Yes, he\’s absolutely correct that we should legalise drugs. No doubt about it.
Then he puts in absurdities like this:
You can see this any day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3,000 per cent profit margins on offer.
Facepalm. Is it actually necessary for graduates in \”social and political science\” to be innumerate?
You cannot have a profit margin over 100%.
![\"\"](\"https://www.timworstall.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/profitmargin1.png\" "\\"profitmargin\\"")
A margin is, by definition, calculated as a percentage of the revenue and thus cannot be over 100%.
What he means is mark up, which is calculated as a percentage of the cost of goods and thus can be over 100%.
Even then he\’s wrong as he\’s got the teenage gangs fighting over the markup/profit from the entire supply chain, from coca leaf in the Colombian forest to the nostrils at the Tory Boy dinner party in Notting Hill. And of course they\’re not fighting over that entire sum, as several Colombian cocaine barons would be only to happy to point out.
countries like the US and Britain – both led by former drug users –
Must admit first I\’ve heard about the tooting habits of Our Own Dear Queen.
Well, it’s becoming normal. Media professors now think they are economists.
Mata Hari must give hope to Media Studies graduates everywhere as they stack their supermarket shelves with good things to eat. I’ve had occasion to correspond with him before and it’s a little like talking to those unfortunates who have a slight cast in one eye and you’re not sure if they’re really paying attention to you or not. I think we should turn the whole blogosphere against him, just wheel on him like a vengeful armada, until he gives up journalism and finds another calling. Also – and as an ex-sub-editor myself – his subs should be beaten on the soles of their feet with rattan canes. Good spot, sir.
Mark: I can remember reading an Internet version of a Mark Steele column in the Indy, which evidently had so distressed the sub that he’d lost the will to live. It managed to degenerate into — and I quote — “the reason these measures do not suit Britain as far as I’m concerned, is that I’m greedy, avaricious and selfish and that is the sound economic prograame that i hope the government pusues to get us out of our present predicament”
Rattan would be too good for that specimen.
Johann Hari making it up as he goes along again? It’s beginning to be a non-story.
Is he la Polly’s wrong-side-of-the-blanket sprog?
Hmph
Countries aren’t led and don’t have leaders. Governments do, but countries? No.
Countries are made up of people all doing their own thing, and without a common goal or guiding strategy. Unless you live in a totalitarian hellhole that is.