Cannabis or alcohol? The listening prime-minister.

New Labour has shown again that it only has one response to things it doesn’t like: that is, criminalise them.

And if it wants to show it dislikes something more than it used to, it puts the criminal penalty up a notch, pour encourager les voters.

Many of us don’t like hunting, even if  -- in my case – we flirted with it in our rural pasts. But I can't help thinking that it would have been a good deal better to kill off this nasty nineteenth-century tradition (which is what it surely must be) with the drip, drip of ridicule than with unenforceable legislation. After all, those men in red (pink, I mean) jackets do look very silly, don’t you think?

As for cannabis, it is extremely enjoyable  (more enjoyable than hunting, as -- inter alia - it doesn’t require staying on the back of a horse). There is also no doubt at all that for some users it is dangerous, even life ruining. Surely there is a way of getting that message across without upping the potential prison sentence, which is what the government’s reclassification of the substance from Class C to B means. In fact young people's cannabis use had actually been falling since it was down-graded to C, which makes one wonder whether the risk of punishment might have been part of the allure.

But isn’t it odd that Gordon Brown’s first, turn-over-a-new-leaf, style of listening, actually means not listening to the very committee he got to advise him on this ? For they advocated precisely the reverse. I guess ‘listening’ is a good sound-bite, but it still means a choice about who you are going to listen to.

Almost 50% of young people between 25 and 29 in the UK have used cannabis, just like their parents – ie my generation – did. We might want to encourage them not to, but what on earth is the point of criminalising half the population? OK, 5 years inside is the maximum sentence. But can we really countenance a government regulation that could in principle put half the nation behind bars for half a decade (with remission)?

The police wont enforce this, of course; they haven’t got the time, for one thing. But that ends us up in a worse position… with the idiocy of an un-enforced law.

There is also the complete illogicality that rules most of our “rule-making” on drugs. We all know – and any sensible teen-age sees this clearer than any of us  – that if either alcohol or tobacco were subject to the same scrutiny as cannabis it would be found a much more dangerous substance indeed. But in the case of alcohol we decide to allow its sale at all hours, in the case of tobacco we just ban it from public spaces.

It is the weird accidents of history that have decided which dangerous things we tolerate and which we don’t.

Of course the big bogey of the moment is skunk. Apparently this is much stronger than what Mums and Dads used to smoke in the 1970s, and so much more dangerous. But as the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs observes, that may well mean that kids use less of it.

Come to think of it when I have a whisky, I don’t put it in a pint glass.

Comments

[Lidwina]

Maybe the Brits could adopt the Dutch solution? (Another thing the continentals do better.)
They treat marijuana much like alcohol: You can buy it legally in licensed premises, on presentation of proof of maturity; it is clean and unadulterated; it is labelled as to strength; the vendor will not sell you the strong stuff unless he thinks you can take it. Everyone wins, even the tax man. Only the drugs mafia have to concentrate on the harder stuff.

I never used dope. I tried it while a student in the 70s, but was not impressed. I prefer a nice cool glass of Chardonnay any time.

[Simri Idoine]

Yes, Prof Beard, those men in ruddy pink jackets do look silly - almost as silly as middle-aged TV dons who sport sagging t-shirts and unkempt locks in a studied attempt to appear unworldly and populist. The same goes for Goldhill's shorts. Perhaps you would like all whose jobs or pastimes demand traditional attire - presumably including lawyers, clerics, policemen and almsmen - to succumb to the homogeneity of the jeans and t-shirt uniform imposed by western culture as the sartorial norm. Darn these dated modernists and their totalising liberal rationalist agenda!

[PL]

Tony-- Remarkable facts about all that drug addiction in the 19th c! That version at least sounds more believable than the theory that cannabis got outlawed because the liquor industry found they were losing sales; especially since their sales would soon be cut off totally by fiat.
Correction and augmentation to my last post: Baudelaire wrote:
"Le vin exalte la volonté, le haschisch l'annihile. Le vin est un support physique, le haschisch est une arme pour le suicide. Le vin rend bon et sociable. Le haschisch est insolant. L'un est laborieux pour ainsi dire, l'autre essentiellement paresseux."
And of course the passage occurs in "Les paradis artificiels", not "Les paradises…"
I was much impressed by the Wiki article you referred us to (under another topic) on Marine Corps (note spelling) lawyer Col Matthew Bogdanos. A remarkable man I'd never heard of before.

[Tony Francis]

Dear PL: The legalization of marijuana has been on the front burner of groups like NORML since at least the 1950s. So far, they have failed to get their agenda legislated. So we can assume if there was a ground swell of support for their position, people would vote for it. Drug regulation has not occurred in a vacuum. Probably at least half the surviving veterans of the US Civil War were dilaudid or moprhine addicts. In the late 1800s, probably 25-35% of the country was addicted to codeine or hashish. That was what led to restrictive regulation. It is always possible to mock seemingly unenforceable laws. There are 20,000 homicides in the US every year. Only 50% of murder cases ever have an arrest. We could say that homicide laws are uneforceable. Yet no one is suggesting they be repealed. Repealing marijuana laws would give a tacit approval for their use. The general feeling in the country now is that less intoxication, and not more should be the goal. Whether laws criminalizing marijuana are effective is debateable. Their repeal would probably increase usage.

[PL]

Tony-- You mention "the moral authority of law";
but law loses its moral authority when, because in contradiction to what people actually believe and practice, it becomes unenforceable. This happened notoriously with alcohol consumption during Prohibition. It is now happening with cannabis? I certainly hope not. As you point out, the latter stays in the body a lot longer. A drunk will be sober the next day-- crapulous maybe, but sober; a pothead stays more or less spaced-out-- and subject to recurrences of the full effect--for weeks. Baudelaire, who knew both forms of intocxication well, gave another reason for preferring alcohol: "Le vin exalte la volonté; le hachiche l'annulle" ("Les paradises artificiels", I quote from memory). Indeed the decline of Islamic civilization vis-à-vis the West has been explained by the ban on wine resulting in widespread use of the dreamier, more passive-making stuff.

[Tony Francis]

We know that a certain percentage of people will use intoxicants of all kinds. Many will do it for years, without any apparent consequences. But the question becomes: Are we going to use the moral authority of law to encourage or discourage certain behaviors? If a certain percentage of the population is chronically intoxicated (I would guess it is between 5 -10%), the society as a whole ceases to function for a variety of reasons. Whether criminalization of substances or behaviors is effective is another question. But every law makes a moral statement because it carries the implied use of the policing power of the state to enforce it. On the other hand, lack of law does the same.

[PL]

There are other dangers too. A biochemist friend tells me his dissertation advisor in Oregon in the 60s refused to smoke marijuana on the grounds that it "might lead to the hard stuff", by which he meant cigarettes.

[Tony Francis]

Despite this rosy, Polyanna picture given by NORML, if you are in an accident or involved in a crime, and you piss hot for marijuana, you are going to be presumed to be under the influence. That goes for the law, and for any judge or jury your case is presented to.
http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=4934

[Tony Francis]

Dear PL: Ok, drinking is legal, driving drunk isn't. It used to be that if a drunk driver killed you, that was just too bad. Then they cracked down on drunk driving with stiff criminal penalties and enforcement. You can check a blood alcohol level. A person can "piss hot" for 30 days after smoking marijuana. So a pot head kills someone with a car, and claims he hasn't smoked for 2 weeks. All his buddies sign affidavits swearing it to be true. Then what?

[PL]

Tony: Liquor is legal but driving drunk isn't.

[Tony Francis]

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguments_for_and_against_drug_prohibition

Here is a hypothetical: Marijuana is legal. Some guy stoned out of his mind runs you down while driving his car. You are permanently disabled, and can never work again. He doesn't have any money. Now what do you do?

[Tony Francis]

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060919070043AAZ4lio

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamekeeper's_thumb

[Oliver NIcholson]

' Ware Riot.

[SW Foska]

The best work on hunting is the Pseudokynegetikos published in 1874 by the archaelogist (so therefore relevant person) Alexandru Odobescu. Odobescu actually disliked hunting and his manual uses hunting as a metaphor for the true subject which is digression.

[Oliver NIcholson]

May I return to the point, please ? Or at least one of them - you provide a rich mixture of points. If we are going to be nasty about hunting, we might perhaps get the facts right. Foxhunting is not a 19th century tradition. The Quorn (I seem to remember) can trace its history continuously back into the 17th century and Sir W.W. Wynn's certainly to the 18th century. It is said that the preoccupations of 18th century MFHs like Squire Osbaldeston who pioneered Fox Hound breeding went hand in hand with the contemporary interest in improving the breeds of farm animals.

The history is reflected in leterature. The first classic hunting poem, The Chase, by William Somerville of New College, a fine piece heavily dependent on Nemesianus and the Georgics ("The Chase I sing, Hounds and their various breed, and no less various use..."). was published under George II. The greatest prose work on hunting, Thoughts on Hunting in a Series of Familiar Letters to a Friend, by William Beckford, a remarkable man who was inter alia responsible for the musical education of Clementi, was published in the 1780s.

The only works of literature I can think of generated by smoking (of any sort) are James I's Counterblaste to Tobacco and C.S. Calverley's Ode to Tobacco (a rare example of successful English Sapphics - which might amuse Richard). But I would not wish to ridicule your amusements.

Go hunting - 50 million foxes can’t be wrong.
OPN
(a former Master of Beagles, but I did not inhale)

P.S. Does Jock Anderson cover the hunting of foxes in his splenddi Hunting in the Ancient World ? Lots of hares and deer, I know

[Jane]

SW Foska
To bore is human, to divert, condign.

[SW Foska]

Fair point Jane, although the extent of your tedium was not exactly clear from your earlier intimations. No Jane, no gain.
xjy is right - a beamer is more than a full toss. Why beamer? for the horizontal trajectory? Because it's aimed at the eye?
When I was a PhD student I was asked to polish up a non-native speaker's translation into English of a folklore monograph. How much do you want they said? I said 50p a page. The author was a big shot in his country and got me a pound a page from the (outraged) state publishing house. By the time i'd finished I decided not to do that again for less than £5 a page. It's harder than starting the translation from the beginning. An then the outraged state publishing house 'corrects' your revisions because they think they know better.
I'd say something on-topic but i've run out of tokens. 'Somebody's boring me. I think it's me' (Dylan Thomas).

[Xjy]

Re: beamer as a full-toss. I thought it was more a very fast ball aimed straight at the batsman's head. A bumper without the bump.

Re: non-native gibberdeglish. Not many people give a toss (full or not). I have a very good friend who is able to communicate with about 150 words of English. It's fantastic to see her in action. I call it Grubelichki internatsional. Talk about Communication Before Correctness! If more people had her zeal for getting something across, we'd be way better off. It is to unbelieve!

I feel quite quaint with my Virgo obsessive-pedantic nitpicking crossword mind. In fact apart from the translation work (and sometimes even there) I'm trying very hard to deobsess and unpedantize.

There's always (or at least always used to be) some poor sod of a secretary condemned to shoehorn the boss's gibberish into English and then put a shine on the uppers. It's more fun to be the master than the slave. I'm getting fed up with shoehorning some dickhead's foreign gibberish into acceptable (to some) English gobbledegook. I'd much rather spout like a gargoyle and watch others sweating to catch and distill the precious drops so they don't just turn the place into a smelly bog.

It's enough to drive one to drink - or to the drug of one's society's choice... ;-)

[PL]

Given that a lot of this stuff goes off-topic (for better and worse), why not say under RECENT COMMENTS what the comments were really on?

[Tony Francis]

When in my residency, I spent a rotation with a general surgeon from Holland. He was really a good surgeon. There was a woman who was dying of ovarian cancer. She was always cheerful and exceptionally pleasant. The Dutch surgeon said, "That is such a glorious woman. She is experiencing a blessed and wonderful Catholic death. She is an inspiration to us all. But you know, in Holland, we would give her a couple shots of morphine IV, and this would all be over."

[Jane]

Me, lecture?
Merely, I found the off-topic topics boring. It is a greater sin to bore than to deviate, as Oscar Wilde may have said.

[anthony alcock]

English. I usually tell all my classes that when they speak to non-native speakers, they will find it almost impossible to "make a mistake", because the others probably won't spot mistakes and even if they do, probably won't feel confident enough to say so. If, however, there are any comments from non-native speakers about "mistakes", I advise people to discontinue the conversation as quickly as possible.

[PL]

I heard a lecture on English as a Foreign Language recently in Stockholm, in which I was told Chinese corporations actually prefer to have their employees learn English from Germans, Belgians, and such. It seems speaking it too much like a native Brit or American is considered unbusinesslike and connotes insincerity.

[SW Foska]

anthony, I have an opposite problem, I read so many scholarly articles written by non-native speakers that I just skip over idiomatic aberrations cos you'd be pausing every sentence. I then set them to students who really baulk at them. My other problem is going to conferences where i'm the only native English speaker and nobody can understand me cos everyone else transacts in internationalglish. so i'm glad you're taking the trouble to teach the Germans 'the tonguework and the vocabular' as it is called in the 1936 satirical work 'How to do and say in England: A Trim Kompaktikum for Students of Englisch Talk'.
I also think it's a bit rich of Jane of all people to be lecturing us about going off-topic & am tempted to ask her about certain aspects of microwave ovens that are currently bothering me. Maybe soon.

[Tony Francis]

The apartment building I lived in in medical school was so permeated with maijuana smoke (from the medical students), I imagined I could get high just from walking in the halls. In my residency, about half the residents were chronic marijuana and alcohol users. I never went in for this scene, because when I wasn't on call, I was moonlighting in an ER --3-4 nights a week. Working ERs is a great place to learn medicine. The Children's Hospital in Denver was the same. It would close down Thrusday afternoon and not re-open 'til Monday afternoon. All the residents and nurses would go to the ski-lodges for a giant marijauna-alcohol screwfest. I used to take call on the weekends because I wasn't into that. Presumably, these are the same doctors who are now giving out high blood pressure pills, and doing spinal surgery and total hips.

At some point the responsible people in society have to sober up. You can't have drunks flying the airplanes and doing surgery. The US federal courts have a 2-3 year wait for hearings of disabled people trying to get Social Security, Federal Disability, Workers Comp, Federal Tort Claims, etc. It starts from about age 35 on. Some of them are taking up to 180 mg of morphine a day, prescribed by a doctor. (5 mg would knock a normal person out for 6 hours.) They are dysfunctional from narcotics addiction, and hence unemployable.