liberality in the policing of personal drug use.
To concentrate on deaths alone would be to diminish the scope of the debate. The drift of opinion among the radical middle classes who manipulate public debate in Britain is well towards decriminalising street drugs.
As long ago as 2017, the Times, the purported noticeboard of the Establishment, gave house room to one Ian Birrell to advocate for drug testing at pop festivals. ‘Like it or not,’ wrote Birrell, ‘some human beings take illegal drugs for pleasure; it is estimated that three million people in Britain have done so. So what hope is there of stopping such a lucrative trade reaching fields of hedonistic weekenders?’
I would say quite a lot of hope if such festivals were comprehensively raided and the middle-class professionals who like to get off their heads at them thought they might end up in court, with career-destroying effects. Additionally, a more prohibitionist approach to mind-bending drugs made in makeshift factories would undoubtedly save many from the appalling deaths they can cause.
(It may interest you that Birrell was a speechwriter for the ‘Conservative’ – only ironic apostrophes will do – prime minister David Cameron.)
As I mentioned in my TCW piece last week about the Mayor of London’s commission to examine drug legalisation, the fact that the police don’t raid such events and are backing away from enforcing the laws on personal drug possession to concentrate on dealers and suppliers merely creates a situation where supply is sometimes intermittent but demand is encouraged. The result of that is that culture and society is stuck with the squalor, criminality, violence and physical and mental illness that always attend street drugs.
But, you may say, what if my child took the illegal drugs they had bought to a government testing lab, found that these drugs, which are in themselves poisons, were poisoned by something else and that information saved their lives? Of course, that would be a good thing for you and your child, but I would hope you would agree that it would remain a very bad thing that official defeatism had brought about a culture where your child could casually buy potentially fatal drugs for their own consumption and intended to carry on doing so. For in a way a publicly-funded initiative to test illegal drugs for their criminal users is not a great deal different to councils testing the safety of, say, ladders used by burglars to make sure they don’t hurt themselves during a raid. It is not exactly a good message to put out.
Which brings us round to the government: in its official pronouncements it remains opposed to legalisation. Yet the Home Office – headed by Priti Patel, who appears to be against the legalisation of drugs – granted the drug testing licence to Bristol City Council, an undoubtedly liberalising move. As the Times reported in relation to the Bristol initiative: ‘The decision to grant the licence is being interpreted as a progressive shift in UK drug policy.’ Another step on the road to legalisation, in other words – it cannot be coincidence that news of it appeared at the same time as the announcement of Khan’s drugs commission.
Steve Brine, the Conservative MP for Winchester, is well pleased by the drug testing scheme. He said: ‘It is without a doubt an important step forward in reframing the conversation around drugs to one of a health issue rather than purely a criminal one.’ When nominally right of centre politicians start talking like this, you know something is in the wind. A few short years ago such utterances were the specious preserve of the liberal-left.
High above our domestic arena, in the limousine-liberal world of supranational politicking, there are clear signs that attention, so long concentrated on the fabrication of pandemic narratives and ‘health security’, is turning to legalising dangerous street drugs. Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand who is now chairwoman of the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP), opined that the Bristol service for criminal drug users was ‘heartening’ because the UK has ranked ‘among most prohibitionist western countries on drug policy and regulation’ in recent years.
The self-styled GCDP, a Swiss-based organisation of globalist movers and shakers, has been openly, and obsessively, campaigning for ‘decriminalising personal use and possession’ of illegal drugs since this lobby of drug legalising sympathisers first set itself up in 2011. One of its founder members is Richard Branson, who is very keen on the idea of a legalised cannabis industry. One of their former members was UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, two others were former Presidents of Mexico and Colombia. It is clearly well financed. At the end of their first and through subsequent reports, the Open Society Foundation – George Soros’s vehicle – and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Unite are named as ‘Support’.
You can be sure that with such big hitters behind the movement, there will be no let up on the legalisation of drugs, whether actual or de facto, and with all its hellish ramifications for society.
The international drug pushers continue their well-funded march.
