PETER HITCHENS: Legalise cannabis? Let’s ask the five victims of a crazed London knifeman first 

If Jason Kakaire had screamed ‘Allahu akbar!’ as he went about his bloody work, you would have heard of him, and he would have been debated in the House of Commons.

But because Kakaire’s five cruel and devastating knife attacks in London could not possibly be given any political or religious motive, there is barely a ripple of interest in his case. This is a mistake.

There are two reasons for the error. The first is that our bloated but unsuccessful ‘security’ apparatus, assisted by posing politicians, likes to use supposed terrorism to boost its power and budgets. 

It hopes nobody will notice that in fact it is almost entirely useless at preventing such attacks.

Why? Because they have much more to do with drugs than with politics. And so they keep happening however much surveillance we have and however many extra powers we give the police and MI5.

The second is that our political and media upper deck is crammed with people who are or have been marijuana users. 

Many let their children smoke the drug at home. And such people hate any hint that their chosen pleasure is in fact a terrible danger, should stay illegal, and should be fought with proper enforcement of existing drug laws.

So let me introduce you to Kakaire. He haunted the London suburb of Edmonton with his knife, stabbing solitary defenceless people in the back.

At the time, these events were slightly covered in brief mentions on inside pages. 

The crimes had no conceivable aim. They were just mad, as so much drug-related crime is.

He stabbed his victims so hard that the knife typically sank almost 4in into their bodies. In one miserable case, he severed a woman’s spinal cord and left her paralysed.

My regular readers will know what comes next. Kakaire is of course a long-term user of marijuana. He should not have been. 

If the police enforced the law of the land, as happens in Japan in South Korea, he would not have been. But they do not. So he is.

This terrifying drug, many of whose users become insane and violent, is falsely plugged as harmless, and even as a sort of miracle medicine.

Greedy rich people hope to make huge profits out of its legal sale, if they can persuade governments to allow it.

Their hopes are rising because politicians are running out of things they can tax to pay for their wild spending and borrowing. Income tax, VAT and pension raids have reached their upper limits. 

I suspect the current plan to raise petrol duty will run into big opposition. The only really reliable wells of money are ‘sin taxes’, imposed on things people like so much that they will pay over the odds to buy them.

I also suspect that many in government foolishly reckon that a doped population will be too apathetic to be discontented. Some may be. But a worrying number, some of them near you, will become like Kakaire.

He absurdly claims to have smoked marijuana so as to stop the ‘voices in his head’ which almost certainly resulted from him smoking it in the first place. 

I am in a way sorry to keep highlighting such cases (though there is no shortage, and many weeks go by when I let it go).

But the campaign for legalisation never lets up and is frighteningly close to success.

You should let your MP know now that you will never support such a disastrous policy.

Or you will wake up one morning soon and find that it has happened, and there will be many more Kakaires not far from your home.

The world isn’t this black and white

I would be interested to know in detail what black Britons think of the new BBC series Noughts + Crosses. This depicts an imaginary UK in which the skin colours are reversed.

No doubt white people such as me need reminding of the cruelties, humiliations and insults of racial bigotry.

The scene where a white servant’s wound was bandaged with dark brown sticking plaster was very telling. Good. If we learn, we will behave better.

But there are always people who will exploit true grievances for their own ends. I happen to think that exaggerated charges of ‘racism’ have often been used for that aim.

I cannot work out whether the Albion of the BBC drama is meant to be a reversal of apartheid South Africa – or of modern Britain.

There is legally enforced segregation, which we have never had here. Are the drama’s whites a conquered but proud people under colonial rule?

Or are they recent migrants wanted for their cheap labour but not otherwise welcome?

Surely these are completely different things which would have different outcomes. Are there no poor black people?

Are there no black opponents of bigotry and black campaigners for equality? 

Think about it for a moment and you will see that such a looking-glass world needs to be lot more subtle than this one seems to be, to make sense.

Quiz takes a puzzling turn

For some years now I have been getting more and more bored with University Challenge.

Its question devisers are obsessed with the flags of small African states, the periodic table of the elements, Chinese dynasties, and fantastically obscure and specialised scientific queries.

But it reached its ludicrous peak last week with this question, which I am sure Jeremy Paxman did not understand: ‘An unpolarised beam of light is incident on a pair of ideal polarisers whose transmission axes have an angle of 60 degrees between them. What fraction of the original incident intensity is transmitted through the pair?’

I have forgotten the answer because, as with so many of these questions, I did not care that I did not know.

Surely a quiz only works if you wish you had known the answers, and kick yourself for not doing so?

It occurs to me that if we had not discovered that the coronavirus existed, and so had not descended into a constant floundering panic about it, it would be doing far less damage than it is.

Alas, some people fall ill and die, but they always have and always will. 

This is not the Black Death, and we might be better off if we stopped behaving as if it was. 

The most dangerous and frightening political leader in our part of the world is Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Not only does he ceaselessly stir the pot of war in Syria, making it almost impossible to end that terrible, tragic conflict.

He is now making grotesquely cynical use of migrants. 

To get his way in Syria, he deliberately encouraged these poor people towards the Greek frontier in a blatant, almost medieval piece of blackmail.

At home he has destroyed formerly free media and independent courts, and flung scores of journalists into prison.

But he is, alas, our Nato ally and we dare not undermine him. So we go on and on about Vladimir Putin instead. 

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