We'll go down as the nation that smoked itself stupid

By PETER HITCHENS, COLUMNIST AND COMMENTATOR

Published: 19:03 EST, 1 September 2012 | Updated: 09:19 EST, 7 September 2012

Cannabis makes you stupid. I know this already, from the feeble arguments and moronic insults that I get from the dope lobby when I argue for harsher, more effective laws against this dangerous, unpredictable poison.

But now you and your children don’t need to take my word for it.

Science has at last caught up with the blazingly obvious. Smoking cannabis in your  teens permanently reduces your IQ – official.

Stultifying: A study found smoking cannabis in your teens reduces your IQ. (File picture)

A highly reputable study traced a sample of more than 1,000 people from birth for 38 years. They controlled for all the other variables. Marijuana was the consistent factor in the lives of those whose IQ shrank and stayed shrunk for ever. The more they smoked, the worse it was.

People who smoked the drug in their teens were still held back by the time they reached the age of 38. Even these  people’s friends confirmed that their memories and their attention spans had declined.

Imagine if some electronic device or prescription medicine were found to have this effect. Human habits would change overnight. The company responsible would probably go out of business, after being forced to pay out billions in compensation.

The newspapers and the airwaves would rock and shudder with the row. ‘BAN THIS DRUG THAT WRECKS MINDS!’ they would shout, ‘BAN IT NOW!’ And Parliament would act.

But no. The story flickered briefly through the newspapers – page 7, page 4, page 2, page 12 in the shameful case of one  supposed quality daily, and page 27 in The Sun, where the news might have done most good. Only the Left-wing Guardian, to its lasting credit, put it on the front page where it belonged.

Big business: Criminal parasites are making huge profits cultivating cannabis to supply to the huge illegal market

Many of those who most needed to know the risks they run will never have heard of this survey at all.

I cannot fathom this double standard. Think of our regular panics – mad cow disease, salmonella in eggs, swine flu, brain tumours from mobile phones, the wild fear of exposure to sunshine. Most of these, if not all of them, are trivial or mistaken.

But when a reputable, thorough and respected scientific survey shows a measurable danger to the brain from a drug that is widely used by the elite classes and their children, nothing happens.

Worse, our society continues to weaken the already feeble laws against it, with police officers instructed to issue meaningless ‘cannabis warnings’ to those caught with it.

The 40-year publicity campaign for dope, provided gratis by dozens of rock stars (who can flourish however stupid they are), has been so effective that 13-year-olds who smoke it do not even think it is a drug.

And untold numbers of criminal parasites make a tidy living by running chains of hydroponic cannabis farms in the attics of suburban houses. In fact, it is one of Britain’s few agricultural success stories of modern times.

When future Chinese historians ponder our national collapse, laughing softly as they do so, I think they may well note that this was the society that banned T-bone steaks while it decriminalised cannabis, and that it was the country that smoked itself stupid.

They will conclude that we deserved the irreversible national decline that followed. And they will be right.

Another dose of costume claptrap

Risible stuff: Actress Rebecca Hall in Parade's End

How does the BBC choose its classic serials?

Does a committee convene and say ‘Gosh, this book will allow us to rent lots of old cars, spend a fortune on clothes and hire some ravishing young actresses with generous mouths?

Oh, and we can have some smoking so everyone knows it’s in the past’?

I think so. And afterwards, some poor sap has to turn the wretched thing into a drama – as with Parade’s End.

How can the nation not laugh as Benedict Cumberbatch, in heavy-duty tweeds from head to toe, fornicates furiously with a complete stranger in a railway carriage, soon after intoning that he is a stern Tory who believes in monogamy and chastity?

Exterminate the 'Darlek checkouts'

I beg you to join my boycott of automated tills in supermarkets and other shops. If you don’t, human staff will vanish from these places and go into the dole queue instead.

Why should we help these big greedy businesses to make our lives more miserable, and to make more people unemployed?

We were fooled by the banks in the same way, and realised too late that we would never again be able to discuss our accounts with anyone with a pulse and a brain. Surely once is enough.

Service without the smile: Shoppers try to use one of a bank of self-service checkout machines

And yet, day by day, I see my fellow shoppers marching to their own doom by submitting to the robot revolution.

A survey of 4,000 shoppers in The Grocer magazine claims that we actually want more of these things. Allegedly ‘the customer experience is improving’.

I suspect that the truth is that the onslaught of the machines has been so rapid that few people have thought very hard about where it will lead.

Interestingly, in the USA, public resistance has been much stronger and the use of these supermarket Daleks has actually declined.

Perhaps that is because so many Americans are armed, and the supermarkets are afraid they will put a bullet through the next machine that sneers ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ as they struggle to scan their potatoes.

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Alas for poor old Sir Rhodes Boyson, a man too principled for politics, disdained and patronised by the Tory smoothies who made him an MP and a Minister, but didn’t listen to him.

Sir Rhodes, who has died at the age of 87, was a great teacher and a superb headmaster, angry and sad at the wrecking of the grammar schools because it destroyed the hopes of bright poor children (such as he had been).

It’s interesting to note that many of the things this good, generous man believed to be right and necessary are now actually illegal, including the cane and the creation of new grammar schools.

Compare and contrast with the Transport Secretary, Ms Justine Greening, who became and remained an MP largely because she stuck carefully to local issues, such as aircraft noise, which are really the job of councillors, and mentioned conservatism as little as possible.

And now that she finds herself in a government that wants to blast her London constituency with extra aircraft noise, what can she do, and what is the point of her?

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If the Houses of Parliament have to close down for repairs, will we at last notice that our current rulers are pygmies, scurrying about in the ruins of a lost civilisation?

I hope so. The gorgeous grandeur of the buildings makes these dreary people look more significant.

If they had to hold their debates in an exhibition centre in Milton Keynes, we’d see them for what they really are.

Peter Hitchens will be at the Henley Literary Festival on Sunday, Sept 30, at 4.30pm to talk about his new book The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs.  

Tickets at www.henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk or call 01189 724700

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