Of Iain Dale, Boris and Gateway Drugs

During his recent one to one with Boris Johnson, Iain Dale stated that Marijuana was a gateway drug. According to Dale, this can be inferred from the fact that one would be unlikely to find a single Heroin addict who had not consumed Marihuana previously. Boris duly conceded that taking drugs was a stupid idea and expressed his scepticism over taking a more relaxed attitude to Marijuana.

So, is Boris loosing his libertarian instincts? Are potheads doomed? Let’s look at the gateway drug issue first.

Hitler and Free Speech

The Grauniad has received some attention with a pro-censorship propaganda piece in a ‘comment is free’ column by some Cath Elliot. She argues the by now familiar line that principled support for free speech causes people to commit hate crimes. Naturally, she takes the opportunity to point out that Hitler too spoke freely. Less common is her partial admission to an implied key assumption: Ms Elliot actually spells out that this argument presupposes that people are generally incapable of thinking for themselves.

Unfortunately, she stops there and doesn’t work out the further implications: if humans can’t think for themselves, who is to think for them? After all, if people generally can’t think for themselves, then the same should be true for their elected (human) representatives. And how can they have the ability to elect representatives in the first place if they can’t independently think and decide who should represent them etc. By and large the piece is so poorly argued, I could spend all night fisking it. I can’t be bothered to do that though and will therefore concentrate on her invocation of the Führer.