David Cameron and cannabis
There’s an essay by Robin Fishwick called In Defence of Hypocrisy which everyone should read. It’s very short but wonderfully perceptive, and it makes a point that should probably be made more often. In fact, I’m a walking illustrative example of Fishwick’s point. As mentioned recently, I was a strict vegetarian for most of my life; I did some hunt-sabbing in my late teens and I’ve been on a bunch of anti-vivisection or anti-whaling or anti-bloodsports demonstrations. I’d even put myself in the philosophically difficult position of believing that animals have certain ‘rights’ and that our behaviour towards them is in the sphere of ‘morality’.
However, since my early twenties, my footwear of choice has been the classic 7-eye, ankle-length Doc Martin black leather boot. And you wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve been hassled about this fact. Confirmed carnivores, fresh from stuffing their faces in MacDonalds somehow feel justified in pointing out my ethical failing. “How can you wear leather boots”, they demand, “and yet still call yourself a vegetarian?” Of course by now I’ve developed a full repertoire of responses depending upon the person challenging me. My personal favourite is “The same way you can have shit for brains and still call yourself a human being”.
Thing is, my reasons for wearing leather Docs wouldn’t pass the ethical tests against which I judge the food I eat. I don’t have some great moral justification… it’s just that I really really like the boots, they’re very comfortable, and they work out quite cheap (despite not being cheap to buy) as they only need replacing every five years or so. I guess I’m simply failing to meet the ethical standards I have set for myself. I’m a hypocrite.
But I’m in good company. The vast majority of the people I truly admire have stuggled and continue to struggle to reach the standards they have set for themselves. If you’re reading this and thinking “Bah! I always achieve the standards I set”, then I humbly suggest you’ve not set them high enough. Albert Einstein, a great thinker and a profoundly moral man, was a strong proponent of vegetarianism for most of his life. But Einstein was also a human being with human failings and a real taste for German sausage. In letters to friends he wrote about his “terribly guilty conscience” every time he gave into temptation and ate his favourite food.
Should we deride the man for saying that “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet” and then occasionally succumbing to the temptation of a smoked sausage sarnie? Or should we celebrate him for recognising a truth and doing his best to live his life accordingly, even if he failed from time to time? If it’s flawless heroes you want, then the human race probably isn’t the best place to look for them. We are imperfect creatures, and those of us who strive to overcome those imperfections – despite knowing that battle can never be completely won – shouldn’t be berated for each stumble.
Passive Vs. Aggressive Hypocrisy
But that’s hardly the whole story. There’s a hypocrisy that can’t be defended. One that is not the passive failure of individuals to meet the standards they set for themselves, but the aggressive insistence of others that we all meet standards they themselves fail to achieve. This form of hypocrisy can usually be seen in the three ‘P’s (parents, priests and politicians). So a child is threatened with a grounding if they get caught with a cigarette, despite the father smoking 40 a day. The congregation is threatened with eternal damnation if they steal, by a priest pilfering cash from the poor-box. And the public get threatened with a criminal record and imprisonment if they possess cannabis, by a politician who was an occasional toker for several years of his life.
All three of those are utterly indefensible. If a father wishes to punish his child for smoking a cigarette (not an unreasonable thing to do by any means) then he needs to give them up first. If a priest wishes to be a moral leader; to proscribe a standard of behaviour and threaten punishment for those who fail to achieve it; then that priest needs to live to that standard. And if a politician wants to enforce a law under which cannabis smokers are jailed or receive a criminal record (along with the various restrictions that places on the rest of your life), then that politician better not have been a toker himself.
Here’s an interesting question… does anyone believe it would have been possible for David Cameron to become leader of the British Conservative Party if he had a criminal record? Oh come on Tories! Be honest, there’s just no fricking way he’d even have gotten selected as an election candidate. Yet Mr. Cameron and his party have a policy that states clearly that Mr. Cameron should have been criminalised for his earlier actions. I love the description of the punishment Cameron received when his cannabis-smoking was discovered at Eton…
Eton launched an investigation into reports that some boys were buying drugs in the nearby town. During the course of the inquiry, Cameron and a number of other pupils admitted smoking pot…
Cameron was ‘gated’- meaning that he was deprived of school privileges and barred from leaving the premises or being visited by friends or family. His punishment lasted for about a week.
An Eton contemporary said the punishment had been particularly humiliating for the future Leader of the Opposition because it had come shortly before the annual ‘Fourth of June’ gala day, when the college is thrown open to pupils’ parents, relatives and friends who are invited to enjoy exhibitions, speeches, sports events and the traditional ‘Procession of Boats’.
‘Cameron was gated just beforehand, so his parents, who had been looking forward to spending the day with him, had to apologise to their friends,’ the student said. ‘It was all painfully embarrassing. But after that he pulled himself together and became an exemplary pupil.’
Awwww… poor lickle David… gated for a full week! And all that embarrassment. Meanwhile the latest Tory policy statement I can find on the subject of cannabis demands that the government reclassify cannabis as a Class B drug (rather than Class C as it’s currently classified). This means the Tory Party believe that anyone caught in possession of cannabis should be jailed for between 3 months and 5 years, receive a minimum fine of GBP2,500 and have a criminal record for the rest of their lives.
The Tories are prepared to forgive Cameron his youthful indiscretions of course. They’ve just spent over a decade in the wilderness with one unelectable leader after another; political expediency demands that they turn a blind eye to Cameron’s pot-smoking (and coke-snorting allegedly) days. But that’s just not good enough. The only reason David Cameron is within touching distance of power is because the policy he proposes regarding cannabis possession doesn’t apply to him.
Careful with that Vote
I was talking about the upcoming Irish elections with a friend recently. He was advocating a vote for Fine Gael for tactical reasons (a classic ‘anyone but the incumbent’ strategy that involves voting for the strongest opposition even if you don’t like them). “But D,” I argued, “you can’t vote for Fine Gael… you’re a pot head!” He dismissed this initially by pointing out that he didn’t vote on single issues. “Yeah, but this is one hell of a single issue D. You’re electing someone who wants to put you in prison. Who wants to take your family, your home and your job away from you. It’s sheer insanity for you to want that person in power.”
He’s reconsidering his position.
And I damn well hope David Cameron is reconsidering his. I’d love to ask him whether he believes his life would be better had his cannabis possession been subjected to the punishment he advocates for others? Would Mr. Cameron be a better, more-productive member of society if he’d been expelled from school, spent three months in a juvenile detention centre, and received a criminal record barring him from numerous positions (as well as travel to several countries)? Would society be better off to have one more half-educated ex-con with a chip on his shoulder?
We are all of us hypocrites from time to time, but David Cameron is guilty of an aggressive hypocrisy that makes him dangerous and untrustworthy and – I sincerely hope – entirely unelectable.
UPDATE: It strikes me that being “a half-educated ex-con with a chip on his shoulder” probably qualifies as “a better, more-productive member of society” than does Leader of the Conservative Party. However I suspect Mr. Cameron doesn’t think that.
Right fucking on!
February 14th, 2007 | 10:03pm
by Gyrus
The more I thought about what I was going to write in this box, the longer and more complicated it got. So it’s looking like a separate post. Damn – I’ve got stuff to do today, as well.
February 15th, 2007 | 9:19am
by Phil
Couldn’t agree more! I have been thinking similar thoughts over this. On the one hand, who cares if David had a cheeky spliff as a teenager, it hardly makes him that unusual. However, there is, as you say, the issue that he is now supporting a policy that would have criminalised his teenage self, which seems, well, slightly insane. I say “insane” because it’s fairly clear that David doesn’t actually think he did anything really wrong as a teenager (compare perhaps to a corrupt politician passing anti-corruption laws). Of course, the media doesn’t seem to have picked up on this point at all.
February 16th, 2007 | 2:47am
by Doormat
We Americans see a lot of this aggressive form of hypocrisy quite frequently from the religious right. People are really quite awful for the most part, even the good ones.
February 16th, 2007 | 3:18am
by L
But Jim, it’s just not like that. As Janine di Giovanni said on last night’s Question Time, Cameron will have smoked normal marijuana, whereas what’s on the streets now is skunk and that’s somehow much more dangerous.
How is it more dangerous? Norman Tebbit explained that people are getting high on it and going out and killing people.
Richard Littlejohn – esteemed Daily Mail columnist – then weighed in and explained that Cameron’s alright because he understands it was wrong now and wants to reclassify cannabis.
He’s clever enough to learn his own lessons without damage, but what about other people? The poor and the blacks? They’d get wild and out of control on it and we normal types need to be protected from these feral untermenschen.
They already ARE going wild on it and savaging us in our own homes. Norman Tebbit says so.
February 16th, 2007 | 2:56pm
by merrick
“There’s a hypocrisy that can’t be defended. One that is not the passive failure of individuals to meet the standards they set for themselves, but the aggressive insistence of others that we all meet standards they themselves fail to achieve.”
So presumably your hunt-sabbing and so on was also aggressive hypocrisy. Or perhaps only if you did it in your Doc Martens. That probably comes across as more aggressive than I intended, but I think this is more complicated than the distinction you offer suggests. For Cameron to really be a hypocrite, I’d think, he’d have to be advocating punishing anyone who once had a sneaky spliff: do you really want anyone who ever changes their mind about something – which it’s not totally inconceivable Cameron may have done – to become a hypocrite, and for anyone who has changed their mind about anything and urges others to do the same to become a uniquely obnoxious hypocrite? The problem with his position is not obviously that it’s hypocritical, it’s that it’s fucking ridiculous.
February 16th, 2007 | 9:31pm
by Rob
So presumably your hunt-sabbing and so on was also aggressive hypocrisy.
I’ve no idea how you arrived at that idea, Rob. Can you explain exactly how you can draw an analogy between me actively preventing human beings from torturing a fox (without harming any person), and David Cameron wishing to criminalise others for an activity he himself enjoyed but for which he was not criminalised?
I mentioned the hunt-sabbing and other points merely to highlight my general position on animal welfare. Perhaps I’m wrong — and others can feel free to point it out — but I see no similarity between opposing bloodsports (the willfully cruel use of animal death and torture as human entertainment) and eating meat or wearing leather. At least one of the people I used to sab with was a fully-fledged carnivore. I have never seen a contradiction or even a whiff of hypocrisy.
My views on ‘animal rights’ and acceptable human behaviour towards animals are fairly complex and — I believe — quite rigorous. I do not believe I have a case to answer for aggressive hypocrisy on the issue.
That probably comes across as more aggressive than I intended…
No worries. I’m not as thin-skinned as all that. Plus I’ll be honest with you; in this case I think the point you’re making is total arse, so it’s water off a duck’s back.
For Cameron to really be a hypocrite, I’d think, he’d have to be advocating punishing anyone who once had a sneaky spliff
Are you suggesting that he’s not? That Tory Policy includes a “but the occasional sneaky spliff is alright” clause? I must have missed that. Imagine a 16-year old mixed race kid in an inner-city comprehensive… under the Tory plan to reclassify as Class B, how many sneaky spliffs is the kid allowed before he receives a criminal record and its lifelong legacy?
Is it:
a) As many as Cameron (and that’s actually quite a few by some accounts)?
b) Less than Cameron, but more than zero?
c) None at all.
(hint: I think the answer is ‘c’, but if you can point me to where Cameron or the Tories have suggested otherwise, Rob, then I’ll be happy to cut them a little bit of slack)
[Should] anyone who has changed their mind about anything and urges others to do the same … become a uniquely obnoxious hypocrite?
But that’s not what’s happening here, Rob. Not a bit of it. It’s oddly naive of you to describe Tory policy on cannabis as simply “urg[ing] others to [change their minds]”. That’s about as silly a thing I can imagine. Tory policy isn’t asking cannabis smokers to “change their mind”, it’s punishing them extremely harshly for their choice. A choice that Cameron also made but which his party is willing to ignore.
So I’m sorry, Rob, but I utterly reject your analogy.
February 17th, 2007 | 12:04am
by Jim
I didn’t watch that Question Time, Merrick. And I’m not sure I will. Tebbit makes me think very dark thoughts indeed, and Littlejohn makes me want to break things. The two together might be too much to handle.
I’m always amused, though, when I hear the “ooooh but it’s so much stronger now than it used to be” argument. It’s made by exactly the same people who used to claim that cannabis was “a gateway” (something the Tories still claim incidentally) despite study after study (and the Dutch experience) clearly demonstrating that it’s not.
There’s no question that during the late 70s and throughout the 80s, a number of new growing techniques and hybridization created varieties of cannabis with higher THC content (bio-PP anyone?) but there are two important points to bear in mind… firstly, the famous paper by the American Council for Drug Education (ACDE) which claims that pot from the early 70s typically contained less than 1 percent THC, while modern skunk is up to 24 percent THC is fundamentally flawed. Samples of cannabis which had been locked in police evidence lockers for over twenty years were tested to check the THC content of 1974-vintage pot.
Even the most casual smoker is aware that the fresher the bud, the stronger it is. It’s a wonder 20-year-old pot still has any THC in it at all. It’s no surprise, then, that samples gathered between the early 70s and the mid 90s, and then tested in 1994, would show a steady increase in THC content. Yes, growers have gotten better at maximising the THC content of their plant, but that’s not the only thing going on.
I once heard a TV pundit insist that modern cannabis was “80 times stronger now than it was in the sixties”. Whatever the claims of the ACDE, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that half-decent pot from the sixties would have been between 2 and 4 percent THC. So according to this particular woman, modern cannabis is at least 160 percent THC!
Talk about “CIA stash”.
The other point about modern cannabis is that smokers simply don’t smoke as much of the stuff as they would have done in the 60s. The average toker is looking to feel “moderately high”. That’s where you aim for… you want the music to sound fecking amazing (even if it’s bloody Pink Floyd)… you want the movie to be more involving and more immediate… you want to giggle a bit and think silly thoughts. Now; there’s a certain amount of THC that will induce that state. And that amount hasn’t changed since the 60s.
But, if you smoke much more than that amount, then you start to feel woozy, the movie becomes hectic as opposed to involving, the music gets a bit busy quite frankly, and all you want to do is snuggle down somewhere infinitely comfortable and fall asleep.
So if you smoke pot that’s 10 times stronger than you’re used to; you do not get 10 times higher. You get roughly as high as you normally would, but you use one tenth of the amount of pot to do it.
During the mid-90s I hung out with a guy who had been part of the 60s counter-cultural scene and had spent most of the 70s and early 80s in jail. He designed the tiny images that appeared on much of the blotter LSD of the time… FBI’s were his most famous (little prints of the FBI badge) and he was busted with 25,000 undipped, but printed and perforated sheets of 100 tabs. He’s got a sense of humour about it… the fact that he was — in effect — sent down for 14 years for possession of lots of coloured paper.
Anyways, we were collaborating on a book about drugs that never got completed, and I used to enjoy his reminiscences about The Scene in California in the 60s… needless to say, he smoked a lot of pot. And we discussed the differences between the drug culture of the 60s and that of the 90s (they were significant). One thing he pointed out again and again is how much stronger the pot was today, but how much weaker the acid was. “You’d smoke three or four big spliffs of pure grass, just to get the same buzz that you can get from a couple of bong hits today”.
The point is… he didn’t smoke three or four spliffs of 90s skunk. He smoked two bongs. So if anything, the stronger the cannabis, the better it is for you (as you end up breathing less smoke).
As for people getting high and going out and killing people (and if Tebbit says it’s happening, that’s good enough for me), then it’s a damn good thing that going out and killing people is illegal, eh?
February 17th, 2007 | 1:04am
by Jim
Great post – I’d been thinking that the whole schoolboy spliff-thing was a non-story, but of course the point you make is an excellent one.
In the interest of playing Devil’s advocate, I’d say that Rob had a decent prima faciae case, in the case of Boots versus Sabbing. Sure, your simultaneous vegetarianism and boot-wearing fits the definition of passive hypocrisy: “failure of individuals to meet the standards they set for themselves”; but once you throw in the sabbing, wouldn’t that constitute aggressive hypocrisy, as defined by you: “the aggressive insistence of others that we all meet standards they themselves fail to achieve”?
You say My views on ‘animal rights’ and acceptable human behaviour towards animals are fairly complex and – I believe – quite rigorous, and I don’t doubt it, but without second-guessing what your views exactly are, it’s clear that they include (a) a theoretical opposition to wearing leather, and (b) an active opposition to hunting foxes. You’re trying to tease the two apart – but surely they both stem from your general position on animal welfare, whatever its complexities may be?
Your carnivorous sabbing friend isn’t really relevant – it’s clear for him that the two are somehow separate issues. So while his views are (in my view) highly eccentric, there needn’t be any suggestion of hypocrisy. On the other hand if he wasn’t a a fully-fledged carnivore, but rather an Einstein-like occasional sausage-eater, then he would have a case to answer. Isn’t that roughly the position you’re in?
PS I’ve got a vegetarian cousin who regularly goes fox-hunting – maybe we should get them together.
PPS I wouldn’t usually dream of accusing you of “aggressive hypocrisy”, but that’s the term which you’ve coined, so please understand it in that sense. And, of course if you only took up the boot-wearing after you gave up the sabbing, then you’d be in the clear anyway.
PPPS You can get some pretty decent, long-lasting vegetarian DM-ish shoes these days – I can probably dig out a link if you’re interested.
February 17th, 2007 | 1:07pm
by Larry Teabag
Obviously, I think Larry’s right about the hunt-sabbing, aggressive hypocrisy stuff, since you admit that you’re a passive hypocrite for being a vegetarian, presumably on grounds to do with animal welfare, and wearing Doc Martens. Maybe a more precise specification of your views would show that wearing Doc Martens doesn’t make you a hypocrite for going hunt-sabbing; there’s surely a prima facie case though. That, though, is exactly what you’re not willing to allow Cameron. For him to be a hypocrite, his views would have to at least imply that people who are relevantly similar to him – that is, smoked some weed twenty-odd years ago – should be punished. Advocating punishing people who are caught with weed now does not obviously imply that people who smoked weed twenty-odd years ago should be punished. If you want to hold that advocating punishing people caught with weed now does imply that, you would get in to all kinds of problems about people who did something, got away with it, and then change their mind about whether they should have done it or not. It does not make me a hypocrite to think that something I did five years ago was wrong, and urge other people not to do it.
February 18th, 2007 | 5:22pm
by Rob
Rob, “It does not make me a hypocrite to think that something I did five years ago was wrong, and urge other people not to do it.”
Indeed not, but – as Jim’s already said – that isn’t Cameron’s position so it’s not relevant here.
Cameron doesn’t want to “urge”, he wants to criminalise, to fine and punish, to give a lifelong criminal record to which will preclude them from many socially useful jobs.
As the initial post asks, does Cameron believe his life or society would have been improved if he had been convicted in his pot smoking days?
If not, it is hypocrisy to say it should happen to others.
Unless he believes he’s some sort of superhuman guy who can handle things that us mere mortals cannot, which makes him morally consistent but unfit for making legislation. As does the only other position he might be holding, which is making policy that denies all the evidence of social experience.
“For him to be a hypocrite, his views would have to at least imply that people who are relevantly similar to him – that is, smoked some weed twenty-odd years ago – should be punished.”
The law Cameron advocates allows exactly that.
In 1997 overzealous police arrested me at a legalise cannabis demo. I had committed no crime and, on searching me, they found I had no cannabis on me. They asked if I had ever had cannabis in the past. I answered yes, and was charged with possession. That’s the Misuse of Drugs Act with cannabis as an arrestable Class B substance, exactly what Cameron wants a return to.
February 19th, 2007 | 5:24pm
by merrick
They asked if I had ever had cannabis in the past. I answered yes, and was charged with possession. That’s the Misuse of Drugs Act with cannabis as an arrestable Class B substance, exactly what Cameron wants a return to.
I haven’t got the MDA in front of me at the moment, but are you sure it authorised them to do that? Apart from anything else, it would mean that Cameron could still be nicked if he owned up.
February 19th, 2007 | 9:41pm
by Phil
Look Larry and Rob, you’re on a hiding to nothing here. I just last week coined the phrase “aggressive hypocrisy”. I can simply claim that you have misinterpreted it, and in the process of clarifying exactly what I mean by “aggressive hypocrisy”, I can deftly define myself out of it.
So nyah!
But annoyingly, that does seem to be the essence of the problem. You see, I’m speaking here about those who enforce rules of behaviour which they themselves have not abided by. The key word for me; and I suspect this is what I clearly failed to emphasise in the original piece (though Merrick picked up on it); is “enforce”.
You’re both talking about Tory policy as though it were about asking people not to smoke cannabis, or urging them to change their minds on the issue. It’s not. That’s a perfectly acceptable policy in my eyes. More education, more information, whatever. If David Cameron thinks his pot-smoking was a mistake, and wants to protect the defenceless children of the nation from the same mistake, then good for him!
But can you please tell me what that has to do with reclassifying the drug? Drug classification is all about levels of punishment. It’s not urging people to stop, it’s fucking up their lives for having ever started. For making exactly the same “mistake” that Cameron did. I’ve spent two nights (on separate occasions) in police cells, so I have a rough idea of the physical experience. I can honestly say that there have been periods in my life; at my lowest; when three consecutive months of that would simply have ended me.
What Cameron is saying is that he made a mistake (actually he’s not even saying that very much, but let’s imagine) but that he’s learnt his lesson. Now, in celebration of learning that lesson he’s not going to pass on his wisdom, he’s going to completely fuck over anyone he catches making that same mistake.
That’s “aggressive hypocrisy”. Leastways, what I mean by the phrase.
Now… hunt-sabbing while wearing leather. Actually, Larry gave me a convenient get-out clause which I could well use; when I was sabbing, I was at my veggie-strictest (almost vegan but I just can’t quit bloody cheese!) and certainly wasn’t wearing leather. All the same, I still fundamentally disagree that there’s any similarity between the leather-boot-wearing hunt-saboteur and Cameron’s aggressive hypocrisy. They are two completely different positions.
What is hunt-sabbing? At it’s most immediate – and this is how I saw it – it is an attempt to protect an animal. On top of that can be added layers of political meaning and symbolism, but the actual physical activity you engage in is simply the protection of an animal. P, the guy I knew who would happily arrive at the meet with a half-eaten McDonalds burger, was unapologetically (and very vocally) involved for the ‘Class War’ aspect. He theoretically couldn’t give a toss about animal welfare, but nonetheless he spent a few hours of that day protecting a fox.
My involvement wasn’t so cut-and-dried. It was partly an animal welfare issue, but mostly a moral one. There is a very clear moral distinction between using animals to clothe and feed ourselves; versus torturing them to death for our personal entertainment. And I have no particular objection to people riding across fields on horses, and wasn’t seeking to prevent that; it was the final act of cruelty that morally compelled me to intervene.
Oh, and the argument that I was infringing the rights of the hunters, making my position untenable (the argument that human rights trump our moral considerations towards animals) holds no water unless you suggest that the hunt has some “prior claim” over the fox that trumps that of the saboteurs. And I reject that suggestion.
The vital point is that I wasn’t suggesting that people be actively prevented from eating meat or wearing leather and should be punished for doing so (despite my boots). I was intervening to prevent death-as-entertainment, a moral line I had not crossed. And I was not even suggesting that the hunters be punished (though many saboteurs were); merely that my right to protect the fox was not trumped by their right to hunt it.
Am I making sense? If not, let me know and I’ll try again…
And Phil… I don’t know if the MDA authorised the police to arrest Merrick, but I was at that action, and arrest him they most certainly did (for the reason Merrick stated). Mind you, I came within a hair’s breadth of being arrested myself that day. My offence? Writing down the badge-numbers of arresting officers.
February 20th, 2007 | 3:30am
by Jim
Merrick,
Cameron’s not compelled to think it would have been better if he were arrested, he’s compelled to think he would have had no reasonable complaint (you don’t have to think every instance of enforcement of a general rule is valuable to think it’s a valuable rule – presumably there are drivers who could break a given speed limit safely, but that doesn’t mean that a given speed limit is not a sensible rule). And that’s a much easier position to occupy than the thought that it would have been better: there are plenty of things I’ve done that I would have had no reasonable complaint about if I had been punished for, but I’m not sure many of them would have resulted in betterness overall. I’m not sure I can even make sense of that thought about betterness really.
Jim,
it seems like your objection is to coercive hypocrisy, which then gets into questions about what counts as coercion. Clearly legal sanction counts as coercion. I don’t know about hunt-sabbing, because I don’t know about hunt-sabbing. It doesn’t seem radically implausible to me that physically interposing myself between you and some end of yours is coercion though, if not necessarily coercion of the same degree as legal sanctions – think of what you’d think was appropriate to do to someone who lay down in front of a bus so as to prevent the bus leaving, assuming the bus was doing something morally neutral so as to avoid issues about whether the coercion is legitimate, if indeed it is coercion. Your example of priests, at least, indicates that legal sanction does not exhaust the category of coercion. Either way, I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that either, the concept of hypocrisy needs to be narrowed so as to avoid condemning people who really have changed their minds, or hypocrisy in general, as opposed to what I’ll call present hypocrisy, shouldn’t be such a terrible thing. Whatever you think about whether Cameron is a hypocrite or not, he would surely be a much worse hypocrite if he were smoking weed now. None of which speaks to whether the policy is sensible at all, of course.
February 20th, 2007 | 10:58pm
by Rob
Phil, yes I’m sure the charge fits the law.
The law prohibits the possession of cannabis. I admitted – under caution too – to being in possession of cannabis.
Of course, the problem would’ve come in proving my offence. Indeed, I asked the coppers if I could admit to nicking Shergar and abducting Lord Lucan if all they needed for a prosecution was my say-so. The standard of proof was surely better for those other crimes – we have evidence they actually took place, whereas the only evidence of the cannabis crime itself was my word!
It wasn’t just overzealous policing on the day. The Crown Prosecution Service went ahead with the case. The first time it came to court I got it adjourned because the police hadn’t served me a copy of my statement. The next time it came they still hadn’t given me the statement but the magistrate, probably unlawfully, wanted to go ahead with the trial anyway, seeing it as open and shut.
However, your type of trial depends on the amount of cannabis you were in possession of. A small amount is dealt with by magistrates. A larger amount, with the possibility of intent to supply, can be tried in magistrates or Crown court.
As my amount was utterly unspecified, it couldn’t be said to be under the small-amount threshold. So, I exercised my right as someone charged with an offence that’s triable either way; I elected to go to Crown.
They set a date but, as Crown trials cost an order of magnitude more than magistrates ones, two days before trial the CPS decided it ‘was not in the public interest’ to proceed and the case was discontinued.
This is not the same as an acquittal. I have a ‘drugs marker’ against my name on the Police National Computer, despite having been convicted of no drugs offences. Just one reason Why I Hate The Police.
February 22nd, 2007 | 5:37pm
by merrick
Ay up Merrick, I just re-read your Why I Hate The Police article. It’s as good as I remember, and it still calls to mind that Bukowski quote from Notes on The Pest…
Not making exactly the same point as you, but singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were.
February 22nd, 2007 | 8:41pm
by Jim
[…] For a progressive view of the drug policy debate go to the Transform Drug Policy Foundation. Other blogs articles: “Cameron, Cannabis and Conservative policy on drug education” – Drug Education Forum Blog “David Cameron and cannabis” – The Quiet Road […]
February 24th, 2007 | 10:39am
by Toby Flux » Blog Archive » Cameron’s criminal drug policy
I wasn’t really pursuing an analogy between your hunt-sabbing and Cameron’s tokage, just testing your own behaviour against your definition of “aggressive hypocrisy”.
If you really believe that:
There is a very clear moral distinction between using animals to clothe and feed ourselves; versus torturing them to death for our personal entertainment.
Then all I can say is that I disagree – but that’s a whole separate discussion…
February 25th, 2007 | 7:22pm
by Larry Teabag
This interesting stuff.
But smoking dope and vegetarianism seem to me to be more about lifestyle choices than hard political decisions.
I think the moral question is more about Cameron’s attempt to show himself as a nice chap when actually he is planning to sweep away the rights of many people.
I’ve blogged on his plans to make employment laws much worse for workers. Click on my name for details.
March 22nd, 2007 | 11:24pm
by Miles
[…] gold and green David Cameron: active hypocrite or passive hypocrite? Or both?Jim has an excellent post up discussing Tory Boy’s not-quite-admission to a dope-smoking past. […]
May 1st, 2007 | 2:09pm
by Red, gold and green « The gaping silence
Spot on!
I definitely won’t be voting for him! I’m gonna give the Lib Dems a try… they need a chance (but will undoubtedly f*ck it up too).
July 8th, 2009 | 9:11pm
by Spence
Jim,
rereading this ancient post, I’m struck by this
Perhaps I’m wrong — and others can feel free to point it out — but I see no similarity between opposing bloodsports (the willfully cruel use of animal death and torture as human entertainment) and eating meat or wearing leather.
Allow me to step up and be those others.
There is a very clear moral distinction between using animals to clothe and feed ourselves; versus torturing them to death for our personal entertainment.
Yes, but only when we have do that clothing and feeding out of necessity.
If – as you did at the time of your hunt sabbing, and indeed still do today – we live in a society where we can clothe and feed ourselves to a very high standard without resorting to killing animals then it’s a different moral question.
We only kill animals for our food and clothes because we want to. Either we really like the animal product, or it is easier to obtain.
Actually there’s a tiny group with a third option who dislike leather but believe the alternatives are morally worse. I know more than one person who wears second hand leather as the morally superior position to brand new oil-plastics, and there’s a case to be made that new leather would qualify.
But if that didn’t apply to you then – and as someone who accords animals rights I think it likely that it didn’t – then you only did it for the first two reasons, essentially for greed or convenience, certainly not out of necessity.
In our society (excepting the miniscule number who do it as a considered lesser evil), we consume meat and leather for precisely the same reason that we have bloodsports; we don’t need to, we just want to.
July 11th, 2009 | 4:14pm
by merrick
There is a nasty form of hypocricy which I didn’t cover in my article all those years ago, but I don’t think the distinction is so much to do with agressiveness as with dishonesty. We easily become the more forgiveable sort of hypocrites when we fall short of the ideals we espouse, especially if those ideals are highly demanding – but what is less easy to forgive is when people publicly espouse ideals and present themselves as living up to them whilst privately which they are doing no such thing.
I personally do not expect parents, priests and politicians to be perfect but I have much more time for those who are more honest about their faults and failings. I am actually a Quaker and purely because I have a religious belief I have to deal with other people’s unrealistic assumptions(“But you’re supposed to be…”, “you’re not supposed to…”).
The snipers I referred to in my article often are people who make these sorts of assumptions about what claims people who espouse ideals are making about themselves. I might say “I’m a Quaker” but what they hear is “Ooh, look at me, everyone, I’m so good! Ooh, I’m so in touch with my own spirituality!”
So I have a lot of time for your carnivorous hunt sabbing friend. There is a wide range of moral schemas which could make a clear distinction between eating meat and fox hunting. You or I might not agree with the particular moral schema he has, but it is not for us to tell him what he is “supposed to” believe about eating meat, just because he is opposed to fox hunting. And practically speaking, fox hunting would now still be fully legal if the views of all carnivorous hunting opponents were somehow discounted.
This touches on my final point. Those of us who espouse moral values do not just face the charge of hypocricy from those I call the “snipers” -we also have to deal with inner critics. Last year, a few of us started a group called “Borrowed Planet” – a group of parents concerned about climate change and other environmental issues which will affect the generations to come. One of the main obstacles to getting other friends involved is what I took to calling “The Hypocricy Barrier” – it was people saying “I’d like to get involved, but I can’t really talk because I use the plane” or “drive a car” or whatever. So many people adopt this (non)position rather than engage with the issues that face us all. They fail to realise that by that token the only people who have the moral authority to talk about global warming are trees. And they can’t talk. Because they are trees, We have to persuade people that we all have to plunge into the hypocricy zone to prevent things from going horribly, horribly wrong.
January 5th, 2010 | 3:59pm
by Robin Fishwick