MOTORISTS FEAR YOU, MR BRUNSTROM ...SO WHY NOT JUNKIES?

If Richard Brunstrom wants to make life hard for speeding drivers, he
has my full support, though I much prefer patrol cars to cameras.

The results of speeding are often horrible. If fining people makes
them slow down, then fine them.

I say this partly because I want to make it clear that my scorn for
the North Wales Chief Constable's plan to legalise drugs has no other
motive or reason, except that I think he is a dangerous and defeatist
person whose approach to drugs is morally deficient, and he is unfit
to run a police force.

Mr Brunstrom is obviously a publicity-seeking show-off, though that
is not necessarily a bad thing in a Chief Constable.

I wish we had a few noisy, headline-hungry police chiefs who wanted
to put constables back on foot patrol, who applied existing laws
against drug possession rigorously and who refused to discipline
officers who walloped the occasional lout. But I digress.

He is typical of what I call the demoralisation of the British
governing classes. He appears to have no clear idea of right and
wrong. He has swallowed, whole and unchewed, the crudest propaganda
of the pro-drug lobby. You can always spot them. Alcohol and tobacco
are bad, they say. Yet they are legal. So why not make other bad
drugs legal too?

I just do not know how dim you would have to be to fall for this
brain-dead false logic. Why does the existence of two damaging legal
poisons justify the licensing of three more?

The fact that alcohol and tobacco are part of our culture and
society, and have been for hundreds of years, makes it virtually
impossible to ban them now. Even the Ayatollahs of Iran have failed
to stamp out alcohol.

So it is too late to make them illegal. This is not the case with
cannabis, that unlucky lottery ticket to the mental ward, nor for
cocaine or heroin in all their forms. Most people in this country
have never touched these poisons, and many of those who have, have
done so only once or twice.

It would still be possible, with courage and determination, to drive
these things out of our society almost completely, and certainly to
confine them to a squalid mini-minority, despised, criminalised and
marginalised, where they would pose little threat to our children.

But that would be difficult, which is partly why it has not been
tried, and why the alleged "war against drugs" is a fiction, in which
we have made showy, feeble efforts to stem the supply, while doing
absolutely nothing to slow the demand. Actually arresting and
prosecuting and punishing people for possessing drugs would be
effective. But it would bring the police into conflict with one of
the most influential lobbies in Britain, that of the Sixties
generation who think drugs are cool -- and of their children, who
have been brought up with the same belief.

I do not know if Mr Brunstrom is afraid of these lobbies or has
simply been captured by them. I do know that the Government, while
pretending to be firm on the matter, has more or less accepted Mr
Brunstrom's position. We learned this week that the drug addict's
"reward" for reducing his intake of brain-rotting filth is a gift --
from the taxpayer -- of more toxic filth.

This futile, blackly comic process is called "rehabilitation" and
"treatment". It does not work. Punishment and fear would, just as
they do for speeding motorists. When drugs come into a family, they
create just as much misery as a car crash. The mystery is why Mr
Brunstrom understands that punishment and fear work for drivers, but
denies that they do for drug-takers.