Skip to content

Perhaps not, eh?

Mr Johnson said: “Drugs are a scourge on our society, fuelling violence on our streets which communities across the country are forced to endure. That’s why, to cut crime and truly level up across the country, we must step up efforts to wipe out the vile county lines gangs who are blighting our neighbourhoods, exploiting children and ruining lives.

“Backed by record investment, the strategy we’re setting out will attack supply and break the county lines model which sees criminals profit from people’s misery. Those who break the law will have nowhere to hide.”

Of course most don’t think as I do – which is that if folks want to get blitzed then why the hell not?

Even, that the violence to be done here to a free society is worse than the problem they’re still not going to be able to solve.

24 thoughts on “Perhaps not, eh?”

  1. Virtue-signalling as policy, a bit like Bozo’s green policies.

    The only crime that middle class drug users commit, is possession of drugs. The epidemic of dusky peasants stabbing each other in London has nothing to do with cokeheads in St Albans. The aspiring footballers and DJs never leave their own postcode. Likewise, the skunk-addled yobs who make life a misery on estates in the nation’s shittier towns won’t be affected.

    Most of the non-possession crimes attributable to drug users comes from a hard core of crack and smack addicts who rob and steal to fund their habits. However the criminal justice system repeatedly lets them off, non-custodial sentences for dozens of crimes.

    If Bozo wants ‘levelling up’, he ought to force Plod to do ‘broken windows’ policing in deprived areas.

  2. If folks want to commit violent crimes in order to get blitzed and commit more violent crimes when they’re blitzed, why the hell not?

  3. By interfering with the supply the Government pushes up the price and reduces the quality. If you let supermarkets sell them the drug gangs would be out of business, the drugs would be vastly better made so safer and the reduced price would mean less crime from addicts feeding their habit.

    Once the criminal side is removed drug related problems become like alcohol related problems. Society copes with them. Because the drug quality and consistency goes up the risk of taking them goes down. Statistically that risk is thousands of times lower than currently permitted high risk activities like horse riding.

  4. So he’s intent on reducing the supply of drugs, is he? Since demand seems to be constant, we can expect price rises. Good time to be moving into drug smuggling & supply, methinks.
    Does it not occur that this has been government policy for the past 60 years. And has resulted in all the problems he’s complaining about. Which part of “this doesn’t fucking work” d’y reckon he doesn’t understand?

  5. Southerner, I am torn between doing what we are doing, which isn’t working and legalising it. Those who use it will still need to fund their habit so will have to get the money somehow, unless Bozo is planning to let them have it free as with methadone.

    And as has been shown in Canada in particular, allow the government to get involved in the drug trade and they will do what they every time they get involved in anything: fuck it right up.

  6. Substitute County Lines and Drugs with People Traffickers and Illegal Immigration … am sure the Government’s success/failure ratio is broadly similar.

  7. I’ll amend my previous comment. Bearing in mind the circles I suspect BoJo’s been moving in the past couple of decades I expect he knows all this very well. I don’t suppose his chums have any problems at all sourcing their after dinner lines of charlie. It is the purest, un-cut, primo virtue signalling.

  8. Yeah…. We’ve seen how effective the War on Drugs was/is for the US…

    That besides the fact that so much of the stuff is produced that, for instance, the coke producers can afford to build fancy submarines and literally send triple/quadruple bulk loads to make sure one arrives..
    Hell… about the worst “the government” can do to the market is simply not bother for a month or two.. The user market is pretty much saturated already and demand is pretty much fully met. The result of letting the supply side flood the market even more is… inprofitability.. Just like every other good.

  9. I had heard that, many many years ago, Britain had a policy where doctors could prescribe opium or heroin to those they certified as addicts.

    No doubt this was open to abuse. But it’d certainly be cheaper to keep the dole bludgers sozzled instead of having to chase them down, try them and imprison them. After all it’s only their illegality that makes drugs expensive.

    Indeed MC, you’ve pointed out that it’s too much bother to imprison them now!! Though of course if I was running things, I’d put ’em in the stocks. Or try the Singaporean example of a whack with the rattan.

  10. Why do people use this term “county lines” like it’s some special organised thing? It’s just a bloke putting some drugs in his boot and driving to Winchester or Northampton and selling to people there.

    And as long as he’s not stupid enough to have been smoking weed in there, no-one is going to check the boot.

  11. BoM4:

    Peter Hitchens has suggested that the term is used because it has an American ring to it (“crossing county lines!”) and therefore makes the police sound as if they are doing a more important and dangerous job.

  12. Ironic that the Speaker has just launched an investigation into drug use at the Houses of Parliament. It seems that traces of charlie have been found in toilets near the offices of the PM and Home Secretary….

  13. MC,

    “The only crime that middle class drug users commit, is possession of drugs.”

    I think pretty much everyone agrees with this, but there is the argument, which Boris alluded to, that this crime incentives the violent and other crimes associated with the supply chain.

    …to which, of course, the sensible answer is legalisation. We don’t see too many for wars between Diageo and InBev, do we?

    Unfortunately, sense rarely seems to feature in this debate.

  14. As Canada as shown cracking down in supply leads to switching to increase in things like fentanyl, stronger so can smuggle smaller quantities for same profit. Unfortunately much easier to overdose on, in British Columbia the overdose rates are orders of magnitude above the Covid deaths. The lockdown also having seen record numbers of overdose deaths as well. The response has been calls to deregulate street possession and set up safe sites so their usage can be safer.

    As alluded to earlier government legalising drugs like Canada and weed just leads to a prime example of the fact they couldn’t run a piss up in a brewery. Lack of supply, poor quality and failure of local authorities to license stores in a timely manner, local existing medical marijuana store that has been there was threatened with closure as not granted a license from council for over 9 months. All leading to people still buying illegally, saw one estimate that after a year the legal market was still only 1/3rd of the total market

  15. I’m broadly in favour of legalising. The illegal activity around the supply side’s 90% of what drug problems are about.
    With a caveat. One of the problems of the illegality is there been no opportunity to create any sort of etiquette around drug use in the same way as we have one around alcohol consumption. Most people understand the difference between social drinking & excessive drinking. We even have times when excessive drinking is regarded as acceptable. Celebrations etc. And even standards about degree of excess. Being merrily drunk can be tolerated whilst shit-faced drunk, not so much.
    We’ve nothing like that with other substances. Part of it’s lack of quality control. Users may not know how strong the stuff they’re using is until the effects hit them. But a lot of it’s because we haven’t worked out etiquettes. How stoned is too stoned if you’re with non-users? When is an acceptable time & when isn’t?

  16. This ‘county lines’ phrase is indeed infuriating BoM4. It’s as if they think buying local is better. What would be better though is if drug policies and any derived income were devolved to Local Authorities.
    If Teesside wants to go anti-liberal and keep the ban, and Gove’s Surrey wants to legalise it and get the taxes, then bring on the county lines I say.

  17. I have a feeling that’s something that can only come from experience. Imagine what it was like 7,000 years back when they first started brewing beer….

  18. So his plan is to double down on the thing that hasn’t been working.

    If it wasn’t forbidden, the UK could look to America for some pointed lessons about *what not to do*.

  19. California has legalized weed, but is trying to tax the hell out of it. What that has led to is Mexican drug cartels setting up greenhouse farms in the desert north of Los Angeles. The still sell the weed on the black market undercutting the legal weed stores because they don’t pay tax. So you end up with the worst of both worlds, people driving around stoned and the cartels running the business.

    And no, the name Mohave Greenie doesn’t mean I’m farming weed in the Mojave desert.

  20. Who do you think has been snorting cocaine in No 10? Treason May, Daddy David Camoron?

    Blowjob Johnson.

    The creep is a supreme hypocrite. I can do it but you plebs cant cos I tell you that you cant.

    Time to counter ALL his BS inc his plans to have the state wipe its arse on Judicial Reviews.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4O79L1EVnA

  21. Dear Mr Worstall

    From the government’s perspective, they are doing the sensible thing: perpetuating a forever war.

    It’s what governments do. I have a first day cover of a set of two stamps issued in the early 1960s promoting the ‘war on want’. Government policy has maintained the poverty stricken in their state so that lefties and do-gooders everywhere can wring their hands and demand action or ‘do good’ according to their calling. The Chinese have spoilt it a little by adopting a more free-enterprise approach which has lifted the bulk of their population out of extreme poverty over the last 35 years, as noted by Dr Pirie at the ASI. Other countries have copied or followed the same path independently, causing the greatest fall in poverty in history.

    The war on tobacco started over 400 years ago, as the late Frank Davis pointed out many times.

    The war on alcohol was brief, but set up organised crime on a grand scale.

    The war on drugs started soon after the war on alcohol was lost, because Eliot Ness’s boss needed something to do.

    The war on global warming was invented in 1988 by James Hansen, shortly after the war on global cooling failed to start.

    The war on terror is a relative latecomer.

    The war on covid is the new kid on the block.

    All are multi-trillion dollar enterprises and they allow governments everywhere to gift themselves the right to intrude upon all aspects of civil life.

    Governments aren’t going to stop such lucrative and power-enhancing wars any time soon; where’s the sense in that?

    DP

  22. All the legalisation fanbois need to address the fact that the drugs cartels do not pay taxes

    They will always be able to undercut ‘legal’ drugs

    Legalised drug suppliers are unlikely to display the same agility as drugs of choice change, presumably they will be unable to develop their markets in the same aggressive way as the cartels can

    The only way to sort this out is to stop the middle classes paying for it and ignoring the issues they create and support

    Time to clamp down on them rather than the easy target homeless

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *