Surely some mistake?

Spuriouser and Spuriouser!

2011-12-13T11:58:00.000Z

Peering back through the mists of time, another case of spurious retraction - of a statement which inadvertently reveals - just another bog-standard political conspiracy.

The Daily Mail ('Tear up the sentencing guidelines and jail EVERY looter': Crackdown on looters revealed) reports an incautious statement in court by a JP, Novello Noades:

Our directive for anyone involved in the rioting is a custodial sentence. That is the directive we have had - it is a very serious matter.

And indeed, as the Guardian discovered, emails were circulated to justices' clerks, telling them

...you should advise magistrates to commit to the crown court cases of commercial burglary, or handling … or violent disorder arising from the recent disturbances. There is a general acceptance that what occurred earlier this week is not covered by the sentencing guidelines and it will be very much the exception that such cases are sentenced in the magistrates courts...

These emails were sent by a 'senior justices clerk' in the London regional office of Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service, that is to say, in effect, an official working for the Ministry of Justice, which was the body forced to release the emails in response to an FoI request. The reader is invited to consider how likely it is that this official produced these instructions on their own initiative and formulated them without guidance from higher up the political chain.

Luckily, as Noakes casually made her incriminating revelation, Justices clerk Claire Luxford, one of those who had received these instructions and been given the task of communicating the pretty unambiguous message from her government masters, was on hand to explain:

It's general guidance - not a directive as such - that the sentencing guidelines in cases such as these are not applied.

There is of course no such thing as a government 'directive' to the judiciary, in any formal sense. A non-technical use of the word 'directive' appears pretty apt, though. The government appears to have intervened in the judicial process in order to attack a specific group of people. This tactic, however delicately performed and however mellifluous and bland the wording used, is a basic violation of the rule of law.

The government went into damage-limitation mode of course, since they don't really want to be revealed as using nakedly dictatorial tactics in their panicked urgency to stamp out any further revolt. An HMCS spokesman is quoted by the Guardian giving the official line:

Sentencing is a matter for the independent judiciary. Justices' clerks and legal advisers in magistrates' courts have a responsibility to give advice to magistrates on sentencing guidelines. Accordingly magistrates in London are being advised by their legal advisers to consider whether their powers of punishment are sufficient in dealing with some cases arising from the recent disorder. Magistrates are independent and not subject to direction from their legal advisers.

This bland description is at odds with the content of the released emails, and furthermore masks the fact that on questions of law and on constitutional matters JPs are entirely dependent on their clerks and legal advisors. As Noakes's unguarded statement reveals, what magistrates are told by those advisors is treated as authoritative. In this case, Noades, lacking legal training, was apparently unaware of the scandal she was revealing.

She was evidently disabused of the assumption that all this was above board and perfectly OK to chat about in open court, and so came the spurious retraction: a 'spokesperson' was drafted in to announce that

Ms Novello Noades, the Bench Chair, is mortified she used the term ''directive'', she knew there wasn't one and accepts it is entirely her mistake in language.

So that clears that up, then.

Meanwhile the the independent judiciary sent out the tough message that pleased David Cameron so much. 'Mad Dog' Gilbard, a QC who seems to have been granted the status of 'honorary recorder of Manchester', was happy to get stuck in.

The Court of Appeal quietly reversed some of the most rabid excesses and could hardly fail to mutter something uncomplimentary about Mad Dog:

20. It was, as we have indicated, entirely appropriate for Judge Gilbart to make clear that any offence committed in the context of a riot was different in kind from a similar offence committed in isolated circumstances, and for that reason to indicate his intention to depart from the sentencing guidelines provided for specific offences in what he described as the "usual context of criminality". It is however inappropriate for Crown Court judges to issue, or appear to be issuing, sentencing guidelines. Up and down the country judges will pass the sentences they think appropriate in the context of the public disorder taking place in their own cities, and nationally, and in the light of well understood principles, and in the event of any appeals against these sentences, by reference to the decisions of this court. That is the correct process. Until there are appeals against sentence, this court cannot and should not have any input into the sentencing decisions in the Crown Courts, save in the broad sense that the principles to be applied have in fact already been established

and, heavily muffled, about the goings-on in the Courts Service (emphasis in both quotes very much mine):

21. Much the same applies to magistrates courts. Legal advisers to magistrates are indeed legal advisers. It was clearly appropriate for them to advise magistrates that the magistrates' courts sentencing guidelines were not drafted with offences committed in the context of riot and public disorder in mind and that it was open to courts, if they thought appropriate in the individual cases, to impose sentences outside the range suggested by those guidelines. If any individual sentence was excessive, it would, of course, be subject to appeal to the Crown Court in the usual way.

but everyone knew what was required, and Lord Judge, sporting his very safest pair of hands, proceeded to pre-empt parody as he upheld four-year sentences for a couple of harmless facebook pranksters:

"It is very simple. Those who deliberately participate in disturbances of this magnitude, causing injury and damage and fear to even the most stout-hearted of citizens … must be punished accordingly and the sentences should be designed to deter others."

As an otherwise authoritarian article from Joshua Rozenberg delicately hints, the precedent set by these sentences is likely to have a chilling effect on protest and civil disobedience:

For the last few days, we have seen peaceful protests outside St Paul's Cathedral. No doubt those involved in the protest have never had any intention of rioting. But anyone who might be thinking of sparking a riot in the City of London will now know that prison awaits for what would otherwise be the most trivial of offences.

P.S. The Met's directive to seek remand on custody in all cases was described as a policy of "unlawful arbitrary detention" by lawyers, and Tory MP James Clappison found it rather disturbing, too. Not as disturbing of course as the plight of those needlessly banged up for long periods - quite possibly long enough to lose a job, a house, or custody of children - before in some cases, of course, being acquitted. (And in such cases compensation is highly unlikely to be forthcoming.)

One Man's Poison

2011-07-22T12:28:00.006+01:00

The previous post deals with the issue of cannabis legalisation policy approached as broadly speaking a matter of weighing costs and benefits. Here I'll make some first steps in discussing the relevance and impact of moral principles.

(My comments about Hitchens's position are inevitably somewhat sketchy; one could go on for thousands of words attempting to cover every fine gradation and distinction in the positions it is possible to take. An advantage of adversarial debate is at least that I can rely instead on Hitchens to clarify which positions he wishes to appeal to.)

A successful appeal to moral principle in this debate should establish two things: that the principle is valid, and that it has certain consequences so far as the criminal law is concerned. That is not, however, to say that either of these things must be established to any particular standard or by any particular method: perhaps the most that can be said here is that good reasons must be supplied. If they are not, the argument won't go through. And if a (supposed) moral principle can be shown to be invalid or legally inconsequential, then arguments invoking it can be rejected outright.

The relationship between moral principle and the law is a complex matter. I will suggest three main approaches:

First, judgements of value feed into the assessment of costs and benefits: for example if something can be established to be of little value, it should be accorded little or no weight in assessing possible outcomes. Questions of moral duty might in turn feed into judgements of value - the benefits of, to use Hitchens's example, cruelty to animals might be discounted since although a sadistic animal torturer may derive subjective pleasure or other benefits from his activities, these benefits are of such a morally defective kind that they are considered to have no value. That is not so say that the analogy between animal cruelty and taking cannabis is a close one - enjoying cannabis certainly does not depend, either in intention or in fact, on the suffering of other beings (though of course, like almost any activity, it might under certain circumstances bring about such suffering). In any case, on this approach, moral issues are relevant as one of an open-ended set of inputs to a policy decision. Call this the 'value-based' approach.

The second approach to these issues is to draw conclusions about legal status directly from moral considerations. In particular, one might seek to justify punishment of certain behaviour by direct reference to its immoral character. Certain conduct, being intrinsically wrong, should be banned, regardless of whether the consequences of such a ban are entirely desirable, all things considered (such a view might of course allow that very severe or perverse consequences might be sufficient to overturn the presumption in favour of a ban - an example might be Hitchens's remark:
...‘regulation’ of something fundamentally bad doesn’t get rid of its fundamental badness. Sometimes we may have to accept it as a compromise while we try to remove a poison from our culture, or at least greatly restrict it. But that is a defeat...).

I'll refer to this as the 'enforcement of morality' view.

Yet a third way of bringing in issues of personal morality combines certain elements of both these. In common with the first method, immorality is held to 'downgrade' a certain kind of action. In a similar fashion to the second approach, though, this is applied directly to principles about just punishment. Here I have in mind in particular the position that would make an exception of cannabis use: while normally behaviour should be permitted under the criminal law even if it is potentially harmful, there is something about cannabis use which means it is an exception to this general principle. We might call this 'withdrawal of protection'.

Unearned enjoyment

I'll consider first a moral principle that I think fails on its own terms, so that it is unnecessary to consider whether it is legally consequential. In comments on this blog, Hitchens suggests that using cannabis is immoral in itself:

http://surelysomemistake.blogspot.com/2011/07/reefer-madness-evidence.html?showComment=1310810261183#c528468107287226647
There *are* strong moral arguments against the legalising of stupefying drugs, which I happen to think are over-riding.We should live our lives truthfully according to our senses, and not seek to hide from the truth by blurring those senses. Nor should we cheat our brains into rewarding us with artificial joy, when we have done nothing to deserve it.

One element here seems to be a variant of the objection based on 'self-stupefaction', here taking the form of self-deceptive retreat into distorted perceptions. For now all I will say about his is that this is not a good description of the way in which most people use cannabis - while heavy use may have a sedative effect and if prolonged perhaps lead to a degree of separation from reality, it is not an inevitable nor a widespread, nor, even when it occurs, a particularly pronounced effect of cannabis use. I will look more closely at 'self-stupefaction' later.

A second element, which I've emphasised, has been expressed in more detail elsewhere:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/think-it-possible-that-ye-may-be-mistaken.html
...morally - the pleasure and joy and exaltation provided artificially by drugs, and naturally by the human body are rewards for effort and courage. You may believe this is a created fact or the consequence of evolutionary biology, but the arrangement is beneficial to humankind because it limits this reward to those who have earned it. If you haven’t delivered the Gettysburg address, or won the Second World War, or designed St Paul’s Cathedral, or written Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, you shouldn’t be able to feel as if you had. If you can, then people will stop doing these things.

The final sentence seems to suggest that the idea here is that people taking cannabis will derive such joy and exaltation that they will lack motivation to achieve great things. To scale this idea down, we may express it as the concern that cannabis supplants the will to create, to achieve. This seems misguided, since many who take cannabis report that they experience an enhancement of creativity or of the ability to concentrate. Certainly an altered state of consciousness may be inspirational - one need not make New-Agey claims about the mystic properties of cannabis to see that the change in perspective delivered by cannabis might have benefits.

The idea that cannabis provides 'artificial' rewards is hard to pin down. Much of the subjective benefit to those who take it in moderation seem to consist in enhancing, rather than supplanting, real experience and achievement. 'Artificiality' is of course a rather common feature of the daily benefits (as well as disadvantages) of modern life. That a certain contrivance - the relatively natural one of consuming a herb - operates by way of direct effects on the central nervous system does not seem to me to constitute a good objection in itself.

Of course for some, cannabis is used in heavy doses as a euphoriant sedative. Of those who seek something approaching oblivion, the real question is why, not how, they do so. Fixating on cannabis as a source rather than a symptom of the problem is natural enough - as in the case of parents whose children develop mental illness or behave badly - is misguided. I don't think it at all far-fetched to suppose that the availability of this 'crutch' may have saved lives by providing an alternative to more permanent ways of escape. (Perhaps this is more likely to apply to opiates, a much more effective route to sheer disembodied world-excluding pleasure.) This is something of a diversion, since what 'dependent' and very heavy users get up to does not provide an objection to cannabis use in general.

So I'm led to consider the point relating to earning or deserving one's pleasure. Even granting that cannabis doesn't generate pleasure or satisfaction from nowhere, but instead enhances real enjoyments, isn't there a 'free lunch' being enjoyed here, like manna from heaven? And shouldn't this be stopped? If people are going to have more fun, shouldn't they be made to pay for it?

I don't accept the notion that if people are going to enjoy themselves, they should be made to pay a price. The idea of joy without compensating toil or hardship is not offensive to me at least, even if it is to Hitchens (and it's rather hard to believe that it really is). But in any case it's not clear that this rather excessively puritanical attitude can supply an objection to cannabis use.

I've mentioned previously that cannabis can of course be cultivated by the individual - and that such a case makes clear the essential privacy of cannabis use. This paradigm also serves to illustrate that cannabis use does involve work - we need not fear that benefits are being gained without a price being paid. Of course the price paid is generally a literal price - cash. That fact reflects division of labour: people don't have to grow their own cannabis, but instead pay for it with money, just as they do for other sources of enjoyment, like chocolate biscuits.

The example of chocolate biscuits ought also to see off a plausible and somewhat more sophisticated way of understanding Hitchens's argument here: one which combines and unifies the elements of artificiality and earning. Taking cannabis, the argument might go, involves a failure of reward and effort to be integrated as an organic unity: one's efforts ought to be closely coupled in some way with the rewards one gains from them. This seems to deny the benefits of interpersonal division of labour, so that one may only legitimately enjoy chocolate biscuits that one has made oneself, for example (and must one also make the chocolate, grow the wheat? So far as this has any plausibility, it still seems unable to provide an objection to taking cannabis that one has cultivated oneself.

This line seems unpromising, and I won't pursue it further. If Hitchens has a good point to make here, this surely isn't it. He may of course wish to clarify or refine his position, in which case I will respond.

'Self-stupefaction'

One might try to fit the following remarks into the enforcement of morality approach:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/11/free-to-be-slaves-the-real-point-of-the-drugs-debate.html
I contend that it is morally wrong to stupefy yourself, and morally wrong to damage yourself or take a conscious risk of damaging yourself, with the aim of getting physical pleasure...

This might be the right place to locate an earlier discussion of Peter Geach's moral philosophy: Geach says that there is no duty to remain maximally alert, using the example of drinking hot toddy in bed. Hitchens replies:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/wheres-the-evidence.html
What if the man, having gone to sleep drunk, is woken at two a.m. by the screams of his children, trapped in a fire? Or not woken? Or not woken until far too late? Where then is his duty? Was the drinking or the (tee hee) consumption of ‘cannabis indica’ morally objectionable if the children, as a result, were not saved? Yet he could not have known the house would catch fire -only that there was a remote chance that it might. And a remote chance that he would be too stupefied to act with courage and decision. Even if he was alone and therefore (according to the utilitarian ‘libertarians’) nobody’s concern but his own, he would have been more likely to burn to death, and others would have had to turn out to scrape through the ruins for his charred bones, or even risk their lives trying to rescue his already lifeless body.

An obvious objection to this is that Hitchens, in substituting his own example, has introduced the issue of harm to others - which I previously suggested can be adequately controlled by targeting especially risky or irresponsible behaviour such as becoming significantly intoxicated while in charge of a child, or while driving. But perhaps Hitchens is suggesting that intoxication carries with it such a general risk of danger that it merits a total ban on policy grounds. This doesn't seem sustainable in the case of cannabis intoxication.

However we are to understand the supposed legal consequences of the immorality of 'self-stupefaction' (a characterisation I've rejected as inaccurate to describe the effects of cannabis), the idea that there is an obligation to remain at maximum alertness at all times is hopelessly over-strict. People occasionally become tired, or choose to lightly doze, perhaps while lying on the beach, when they could instead remains vigilant. I don't think we could claim that they are always acting immorally.

Since being asleep always makes one less alert than being awake, even if every tired, perhaps we should resist sleep, or at least seek a cure for it. Similarly, is there a moral obligation to take performance-enhancing drugs? The proliferation of such questions I think illustrates the implausibility of this view.

Once we factor in the need for the moral principle to have consequences for the criminal law, I think it becomes clear that this approach is no good. No-one would accept this totalitarian attitude to mental alertness if it were consistently applied.

Epicycles

Now I have addressed some main strands of argument offered by Hitchens. But it is always possible that moral considerations interact and combine to create complex position, with exceptions to exceptions and so on.

A commenter on Hitchens's Blog, 'beaufrere', has suggested the following distillation of an argument provided by Hitchens:

An activity should be prohibited by law if the following conditions apply:

C1: the activity is known to be harmful to the health, safety or well-being of those who participate in it or who are affected by it, or it is reasonable to believe that there is a significant risk that the activity is harmful

C2: both the risk of harm from the activity and the extent of that harm are significant or substantial

C3: participation in the activity would become (or remain) widespread if the activity were to become (or remain) lawful,

but the activity should not be prohibited if at least one of the following exceptions applies:

E1: the activity has been lawfully pursued for a substantial period of time (and still is being lawfully pursued) by a significant number of people, as a result of which it has gained widespread acceptance as part of the nation's customs or culture

E2: the activity is capable of being pursued or applied for beneficial purposes, and where the sole or main beneficial purpose is the pleasure, entertainment or self-gratification of the participant(s), the pursuit of the activity requires or promotes self-discipline, courage, skill or other moral virtues in the participant.

As beaufrere goes on to suggest, this has the appearance of an ad hoc position tailored to Hitchens's preferred outcome. To try and dissect and evaluate this position would be rather time-consuming, but I am certainly inclined to agree that the position seems to lack antecedent plausibility. If Hitchens endorses this characterisation of his view, or wishes to formulate a similarly clear statement of his position, I will of course address it.

Cognitive Rights

Hitchens states (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/depraved-new-world.html):

Pro-legalisation spokesmen often suggest that there’s something anti-liberty about those of us who want the law on drugs enforced, as if smoking dope were the equivalent of free speech.

Wheil I am not a spokesman or indeed a campaigner, I would certainly agree that there is an important question of liberty here. I've previously suggested that there may be an innate or at least unavoidable desire or tendency for people to seek to alter their state of consciousness. I would certainly consider that there is a right to do so, just as there is a right not to have one's consciousness altered by others without consent. I've previously drawn attention to the essentially private nature of cannabis use. But it may well be that to prevent or prohibit people from using cannabis is indeed to impinge upon a basic right, one which may be more fundamental than freedom of speech.

The central component of non-medical cannabis use alteration of one's consciousness - and what could be more private a matter than that? To prohibit people from altering their consciousness is to impose what may be a significant burden on them, locking them inescapably into a standard mode of thought which in the context of the quotidian reality of their artificial environment may become intolerably tiresome and restrictive. Control over all aspects of one's own mind is surely a basic interest - and the use of tools such as cannabis for exploration of this internal frontier is a part of exercising that control to the full.

If we accept that cognitive rights include the right to alter consciousness - and I think we must - then we should not be erecting insurmountable obstacles to people's exercise of that right - there may not be a right to be supplied with cannabis, but that the state forebear from closing off the supply altogether and from punishing exercises of cognitive freedom may be an indispensable element of any attempt to take cognitive rights and liberty seriously.

Hitchens seeks to force people to be free - but his understanding of freedom is not mine. He seeks to remove any fleeting release or refuge that use of cannabis might offer those who are trapped in a dreary and grinding existence. He hopes that this will lead them to rise up in revolt, but confinement to an unremittingly uniform experience of reality may only draw tighter the chains of a life which for many is neither chosen nor easily escaped.

Revolt requires that one see not only the intolerability of one's situation, but the possibility of something different. Perhaps cannabis can help to deliver a kind of freedom that, glimpsed in the inner realm, can provide a template for independence in all areas of life.

This concludes my current round of responses.

What is To Be Done?

2011-07-19T23:54:00.002+01:00

The present debate is about the legal status of cannabis. The topic is not itself whether smoking cannabis is an especially good idea, or the kind of thing everyone should do, or harmful, or beneficial. None of these will decide the question of legalisation and prohibition, certainly not on their own.

I do not believe any harmful effects to the user that might plausibly be discovered would be a sufficient justification for bringing to bear the power of the state to criminalise the possession and use of cannabis. Nonetheless, for those who disagree or whose attitude to cannabis has otherwise been shaped by highly exaggerated warnings, I've explained my reasons for thinking that the mental health risks from taking cannabis are minimal. I don't propose to go into those any further here.

The first issue I'll deal with is the burden of proof - in the first place, it seems clear to me that any exertion of state penal power over the individual requires justification. Hitchens advocates instituting a much harsher punitive regime than the present one, which already imprisons, fines, and brands as criminal a large number of users. One might suggest that the status quo is privileged, that any departure requires positive justification, but that need not concern us since neither Hitchens nor I consider the current position acceptable.

The 'precautionary principle' - that where it seems possible that a course of action may cause harm, the course should not be adopted - is of little help here - or for that matter in general - since unless unfounded fears are allowed to prevent any change, the 'possible' harms must in fact be probable to a sufficient degree, and since there will be pros and cons on both sides, the question rapidly becomes - which is to be preferred? The harmful effects of the present regime, and of the much harsher regime Hitchens advocates, are clear - imprisonment is a major harm in itself to individuals and those close to them, and while relatively few may be prosecuted, many more take furtive and burdensome steps to avoid it - which accounts on large part for the relatively low rate of conviction. And those who do not share the conviction that cannabis is an innocent herb may not appreciate the resentment, and perception of victimisation that this involves.

I've previously mentioned the harmful effects of the lack of regulation which comes with less-than-completely effective prohibition. These would occur even if possession and use were to be entirely decriminalised. Criminal gangs and unscrupulous dealers will sell to any age group and freely adulterate a product which in any case cannot be checked for strength or specific constituents (for example, one might wish to ensure that one's cannabis contained a relatively high proportion of cannabidiol).
Hitchens says If it is right for the substance to be illegal (the core of the argument) then it is right for the law to punish its possession. We are not talking about freedom of speech or thought here.

But from this we may also conclude that if it is not right for it to be punished, it is not right for it to be illegal. Punishability and illegality in the present sense of the word are inseparable. One may decide that possession of the substance would best be eliminated, and from that conclude that it should be criminal, but that is a highly dubious move. A very obvious issue is whether legalisation would increase cannabis use from current levels. To Hitchens this may be somewhat irrelevant, since he seems intent on ramping up the penalties and the detection effort so as to eliminate cannabis use and traffic. I have no doubt that this could be done - but I repeat my question to PH - just how far would we need to go to achieve this?

For one thing, as well as punishment, criminalisation requires detection. Serious attempts to wipe out cannabis would surely require extreme intrusions into personal privacy, such as drug testing, sniffer dogs at every corner, stop-and-search, and destructive search of the homes of those merely suspected of possession. As well as being intolerable, this would of course be very expensive (as is foregoing the tax revenue which might be gained by legalising trade in cannabis). the problem is that for all Hitchens's talk of wider social effects, impacts on family, and so on, cannabis possession and use is objectively speaking a very private business. There need be no victim to report it, no very easily detectable effects in the public space. Cannabis use is unobtrusive, and detecting it is accordingly intrusive.

It is worth mentioning that the present system, under which scarce police and court resources are not directed toward cannabis users as a matter of priority, mitigates some of these harms to a degree, at the expense of a good deal of arbitrariness and discretion on the part of the authorities - and unequal treatment is very likely to penalise the poor and the marginalised, indistinguishable as they are on inspection from those utterly alienated members of the socially excluded underclass whom many rank and file police openly regard as 'scum'. Those minorities for whom driving a BMW tends - still - to provoke suspicion rather than deference among the police will of course tend to find that they are disproportionately harried. Such functional harassment may sound trivial to those who don't experience it, but the daily drip-drip of humiliation and obstruction is very far from trivial.

(There is one possibility which seems interesting and arises from taking to its conclusion the idea of cannabis use as a private matter. It would be possible that non-commercial cultivation for personal use be entirely legalised, while trading in cannabis remained illegal. Private individuals could, on this model, purchase properly labelled and regulated cannabis seed and cultivation equipment, content testing kits, perhaps even lockable growing units analogous - though the parallel is overblown - to gun cabinets. This could have some advantages in addressing the concerns of those with whom I disagree, and thus enabling a consensus position, and might even have other advantages. Or it might be utterly unsustainable. This is so speculative and underdeveloped a position that I'll leave it hanging for now, possibly revisiting it later.)

Leaving aside the unsatisfactory status quo, I repeat, there should be a presumption against prohibiting any conduct, which can be overturned only given a good reason to do so. Hitchens seems to have misunderstood my earlier statement of this principle, responding I don’t think, as Mr Wilkinson implies, that we are naturally lawful creatures. I start from a willing acknowledgement that there will have to be laws. The point is, which laws?

In deciding if there is a good reason to prohibit, we can't ignore the impact of prohibition. If we are to look at harmful outcomes, we must look at them in the round, including the consequences of trying to deal with them. We must also weigh harms against benefits.

One point which I think is not really answered by Hitchens is that of paternalism. As an opponent of nannying, interfering government action, one would suppose that he should be opposed to people being prohibited from doing thing which need affect only themselves. One rather thin response is I don’t mind being called ‘paternalist’, as I think drug-takers are largely infantilised by their pitiable habit, and need a parental hand. I read this as saying that while paternalism is not in general an adequate basis for punitive measures, in this case it is, because of the childlike nature of cannabis takers. I'll not dwell on the merits of that argument.

The other tack is to bring in actual children - or at least adolescents - and argue as follows: their own cannabis use is a source of very significant harm, they are not capable, or not to be trusted, to decide for themselves, and that their gaining access to cannabis can only be prevented by prohibiting all possession of cannabis. The prohibition of cannabis to consenting adults is thus presented as a side-effect of protecting children, or more plausibly, adolescents.

We are now in the realms of a social cost-benefit analysis, with potential harms to children factored in and suitably weighted. If this is the right way to look at the issue of social harm - and I think it has to be - Hitchens's position amounts to a claim that the risk to teenagers is sufficiently large and grave to outweigh ill-effects of prohibition, including foregone benefits.

The enjoyment of cannabis use must feature in any consideration of costs and benefits, as must the freedom to choose whether to make use of this natural substance (it could after all be grown and consumed entirely in private and without affecting anyone else at all). It's all very well for Hitchens to disapprove of cannabis use - but his attempt to pick and choose between pleasures is not convincing As I've suggested, enjoyment of cannabis is certainly not limited to, nor even mainly constituted by, mere empty pleasure or euphoria - though in any case, it's a rather Spartan approach to suggest that a bit of pleasure counts for nothing at all. We will need some reason to think that the benefits of cannabis are of no value at all.

In his first response, Hitchens stated:

I believe there are people who enjoy mistreating animals. For all I know they say it enhances their appreciation of art, food , music and sex, and stimulates creativity - though I haven’t a clue how one would measure any of these things anyway. I couldn’t care less. Their pleasure in this activity is of no interest or consequence in any discussion of what the law should say about cruelty to animals.

And no, I am not comparing cannabis smoking to cruelty to animals, merely demonstrating that the point is irrelevant.

But of course the entire point is to compare (not necessarily equate) cannabis smoking to cruelty to animals. The reason why the fictitious benefits of animal cruelty are not regarded as relevant is that cruelty to animals is so bad, or an evil of such a kind, that it either hugely outweighs or 'trumps' the benefits that in Hitchens's thought experiment might be derived from it. But of course, cruelty to animals - in animal testing, meat production, even fox hunting and other blood sports, is regarded by some (if they are honest about what is involved) as capable of being justified by benefits - not necessarily very major ones - to humans. Of course, one may very well disagree with that view - or maybe the idea here is that sadistic pleasure in particular is the evil which trumps any benefits. But in either case, exactly what the corresponding evil is in the case of cannabis remains to be seen. The position that taking cannabis is evil in itself and cannot be tolerated will be dealt with separately.

This seems as good a point as any to address two issues which arise from posts made by Hitchens which, while not addressed to me as part of this exchange, have been posted since it began.

Medical Marijuana

I had agreed that this issue was outside the remit of this debate, since licensing cannabis as a medicine could be done independently of policy on non-medical use. However, Hitchens has made some comments in the post Denying Reality. The Red Herring of ‘Medical Cannabis’ and the Long Goodbye of Mr ‘F’ which threaten to unredden or de-herringify the issue:

No serious drug could be administered in the forms in which cannabis is taken by those who use it for pleasure. There are, on both sides of the Atlantic, drugs made from THC (but which do not provide a high) They are rarely prescribed because they simply aren't very effective. (Nabilone is the main one in Britain).

This is interesting: the synthetic version of THC (not made from THC) - which supposedly lacks the relatively benign side-effect of a THC high - is, apparently, ineffective, but the effective form of the drug could never be licensed. If that is the case, then the only way in which people can get the undoubted medical benefits of THC is by self-administering the substance, as is done with various other herbal remedies that are available without prescription.

In that case, the medical benefits of cannabis are no longer irrelevant to the legalisation debate, but provide a very important - overriding, one might think - positive benefit of legalisation.

I am though only going by Hitchens's remarks, which do not consider an alternative explanation for cannabis/THC not being licensed: the pharmaceutical industry can't patent it, and rightly see it as competing with other lucrative products, which might also explain why Hitchens has the impression that Nabilone has no 'high' (it does have advertised side-effects which seem remarkably similar to a high, as seen by medical science) - the absence of a high is the USP (unique selling point) of synthetic or semi-synthetic - patentable - chemicals. (I'm not quite sure of this point, since I understand there has at least been some attempt to patent THC. I've not had time to check this as yet.)

The point that someone from NORML once suggested that publicising medical properties of cannabis could work to improve the general image of the substance (which has after all been under sustained and unscrupulous attack for many decades) doesn't seem to me to be of much interest. Now if a trusted source of presumptively neutral information, such as a scientist involved in research on the subject were to make it clear that he was in the business of producing propaganda, that would be a different matter. An advocate acknowledging, in a rather naive way, the rhetorical aspects of the debate and the importance of image, not quite so important.

Reefer Rage

Hitchens has also provided a list of news stories (High and Violent) which purport to show a new - rather desperate - suggestion for a harmful effect of taking cannabis - that it has a more than negligible chance of triggering a violent attack.

He subsequently follows up with: The Conformist Bigots of the Cannabis Lobby:

I think it very funny that an unadorned recitation ('High and Violent', posted on Thursday afternoon) of a few factual stories from several newspapers over the last few years, the fruit (as clearly stated above) of a brief search, making no wider claims than that the image of cannabis as an invariably peaceful drug is questionable, should have aroused the excited storm of spittle from the drug lobby which we see here.

The brevity of the search is of course irrelevant - searching the internet is a fast business. But such a search is cherrypicking anecdotes from among cherrypicked anecdotes. A few such accounts give no indication of prevalence - but the fact that the stories are considered newsworthy gives some indication. Of course, a single or very small number of confirmed instances could prove that a violent reaction to cannabis is possible - but for that one story would do (in fact the form of most of the news stories is 'violent person - either insane or under the influence of alcohol or major drugs - subsequently found to have taken cannabis'. This is not exactly scientific, is it. And even if all of these examples were actually shown to be of cannabis-induced murder, the incidence would be vanishingly small compared to the death and destruction caused by cooking at home, for example. But like terrorism scares, scares about this kind of incident have a much firmer grip on the public mind and produce a hugely disproportionate response.

I wonder what other things one could find to have coincided with nastiness ten times in as many years? I wonder what the papers would be like if instances of those high on cannabis helping old ladies across the road were considered news? And I wonder if driving under the influence - which would of course remain illegal - should really be classified as 'violence'?

I don't think this line of argument merits further consideration.

Social cost-benefit calculation

Hitchens's strongest remaining consequence-based argument for comprehensive prohibition seems, as I suggest, to be harm to young people. I've already provided my reasons for regarding the mental health risks as highly exaggerated if accurate at all, and any risk there may be should certainly be discounted heavily since the legalisation case allows for criminal penalties for supplying such psychoactive substances to minors (I wonder whether caffeine, a powerful stimulant for all that it is largely non-euphoriant, should be subject to this kind of regulation).

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/think-it-possible-that-ye-may-be-mistaken.html
I might add Allan Bloom's point in 'The Closing of the American Mind', to some extent backed up by Tim Lott in 'The Scent of Dried Roses', that those who have achieved exaltation through drugs in early life are left afterwards with an emptiness, a flatness, an absence of the superlative, which stays with them all their lives. I have a strong suspicion that the human body has only a limited capacity to deliver the sensation of joy, and that the use of drugs eventually exhausts it, with sad consequences for the individual...there are good rational and material justifications for restraining unwise and impulsive young people from consuming chemicals which might - unexpectedly and irreversibly - drain all the colour out of their later lives.

I don't consider this a clear enough case of harm to carry much weight. Even if it is broadly accurate in the sense that intense experiences may make subsequent ones seem less intense by comparison, thisapplies to anything, not just drugs. I don't accept the 'limited supply of joy' hypothesis at all.

But what of other harms that might be associated with cannabis use among teenagers? Habitual cannabis use during the school day, is certainly going to interfere with learning, for example. And there may be other harms from taking cannabis at a young age. How widespread heavy cannabis use under the age of, say, 16 actually is, I don't know, but as Hitchens would no doubt - plausibly - point out, it may be expected to affect the poorest and most disadvantaged in society much more than others. I think that we would expect playground cannabis-smoking to be a feature of more deprived areas rather than affluent and comfortable ones. Again, my approach to this is to ask why that should be.

I return to an issue which I've raised in a different connection - the idea of cannabis as a kind of viral infection, an exogenous influence, an uncaused cause. This is wrong. Even teenagers are not helpless in the face of the evil weed, and there are more basic determinants of heavy cannabis use - rebellion, despair, alienation, boredom, which need to be addressed directly and which cannabis use adds only to a relatively minor extent. When Marx spoke of the opium of the people, he was referring to the painkilling, not euphoriant, properties of opium. In any case, I still doubt the ability of any likely prohibition regime - and certainly the current regime - to do a better job of keeping cannabis away from the under-age than legalisation with strict penalties on supply to minors would do.

Hitchens claims that those advocating legalisation - or opposing increased and more consistently enforced penalties - are greasily selfish dope-smokers who believe that they are not vulnerable to reefer madness, yet are willing to put others at risk of it. (I know for a fact that some legalisation advocates don't take cannabis themselves, but no doubt most campaigners do use cannabis at least sometimes. If they didn't, a different personal attack could be mounted, accusing them of advocating something they are not 'willing' to take themselves.)

I've made my opinion of the reefer madness claim pretty clear already, so I think this argument fails basic factual checks. But since we are operating at this level of rhetoric, I would point out that - like most authoritarian views - the prohibitionist outlook is also 'selfish': the non-cannabis using prohibitionist (surely a majority of prohibitionists are not users) has little to fear - fit-ups and mistakes excluded - from punitive measures for cannabis possession, while being eager that others should face them. No doubt the prohibitionist considers that punitive measures are deserved by the 'giggling', irresponsible dope-smoker, but if so, some arguments need to be provided that cannabis use is wrong - to the extent of being punishable by law without regard to the consequences for the convicted person. I will deal with that issue in the following, final, post.

On the topic of hypocrisy and self-serving arguments, the issue of alcohol is worth revisiting. Ronald Reagan in one of his drug-war speeches exemplified this. Recognising that his generation had recourse to large doses of gin ('Martinis') as a socially acceptable 'crutch', he raised the putative complaint from the younger generation that cannabis was simply their equivalent. His answer - that he would prefer it if this generation didn't 'need' any 'crutch' at all. That's easy for him to say - before approximately 6.15pm, at least.

Leaving aside the characterisation of either gin or cannabis as a 'crutch', the hypocrisy argument is not purely a negative point-scoring exercise. For one thing, the social effect of such hypocrisy is corrosive, and means that the consent of a substantial proportion of the governed will be withheld, making the law against the almost indetectable crime of cannabis possession almost impossible to enforce. For another, it tends to suggest that those applying a double standard do not in fact believe their own arguments, but rely instead on prejudice, which of course tends to undermine their persuasiveness a touch.

The most important consequence of the double standard, though, is this: if cannabis is to be banned, then so is alcohol. But alcohol is not to be banned - as all involved in the debate clearly in fact agree. The inescapable conclusion is that cannabis is not to be banned either.

I've already, like Reagan, suggested that cannabis can supplant alcohol as a means of altering consciousness. Reagan's reply is 'do as I say, not as I do'. Hitchens does not take that approach:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/think-it-possible-that-ye-may-be-mistaken.html
Sometimes we may have to accept it as a compromise while we try to remove a poison from our culture, or at least greatly restrict it. But that is a defeat, and there is no need to acknowledge defeat with cannabis. It is nothing like so deep in our culture as cars, alcohol or tobacco.

For further clarification I'll consult an older post - though I recognise that Hitchens may not still hold precisely the same views, since he is, to his credit, willing and able to change his mind:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/09/a-letter-from-merseyside-and-a-few-notes.html:
...
As I have many times said, I would willingly give up the small amount of alcohol which I drink, if I believed that by doing so I could help protect others, less able to exercise self-control, from its many wicked effects. I just don't happen to think that my sacrifice would achieve anything of the kind, and so prefer to proceed along the lines of restricted sales, tough licensing laws and the religious re-education of the people (as took place both in Protestant England and Roman Catholic Ireland in the 19th century) which would lead necessarily to greater temperance.

I have every reason to think that Hitchens means what he says here - but few others do. And even Hitchens is quick to conclude from this 'cultural embedding' that the only alternative is a system of regulation basically the same as the current one (or the very similar one which was in place before all-day licensing was introduced a few years ago), along with education.

Unlike cannabis, which is not legal and is not part of our culture, alcohol has been legal in this country for many centuries, many people use it in moderation, and it is perfectly possible to consume it without stupefying yourself.

I'm assume Hitchens has some specific point in mind here as to the precise significance of long-standing legality, but rather than provide my own elaboration of what that might be, I'll ask him to clarify, and simply add that of course that something is already legal or illegal cannot in itself provide a justification for its continuing to be.

It is of course also possible to smoke cannabis without stupefying yourself, as I pointed out in the opening post of the debate. The degree of intoxication experienced from consuming cannabis, just as much as from taking alcohol (and let's not pretend that the intoxicating effect of a single alcoholic drink is either non-existent nor a large part of the motivation for drinking the stuff) is controlled by dose, which is controlled by the person taking it. And most people who smoke cannabis do so in relatively small doses. Of course under legalisation and regulation, cannabis dosage could be controlled and sensible doses would be standardised. Smoking extra-strong joints might well come to be as frowned upon as drinking Special Brew or what's known in Glasgow as electric soup.

The effects of cannabis, I may as well point out, are not simply to stupefy, any more than they are to provide pure pleasure (opiates are perhaps the closest common drug to doing that). Cannabis has complex and often subtle effects. The individual effects and pharmacodynamics of the active constituents present in various proportions in cannabis and its smoke are not very well understood, but typically lower doses of cannabis tend to provide the experience if anything of being more sensitive to many things, not less so, and to stimulate rather than suppress thought.

Cultural embedding might include established traditions for sensible use - though the British have never been renowned for great temperance in the use of alcohol, perhaps tending to rely on the low alcohol content of ale to regulate use where our Mediterranean cousins have been used to wine, or perhaps requiring more in the way of intoxication to see them through the cold months. In any case, there is clearly a distinct lack of moderation in its use among a sizable proportion of the population. And Hitchens acknowledges that education and training is required in sensible use of alcohol. But even if such education takes effect, this provides a reason why prohibition may not be required. Cultural embedding is supposed to be a reason why prohibition is unworkable.

I don't think an appeal to socialisation and pub culture is necessarily going to make all the difference, either. Pub culture has been substantially damaged by banning smoking, especially in premises which for one reason or another are unable to provide surreal 'virtual saloons' complete with canopy, sofas and extremely wasteful mushroom heaters. It's further been transformed in many cases by an increased emphasis on food, and of course city-centre standing-room-only megapubs are an innovation.

I suppose the idea, stripped of the impressive resonance of the term 'cultural embedding', is a root just that if alcohol were to be banned tomorrow, there would quite possibly be riots and certainly a huge backlash. But this does not rule out a more gradual approach, such as Hitchens perceives the progressive marginalisation of tobacco to be - though he does not appear to suggest that tobacco will eventually be outlawed altogether. A phased approach could also be taken to legalisation: in general, problems of transition are surmountable given a little imagination and forethought.

As Hitchens says:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/prohibition-blues.html
As for ‘following rather than leading public attitudes’, I do not know how old Mr Wilkinson is, but my conscious life has more or less spanned the period in which cigarette smoking has moved from being normal and accepted to pariah status - and the period during which drunken driving was severely discouraged by moral pressure and law (law being far more effective). In both cases, the authorities spent a great deal of time and money changing attitudes. Plenty of people refused to accept that it was wrong to drink and drive, for many years after it was obviously so. It was many years before Richard Doll’s first report and a general acceptance in society that smoking was likely to lead to serious health dangers. In both cases the government had to ‘lead’ public opinion, not follow it.

And this is consistent with the comments of mine to which it was a response: my point was that criminalisation has to follow rather than lead public attitudes - how those attitudes are shaped is another matter. the same does not apply to legalisation. the public do not have to be convinced that something is a great idea for restrictions on it to be lifted - of course they should probably not be under the true or false impression that the lifting of restriction will impose a significant cost or burden on them, and in the case of cannabis they need not.

But perhaps there is something about alcohol that makes it harder to convince people to give it up than nicotine? I don't think we have far to look for what that might be: a substantial mind-altering effect. It may well be that people have - and will always have - a desire or felt need to alter their state of consciousness in one way or another, and indeed to do so by the use of intoxicants. Perhaps this basic human motive could be satisfied by training in meditative and similar techniques - though I'd like to think that Hitchens would find this more creepy - certainly if it were a state-run programme - than recourse to intoxicants, which at least have some element of spontaneity and sociability.

I can't go into this issue in much more detail at this stage. In lieu of further elaboration (and in default of having actually researched it in any detail at this point) I'd offer this paper as some kind of reference point: Bowins, 'Psychological defense mechanisms: A new perspective'.

If this approach is correct - and without pretending that my unsubstantiated opinion is persuasive, I'd say it certainly seems plausible - then the debate takes on rather a different complexion - and we may find that all we have is a choice between different intoxicants. I've already suggested that cannabis and alcohol are in large part competitors for peoples' leisure time. To this we may add the other major street drugs - and of course prescribed pharmaceuticals, which might thus be revealed as being in competition with cannabis not only for the market in those effects standardly attributed to 'medical marijuana', but also the lucrative market in antidepressants and other psychoactive medications widely prescribed, in particular by GPs on the basis of a 15-minute consultation and a stockpile of subliminal logos which they see very deliberately emblazoned over the freebie notepads, pen and sundry items which they are equally deliberately showered with by the drug companies.

Which leads tolerably neatly to the last (I have probably missed some) of the general, broadly consequentialist, considerations Hitchens presents as militating against legalisation, and in favour of heavier penalisation, of cannabis: the Huxley gambit.

This is of course not the Aldous Huxley of the Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, but the Aldous Huxley of Brave New World:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/depraved-new-world.html
a drugged society is likely to be a complacent society and a softly totalitarian one, as predicted in ‘Brave New World’. Huxley’s mindless, history-less, dissent-free, hideously calm dystopia...is also the logical consequence of permitting self-stupefaction as a general act.

This is pretty heavily hyperbolic: permitting 'self-stupefaction' does not have as a logical - nor even inevitable - consequence anything like 'Brave New World'. But there is a point here - doesn't recourse to recreational drugs such as alcohol, chocolate and cannabis tend to make people less dissatisfied, less angry, less likely to rise up in revolt? Probably.

We are more passive, less free, more subservient. more conformist and less critical than we used to be.

I'm not sure when this golden age of bold individualistic iconoclasm is supposed to have happened, but I 'm happy to agree that we could do with a lot less conformity and a good deal more criticality.

Certainly the image of the 70s Marxist, quoting Althusser while concentrating his (for it is a he) energies on bed-hopping and quaffing red wine has some resonance. But is there any reason to suppose that cannabis use is more distracting, more soothing and placatory than any other activity capable of filling the secondary role in the 'bread and circuses' schema?

Not really. It is not true that cannabis makes people generally lazy and feckless. This is certainly something that may happen while stoned - just as with several pints on a Sunday afternoon. There may be some confusion caused by the fact that the only very visible dope-smokers tend to be those who are, well, visibly doped. And of course the lazy and feckless may well fill their lazy and feckless hours with an activity like smoking weed, or drinking booze.

But those who don't smoke large quantities - and possibly, those who smoke strains with low cannabidiol content, such as the demon skunk - aren't sedated. And the effect of cannabis at moderate dosage is to make one more sensitive to many things. On this regard, the operation of cannabis is almost exactly opposite to that of alcohol, which is a central nervous system depressant and turns people into increasingly crass, insensitive idiots. The 'paranoia' that sometimes affects some people on cannabis is a matter of over-sensitivity to others, of excessive self-consciousness, shyness, suspiciousness. This is a good thing. There has tended to be a general shortage of suspiciousness, of politicians, of business interests, of the permanent state, and of just about every other powerful interest.

The mass media, the ridiculous barrage of quietist propaganda churned out by the likes of David Aaronovitch, are the real source of a mindless, history-less, dissent-free society - but rather than a hideously calm dystopia, this is a mundane reality. Received opinion, the opinion of the privileged is that everything is going perfectly well thank you very much and only misfits think anything seriously corrupt or vicious is afoot. (This irrational insistence seems impervious to the constant stream of evidence that tells us otherwise.)

This is relevant in the context of my remarks two posts back, regarding the harms that can come from cannabis. There I mentioned that some transient effects of cannabis can be classified under the heading 'psychotic symptoms'. Note that checklists of psychotic symptoms tend to include such items as 'suspicion of others' and 'having ideas that others do not share'.

I am happy to own up to those two, with suitable qualifications, for which unfortunately there is no space on computerised diagnostic checklists.

If cannabis has a slight tendency to prompt original thought and to overcome complacent and misplaced trust, the influence of one of its opponents - big pharma - tends to work in the other direction, by way of drug prescriptions for low-level psychiatric diagnoses.

Psychiatry is important and useful. Alzheimer's disease, senile dementia, chronic schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other major well-defined conditions, have devastating effects on many people and on their families. But other psychiatric diagnoses are less clear-cut, and have a nasty tendency to border on social engineering. One need not speculate about the extent to which psychiatrists, or perhaps more germanely, GPs making psychiatric diagnoses and prescriptions, share the complacent attitude described above and treat dissenting opinion accordingly. That is not the point: the very logic of individual psychiatric treatment is that society at large is a given, and the individual's well-being is a matter of adapting - conforming - adequately comfortably to that Leviathan.

An eminently sane unhappiness and alienation from society can easily become a 'symptom' (that is to say in this context, one of a group of items on a scored checklist) of some invented 'dysphoria' or other. When failure to fit in to society, a felt malaise, an unwelcome inability to adjust to social conditions, rather than any more objectively ascertainable criterion of mental illness is used, the aim of making people 'well-adjusted' rapidly converges with that of creating docile and compliant citizens.

But isn't this 'whataboutery'? Why point the finger at the quietist media and the potential problems of too-easy diagnoses of neurosis? Because I think not only that any influence of cannabis pales into insignificance by comparison with them, and with alcohol and vacuous entertainment on the telly, but also that if anything, cannabis tends to cut against these influences, by stimulating unconventional thought, indeed any thought, and - if my line of argument thus far is sound - by displacing antidepressants and so on as a source of consciousness-alteration.

(By the way, surely the career-minded networkers of New Labour are very much of the literal 'don't inhale' persuasion, while only a proper Charlie would suggest that the Cameroons tend to be partial to the weed?)

I don't necessarily claim that the effects I rather tentatively suggest are very strong. Even if those who use cannabis tend if anything, to be more likely to adopt positions that are in opposition to authority, this association, if real, may of course be an artefact of the current prohibition regime - unconventionality might explain a willingness to take illegal substances, or rebelliousness night be stoked by finding one's choice of drugs criminalised. I would certainly, in any case, maintain that cannabis is not the Soma Hitchens thinks it is.

And in the end, all this has little relevance to the legalisation debate. The idea of social engineering to ensure freedom has an oxymoronic quality about it. Increasing liberty does not mean forcing people to act in a way which will maximise their future tendency to exercise liberty in a certain way. Freedom includes the freedom to do nothing, and to do things which some might consider make one less free. Overriding freedom of action for the sake of a claimed greater future freedom may perhaps be justified - depending on how absolutist one wants to be about simple freedom of action - but it had better be well-justified. Hitchens does not provide a suitably strong justification. In other words, if cannabis use means 'soft totalitarianism', still better that than the alternative - the hard totalitarianism of unrelenting prohibition.

There is another way in which the banning of drugs in general, and of the most prevalent of them, cannabis, is relevant to freedom, which relates to the points made some yards further up this post, concerning drug enforcement efforts inevitable intrusion into the private realm. The War on Drugs, like the rest of the unbroken lineage of phoney 'wars' that includes the earlier Cold War and the current favourite, the War on Terror, has performed two major functions - overseas, to provide cover for military 'interventions', and on the domestic front, to justify ever greater incursions into civil liberties. If one cares about liberty, one had better think very carefully about endorsing drug prohibition.

Having dealt at some length with policy matters, I'll defer discussion of more purely moral issues to a separate post, to follow shortly.

CANNABIS CANCER CURE? - More on scientific evidence

2011-07-17T16:47:00.010+01:00

As promised, here is a detailed look at some prominent and relatively recent studies. I've restricted myself to two such studies, both of which have Murray's fingerprints on them. I haven't gone further because this kind of analysis is relatively time-consuming and I want to lay the issue to rest as quickly as is possible consistently with answering Hitchens's challenge to explain my views on harm.

While I've tried to avoid selecting straw men for this analysis, I haven't been terribly rigorous in my selection criteria - the selection is in any case limited by the need to choose studies which are freely available to, thus checkable by, the public. To address this potential source of actual or perceived bias, I will make this commitment: should Hitchens care to propose, in comments to this post, any other paper which he considers invulnerable to my objections, or should any author of a paper on the topic propose theirs, I will respond with a post dedicated to analysing that paper.

The two papers represent the two specific sources of error which I discern in this area of research: first, the existence of a common predisposition, in the sense outlined previously, that influences both cannabis use and the emergence of schizophrenia; and second, the confusion of transient cannabis-related phenomena with evidence of schizophrenia.

Before proceeding, I'll mention two other matters.

First, a merely illustrative example of the context in which this research is proceeding. A review paper published in the Lancet, Moore et al., Cannabis use and risk of psychotic or affective mental health outcomes: a systematic review, states that

There is now sufficient evidence to warn young people that using cannabis could increase their risk of developing a psychotic illness later in life.

This is of some interest for two reasons: first, the statement is couched in terms which suggest that a long-sought objective of gaining 'sufficient evidence' has been reached. Second and perhaps more importantly, the standard of evidence reached is low. The best that can be said is that it is sufficient to warn young people that using cannabis could increase their risk. If doctors are to warn of everything that 'could increase risk', they are going to be spending a lot of time issuing warnings.

Cannabis and cancer

Second, in my previous post I did my best to answer Hitchens by honestly laying out the strongest case against cannabis that I consider justified. I said I've already mentioned that smoking cannabis carries a risk of cancer. It hardly need be added that I would assume it imposes the other major risks associated with smoking. In any case, in Europe cannabis is most commonly smoked mixed with tobacco

These remarks were cursory, since my primary concern was not with any cancer risk (as indicated by the quote I supplied from Hitchens: As for the risk of cancer, while it undoubtedly exists, it is not my principal concern).

Since reading my previous post, Hitchens has shown some early signs of shifting his emphasis - as is his unquestioned prerogative - from mental health to smoking-related dangers. In a recent comment he states: As for cannabis being a poison, it is plainly injurious to its users in many ways, especially when smoked ( as Mr Wilkinson concedes in his latest posting).

So to nip this in, so to speak, the bud, I'll slightly expand and clarify my remarks on cancer and cannabis. Any smoking almost certainly imposes - causes - an increased risk of cancer. Many things contain carcinogens (I seem to remember reading that bracken is among them). Smoke and other products of burning organic matter are among these: smoked meats and burned toast are believed to increase cancer risk, for example. So the likelihood is that cannabis smoke does the same. However, Cancer Research UK make it clear that the specific risks of cannabis smoke are not understood and are probably lower than those of tobacco.
Ben Goldacre, in his Bad Science column, points out that science correspondents - and indeed general reporters - seem to have averted their magpie eyes from a particularly bold and sensational claim for the low incidence of harm from cannabis smoking. I would approach this claim with caution, which is why I opted not to mention it in my previous post. But the report is out there, and while I'm going beyond a quick statement of my own best guess, I should mention it:

For textbook bad science we’d also want to see the media distorting research: overstating the stuff it likes, and ignoring stuff it doesn’t, especially negative findings. We used to read a lot about cannabis and lung cancer in the papers. The largest ever study of whether cannabis causes lung cancer reported its findings recently, to total UK media silence. Lifelong cannabis users, who had smoked more than 22,000 joints, showed no greater risk of cancer than people who had never smoked cannabis.

While no journalist has written a single word on that study, the Times did manage to make a front page story headed "Cocaine floods the playground: use of the addictive drug by children doubles in a year," out of their misinterpretation of a government report that showed nothing of the sort.

All this is of course about smoking. Cannabis, unlike tobacco (which, for example, causes mouth cancer when chewed) does not appear to be carcinogenic when it is not burned.

The tobacco-based component of the cancer risk associated with smoking is of course avoidable. If, as appears likely, the risks from cannabis smoking are in fact less than those of tobacco, this should be made public, and conditional advice offered: if you are going to take cannabis, don't smoke it; if you do choose to smoke it, don't add tobacco. Of course this presupposes well-informed and honest advice uncorrupted by the noble aim of churning out one-sided propaganda and squeamishly avoiding anything that might be seen as 'encouraging' or 'promoting' cannabis use.

Note also that if cannabis were legalised, vaporiser technology would no doubt be improved. Furthermore, in the longer term, other smokeless delivery mechanisms for THC might well be developed.

Oh yes - one more thing. The cancer research site (final paragraph) also mentions the sensational news that the active constituents of cannabis have been found to kill cancer cells. Unlike most initial findings about possible cancer cures and antagonists, this does not seem to have been widely reported in the press. The bad news is that smoking draw is not thought to increase house prices, though since I've mentioned the possibility, it would be irresponsible not to speculate.

Back to the analysis of Reefer Madness studies:

Common predisposition

The past few decades' hunt for a causal relationship leading from cannabis use to schizophrenia was prompted by some findings from a cohort study of Swedish conscripts. This, in the classic pattern, was an exciting result which has been followed by a 'decline effect'. I will focus on a follow-up study which purports to address the obvious issues with the initial finding.

Zammit et al., 'Self reported cannabis use as a risk factor for schizophrenia in Swedish conscripts of 1969: historical cohort study'

This paper seems to avoid the problem of transient cannabis-related effects:

It is unlikely that cases diagnosed as schizophrenia in this cohort were either toxic psychoses induced by cannabis (or amphetamine) or acute, transient drug induced psychoses, given the restrictive tradition in Sweden regarding the diagnosis of schizophrenia.17 Satisfactory validity of schizophrenia diagnoses in a small sample from this cohort has been observed,8 and ICD-8 diagnoses from the register have shown high specificity with criteria for schizophrenia as defined in DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third edition).

However, I shall argue that the paper not only suffers from a failure adequately to control for 'common predisposition', but exhibits positive signs of being compromised by that failure. Along the way, I'll point out some other problems which I consider typical of this research programme, and which in some cases tend to indicate the influence of a certain degree of confirmation bias.

These findings, say the authors, are in keeping with accumulating evidence that cannabis has detrimental effects on mental health in some people

The use of the expression 'In keeping with' may be somewhat revealing. It suggests that conforming to that conclusion is seen as tending to validate the findings presented - the analysis has succeeded! This is related to the phenomenon of publication bias discussed before - in the 'honeymoon' period, the only interesting finding is one that appears to support the promising new hypothesis. Given that an ongoing longitudinal study permits re-analyses of what is for the most part the same previously analysed data, one must hope that no prejudice has been allowed to influence the choice of refinements to the analysis.

So, what did this study (one of many derived from the same data set), find? Let's look first at the summary (which is all that most people who cite the paper will probably read):

Results: Cannabis was associated with an increased risk of developing schizophrenia in a dose dependent fashion both for subjects who had ever used cannabis (adjusted odds ratio for linear trend of increasing frequency 1.2, 95% confidence interval 1.1 to 1.4, P<0.001), and for subjects who had used only cannabis and no other drugs (adjusted odds ratio for linear trend 1.3, 1.1 to 1.5, P<0.015). The adjusted odds ratio for using cannabis >50 times was 6.7 (2.1 to 21.7) in the cannabis only group. Similar results were obtained when analysis was restricted to subjects developing schizophrenia after five years after conscription, to exclude prodromal cases.

These result mentions dose dependence: this is regarded as a key concept in assessing causality (though not by any means either necessary or sufficient to establish it) in contexts such as this. The 'adjusted odds ratio for linear dependence' is meant to be a summary measure of the differences in odds between members of any one usage category and those of the one immediately above it.

The higher figure for this linear relationship between 'dose' and frequency of schizophrenia - 1.3 - comes from the subset of data that relates to those who had not reported taking common illegal drugs other than cannabis. The idea of separating out this data is not made entirely explicit - but would seem to be aimed at eliminating any confounding by use of other drugs such as methamphetamine. If that is the case, then such a decision ought to be committed to before running analysis. Instead, the approach seems to have been: analyse both sets of data , take a sneaky peek, and only then decide which one to draw attention to. Such an approach would utterly undermine the evidential validity of any findings. The figure of 6.7 has been cherry-picked on this basis, the corresponding figure for all drugs (3.1) not being reported.

Anyway, let's take a look at the figures from which this linear relationship is derived, using odds ratios for each usage category as adjusted for some potentially confounding factors.

Cannabis only

 Cannabis use  odds ratio

 None               1.0

 Once            -[*]

 2-4 times:    1.9

 5-10 times    1.7

 11-50 times   0.8

 >50 times       6.7

[*no instances of schizophrenia - dividing by zero means the sums won't work, but intuitively the probability would, if anything, come out as zero]

I don't think anyone is going to suggest that this is a series from which one would expect to derive a finding of a positive linear relationship indicating dose-dependence. The central portion of the series suggests a flat or gently declining relationship, assuming - charitably - that the '11-50' figure is a fluke, as the confidence interval (0.1 - 6.9, reflecting the fact that the result derives from a single instance of schizophrenia) might suggest. However, the cardinal rule of statistical evidence - as opposed to exploratory analysis, which should be clearly labelled as such - is that you don't second-guess the results of the predetermined analysis, so if the authors have followed this basic methodological precept, one must accept this result as one finds it, simply noting that the 95% confidence interval covers the range from 1.0 to 1.5.

(As with most of these studies, I wouldn't have started from here. Distinguishing between 'once, '2-4 times' and '5-10 times' seems to impose at least one more distinction than any real differences could justify.)

The one figure which (or rather the data underlying which) is clearly responsible for the finding of a positive linear relationship is the last one - 6.7. Indeed, as we've seen, this figure is reported on its own, so impressive is it. Since the authors of the paper seem happy to give this figure special attention rather than sticking to (what one hopes was) the predetermined plan of calculating a linear relationship, I'll feel free to take an exploratory rather than evidentiary approach.

As we've seen, this is more than twice the corresponding figure for those who had taken other 'street' drugs. But the point of excluding poly-drug-users was to remove a source of confounding - that is, use of other drugs is expected to be associated with increased statistical risk:

The association between cannabis and schizophrenia persisted even after adjusting for use of alcohol, cigarettes, and other drugs, all of which are likely to be indicative of risk taking behaviour. This implies that a shared risk factor (be it biological, genetic, or through personality traits) for developing schizophrenia and for using psychoactive substances does not adequately explain the association observed.

Yet the finding is that risk - for the heaviest use category - is much lower in the 'any drugs' group.

What could account for this? It seems vanishingly unlikely that taking other drugs would directly halve the risk. So, clinging as we must to the idea that the figures are meaningful at all, we can only conclude that there is something else about those who take only cannabis that increases their risk level. It's not - so far as the data can tell us - that they take more cannabis.

The authors do not mention this point, despite drawing special attention to the result - a result which as we've seen, Murray subsequently touted in the press. Why not? Surely some comment is called for in the course of this - exploratory and speculative - discussion of a single figure.

One important possibility is that the behaviour pattern of using cannabis relatively heavily without trying any other drugs is associated with personality traits or other psychological factors which are precursor or prodromal forerunners of schizophrenia, or otherwise associated with it. In other words the data suggests that the common predisposition hypothesis would be worth investigating.

The authors recognise that common predisposition is an important possibility which needs to be addressed. They do not join me in speculating that this specific pattern of use might be especially relevant, nor that further investigation would be in order - common predisposition, for a true believer like Murray, is a possibility to be eliminated, not entertained.

So in an attempt to eliminate common predisposition as a factor, the authors re-run the analysis deleting all those subjects diagnosed with schizophrenia within five years of the initial survey in which drug use was assessed.

But this branch of the analysis did not exclude subjects who had used drugs other than cannabis. One wonders why this should be, since the point of that exclusion was supposed to be to control for the confounding effects of such poly-drug use. The appearance is of sleight of hand. Open the left hand - nothing in here. A bit of fumbling behind the back, and - nothing in the right hand either!

But perhaps the authors forgot to try this analysis on 'cannabis only' data. I must point out for the benefit of suspicious observers that there is no evidence to suggest that they did try it, but gave in to the ever-present temptation to discard inconvenient - too low, or implausibly high - results as 'anomalous' or 'implausible'. I would caution against even suggesting that this may have happened, since not only would that invalidate these results, but it would tend to cast a long shadow of impropriety over all the authors' work in this area.

In any case, the authors say Similar results were obtained when analysis was restricted to subjects developing schizophrenia after five years after conscription, to exclude prodromal cases ('prodromal cases' here corresponding to what I refer to as common predisposition).

So how similar were those results? Here are the results in which the dependent variable (schizophrenia diagnosis) is not stratified according to time of diagnosis (remember, this is data that includes those who had taken other drugs):

Diagnosis at any time:

Cannabis use    odds ratio

Once            0.6

2-4 times       0.9

5-10 times      1.4

11-50 times     2.2

>50 times       3.1

 Linear trend for frequency of use: 1.2

And here are the results from which subjects diagnosed within five years are excluded

Diagnosis after 5 years:

Cannabis use    odds ratio

Once             0.8

2-4 times       0.9

5-10 times      1

11-50 times     2.1

>50 times       2.5

Linear trend for frequency of use: 1.2

This time, a sanity check by inspection of the adjusted figures appears to confirm - rather than flatly contradict - the proposed linear relationship, at least. Notice though that according to these odds ratios, taking cannabis up to four times actually appears to be associated with a reduction in chances of being diagnosed with schizophrenia. But of course no-one is going to suggest that a low level of cannabis use might protect one from schizophrenia!

But note too that notwithstanding the authors' description of the findings as 'similar', the odds ratio is lower in the second data set. Where has that effect size gone? Well, obviously it's lurking in the data that was excluded. Although they choose not to draw too much attention to it in their executive summary, the authors also ran the analysis for data that excludes those diagnosed after five years. That is, they looked directly at those cases diagnosed within five years, in which - and this is the whole point of this part of the analysis - common disposition is considered to be a potential factor. Let's have a look at that data.

Diagnosis within 5 years:

Cannabis use  odds ratio

Once           -

2-4 times     1

5-10 times    2.6

11-50 times   2.8

>50 times     4.7

Linear trend for frequency of use: 1.3 

We can see that the effect sizes are indeed substantially higher than the data for diagnosis at any time. This is a group which the authors themselves chose to sequester as potentially subject to confounding or reverse causation arising from a 'common predisposition' effect. They give the clear impression that this stratification of the data has no significant effect (comparable results were 'similar' despite it). And yet this is not the case. There appears to be a substantial difference here, which confirms that the main analysis and thus the results reported, does not adequately control for common predisposition.

The authors of course must have noticed this, and without directly acknowledging that an explanation for the result is required, they quietly provide one anyway: [UPDATE 19 JUL 2011 10:38: this is inaccurate - they do provide a different explanation, though it has its own problems. A section will be inserted here shortly, explaining the slightly intricate complications involved. The substance of the following criticism still applies.]

[UPDATE 22 JUL 2011:

At least it seems to confirm this, if we accept that the whole point of this analysis is to check that common predisposition has been eliminated as a factor. If this is a test which can eliminate but not establish the presence of this source of error, it seems a handy kind of test.

Certainly the authors explain this finding away:

The association between use of cannabis and schizophrenia was stronger in subjects who were first admitted within five years of conscription. One explanation is that subjects with a prodrome of schizophrenia at conscription may have increased their cannabis use, perhaps as a means of self medication. But all subjects were screened at conscription, and we adjusted for other psychiatric problems recorded at that time. The relation with cannabis use was also observed in the later onset group, admitted more than five years after conscription. It seems more likely that the reduced association in the group with later onset is due to misclassification, as the number of people who discontinued cannabis use accumulated over time.

The authors mention common predisposition as just 'one explanation' despite the fact that testing for that phenomenon was the whole point of the exercise. They then provide reasons for disregarding the possibility: but if those reasons were good enough, there would have been no point in performing the exercise of stratifying by time of diagnosis. The actual explanation offered for the difference in the figures would actually be quite a convincing one - except that no attempt is made to quantify the effect (discontinuation of cannabis use) suggested, so it is impossible to determine how large the difference would have to be before the authors would accept that their data had failed the test - a test they specifically introduce - for robustness to the hypothesis of common predisposition.

These observations expose the analysis as dodging one of the main issues which need to be addressed, and which it purports to address, and thus to have greater validity than past studies. The explanation offered for this failure is not substantiated, and consists of the hypothesis that since initial data gathering, there will be a tendency for cannabis use to drop off over time. In the absence of any evidence to support the applicability and extent of such an effect, though, the explanation is of doubtful import.

The authors also discuss the major problem of inadequate data in more general terms. One might well have concluded at the design phase that the data has simply not captured sufficient information for further attempts at extracting a conclusion to be worthwhile. The authors instead state rather baldly that the poor quality of the data is not likely to be a problem:
]

We are limited in that we have only data regarding use of cannabis before conscription. But if the pattern of increased initiation and reduced cessation of drug use seen in the schizophrenia group persisted after the time of conscription, this would result in us underestimating the effect size of cannabis.

And again:

Fewer subjects in this cohort claimed to have used cannabis and other illicit drugs compared with similar cohorts that used anonymous questionnaires. The effect of under-reporting would again result in an underestimate of the true effect size.

Does this amount to anything more than special pleading? Are the authors just saying that since this data is not much good, the inconvenient result is not to be trusted, while other results are sound? Certainly the fact that the problem is explained away so cursorily (in fact, not only explained away but even described as tending to strengthen the findings!) leaves something to be desired.

What is the schizophrenia group, in which it is suggested the pattern of increased initiation and reduced cessation of drug use...[might persist]...after the time of conscription? The authors seem, despite themselves, to be saying that those who will turn out to be diagnosed with schizophrenia are more likely to start and less likely to stop using cannabis - that is, that the schizophrenia outcome determines the degree of cannabis use. This is how one would frame it if one were to presuppose reverse (schizophrenia -> cannabis) causation, or more generally the common disposition thesis. These people are going to get schizophrenia, therefore they are more likely to use cannabis.

That is the only justification for supposing that unmeasured cannabis use would be found to be greater among the 'schizophrenia group' than among the rest of the sample. Without that assumption - an assumption directly at odds with the authors' claim to have eliminated this source of error - there is no justification for supposing that the unknown data would strengthen the findings.

Transient effects of cannabis

Murray also had a hand in in one rehashing of the data from the Dunedin multidisciplinary health and development study conducted in New Zealand: Arseneault et al., 'Cannabis use in adolescence and risk for adult psychosis: longitudinal prospective study'

The study attempted to control for the common predisposition effect by the inadequate method of examining self-reported 'psychotic symptoms' at age 11. I won't go into this further.

The more interesting aspect of the study is in the measurement of outcomes other than clear diagnoses of schizophrenia. The paper states:

Logistic regression analyses showed that people who used cannabis by age 15 were four times as likely to have a diagnosis of schizophreniform disorder at age 26 than controls. After psychotic symptoms at age 11 were controlled for, the risk for adult schizophreniform disorder remained higher among those who used cannabis at age 15; however, this risk was reduced by 31% and was no longer significant.

'Schizophreniform disorder', as I understand it, differs from schizophrenia in that it is diagnosed on the basis of a single month's symptoms, and is less serious in terms of functional impairment. It is often an interim diagnosis in reponse to early stages of schizophrenia, but one third of those diagnosed with schizophreniform disorder do not develop schizophrenia. This is an instance of the slippage in severity of measured outcomes which I mentioned in the previous post, and which would tend to, in a memorable phrase, 'hide the decline' in effect sizes. Still, this is a relatively unimportant point.

Rather, the key issue here is that After psychotic symptoms at age 11 were controlled for... - that is, once the statistical analysis was completed - ...this risk was reduced by 31% and was no longer significant.

Statistical significance is, as the name suggests, the sine qua non of statistical inference - and again, this is only based on a crude and inadequate control of 'psychotic symptoms' at age 11.

Having failed to find an increase in risk of schizophreniform disorder, the authors turn to other symptoms:

Multiple linear regression analyses showed that cannabis users by age 15 and by age 18 had more schizophrenia symptoms than controls at age 26 (table). These results remained significant after psychotic symptoms at age 11 were controlled for. The effect was stronger with earlier use.

Looking at the table of results, it uis clear that just as in the case of the Zimmer study examined above, two different sets of factors were adjusted for: here, other drug use, and self-reported psychotic symptoms at age 11. And just as in that study there seems a curious coyness about adjusting for both factors together. But the key point here is that these statistics were based on a study which assessed psychiatric symptoms at age 26 with a standardised interview schedule to obtain DSM-IV (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 4th edition) diagnoses

This sounds impressive, but in fact what it means is that the data was gathered by lay interviewers using a standardised diagnostic checklist. Such a checklist aims to gather sufficient information for a statistical algorithm to generate diagnoses, without the need for the opinion of a medic. In order to do this, many minor and peripheral 'symptoms' are included. This is useful if these symptoms are properly weighted and then tested against a threshold to determine the presence or absence of a certain condition (one may certainly question the validity of this approach to diagnosis, but that is not my point here). It is not however very useful when the individual symptoms are counted outside the diagnostic framework, and used to determine degrees of schizophrenia-likeness. That project is deeply questionable - it is not too much of a simplification to say that we are dealing with diagnosing people as being 'a little bit schizophrenic'.

The specific problem with this approach is that many of the minor 'symptoms' or indicators are likely to be slightly better represented among those who are under the influence of cannabis, or have been so recently, or are such heavy users that their daily functioning has become impaired in ways that have no connection to schizophrenia. This was not controlled for in this study, and given that we are talking about very small numbers and marginal statistical trends, seems highly likely to have provided false positive findings of schizophrenia-likeness.

This concludes my remarks on scientific evidence of cannabis-related harm, for this round of debate anyway. In the following paper, I will address moral and policy arguments, including Hitchens's own non-scientific theories about certain social harms which he attributes to cannabis.

Reefer Madness - the evidence

2011-07-15T09:22:00.014+01:00

Peter Hitchens asks: I want to know precisely which claims he [i.e. I, T.W.] views as ‘overblown’, and whether he accepts that cannabis has - or might in future be found to have - any dangers for those who use it. And if so, what he believes those dangers are..

I certainly do accept that cannabis carries some risks and is implicated in some harmful outcomes.

Cannabis - harms and dangers

First, I've already mentioned that smoking cannabis carries a risk of cancer. It hardly need be added that I would assume it imposes the other major risks associated with smoking. [UPDATE 17 Jul 2011 18:50: But see following post.] In any case, in Europe cannabis is most commonly smoked mixed with tobacco (and unfiltered, though that may be something of a red herring). So far as the present debate goes, Hitchens though has already said As for the risk of cancer, while it undoubtedly exists, it is not my principal concern..

Second, there are the effects of intoxication, some of which may be unwelcome. While stoned, for example, users tend not to be very attentive to some things, and may fail to lay them down in their memory - this is the fabled 'short-term memory loss'.

A stoned person may become rather self-absorbed and 'self-conscious' - that is, conscious of themself as the object of others' attention. This can mean not only being oversensitive to actual attention (yes, those 12 year old girls at the back of the bus might well be giggling about you, that shopkeeper might well be looking at you funny - but normally you wouldn't even notice, let alone care), but also 'paranoid' or oversuspicious of others.

In cases of extreme intoxication - for example after ingesting relatively large quantities of hashish (cannabis resin) - it is even possible to experience hallucinations.

Stoned folk often become lazy and may spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about who is going to go to the 24-hour garage to get Twixes and chocolate-flavoured long-life milk. Some people find the whole thing distinctly unpleasant, and may even in some circumstances feel sick - in which case once the effect has largely worn off in an hour or so, they can give it a miss and do something else. But all of these effects are transient, that is they do not persist once the drug is out of the user's system.

Third, problematic patterns of usage. I have no doubt that just like a hundred other activities, from overeating to computer games to routine and joyless sexual activity, cannabis can become the focus of obsessive and excessive behaviour. Being very stoned all the time is, just to be clear, not a good way of going about things. It is not going to do one's state of mind any good. Distancing oneself from reality for a prolonged period is bound to end up distorting your view of the world, your relationships and even to cause such warped perceptions and habits of mind as to count, technically, as 'psychotic symptoms' (this covers much more than persistently hearing voices, or harbouring bizarre and grandiose delusions). But such symptoms are symptoms of cannabis use or of an ongoing cannabis 'dependency', not of anything else.

Cannabis can no doubt be used as a crutch to deal with problems which would be better faced up to. (Or in some cases, perhaps for problems which are not best faced up to - in this vale of tears, we've all got to try and muddle through somehow and if you can fend off misery for a while I'm not going to frogmarch you off to the cells for it).

It's possible to waste a lot of time sitting around getting stoned, and it's not the kind of thing you want to be doing all day every day. But these are not, in the end, the fault of the evil weed. It doesn't enslave anyone, and it doesn't force anyone to take it (and as I've pointed out, dealers rarely need to do any 'pushing' - they're more likely to be worried about keeping enough back for their regulars, and heading off such new customers as seem likely to draw heat or otherwise cause trouble.) People can take cannabis or not, and most people are quite capable of enjoying a bit of a smoke in moderation without any associated behavioural problems whatsoever.

It's worth noting that problematic cannabis use - particularly very heavy cannabis use, or 'dependence' is not something that simply infects people, as the 70-year-old tropes of invasion and contagion would suggest. Rather, it has its own antecedents and risk factors. It can be explained statistically to some degree, and even be regarded as a symptom. A subfield of psychiatric and psychological research is dedicated to investigating this issue:

Hüsler et al., 'Psychosocial predictors of cannabis use adolescents at risk'

Green et al., 'Predictors of cannabis use in men with and without psychosis'

Creemers et al., 'Predicting onset of cannabis use in early adolescence: the interrelation between high-intensity pleasure and disruptive behavior. The TRAILS Study.'

Wilens, et al., 'Alcohol, drugs, and attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder: a model for the study of addictions in youth'

To pre-empt for a moment the next post, none of this gets us anywhere near justifying either the kind of Draconian laws that would be required to effectively banish the stuff from the realm, nor the kind of paternalistic threats required to stop people from taking it. And even if those things could work, I happen to think they are not worth the price. If people are turning to problematic patterns of drug use, that is likely to suggest a lack of hope, direction, the realistic possibility of ambition. The plight of the poor, marginalised and 'socially excluded' is not primarily about the effects of ganja use.

I should point out that being brought up in a city is said to increase the probability of a schizophrenia diagnosis by a factor of 3-4. That is substantially more than current figures - which I dispute in any case - would suggest for the cannabis link. It is nice to hear Hitchens speak of the 'weak and vulnerable', rather than telling people to pull their socks up and their fingers out. Shame the next sentiment to follow should be 'bang 'em up'. (Or is that - infantilise them before they have a chance to do it to themselves?)

Overblown claims

So much for relatively uncontroversial harms and disadvantages of cannabis use. What of 'overblown' claims? I want - Hitchens states - to know precisely which claims he views as ‘overblown’. I don't think propositions about cannabis use can be overblown in themselves - only more or less accurate. For a claim to be overblown, there has to be someone doing the claiming, and along with it the overblowing.

My initial mention of the self-defeating nature of overblown warnings was tangential to the issue of criminalisation. If cannabis were legal, I would still, in a helpful spirit, warn against inflated claims. People are not stupid. when you're telling them what they want to hear, or something uncheckable about what is happening in a foreign country they don't have any stake in, you can get away with rampant lies. When you're giving them information that directly affects their lives and about which they have other sources of information, any hint of the 'noble lie' is going to scupper any chance of being taken seriously. Consider the damage done to the global warming campaign as a result of the behaviour of the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia and the subsequent fudged inquiries, just as one example.

Criminalisation, though, tends itself to produce palpably exaggerated warnings. After all, the current criminalisation of cannabis doesn't tend to be defended by reference to any moral arguments about the charred corpses of toddy-drinkers, or by alluding to something Alan Bloom once wrote (more on those topics in part three). The justification that is offered - and which would be offered for any remotely plausible future 'crackdown' - is primarily danger. Accordingly, the warnings given to provide that justification have to be suitably, well, overblown.

This is perhaps especially ironic in the case of those who advocate criminal sanctions without believing, as Hitchens does, that an acceptably civilised prohibition regime could come close to eradicating cannabis use. For some such people, criminalisation is seen as a means of providing public information messages, on an 'only language they understand' kind of basis. In the recent hoo-hah over the finer points of drug classification (which neither I nor Hitchens consider to be of more than marginal relevance to altering behaviour via deterrence), this was just about the only relevant consideration. Having downgraded cannabis from class B to C, politicians responded to pressure from those they judged as having the strongest feelings - and loudest voices - and rapidly performed an about-face.

This memorable advertisement managed to be appear rather overblown without providing much actual content:

Just to complicate things, this was introduced as part of a a campaign which followed the short-lived downgrading of cannabis - and was intended to offset a reduction of penalties rather than to justify an increase.

As this video suggests, and my first post indicated, though only in outline, the main strand of widely exaggerated - and very probably misconceived - rhetoric I'm concerned about relates to the link between cannabis and schizophrenia.

Cannabis and Schizophrenia

A number of clinicians and academics are pursuing this avenue of investigation with some optimism, notable among them being Robin Murray, whom Hitchens suggests it would be 'arrogant' to contradict. Of course it would also be arrogant to contradict those scientists like Nutt (the Drugs Kaiser fired by the last government for expressing the opinion he was employed to give) or many others who have less invested than Murray in the cannabis/schizophrenia issue. So going by Hitchens's logic, arrogance is unavoidable if one is to make any useful judgement about the matter. So I'll embrace my arrogance with regard to Dr Murray, and see if I can explain to others my reasons for doing so.

Hitchens's question concerned my acceptance that cannabis has - or might in future be found to have - any dangers for those who use it. As well as accepting that cannabis is associated with some harms and dangers, I certainly accept that all kinds of things might yet be discovered. Such general possibilities are however of little interest, since they cut both ways. One should certainly observe Cromwell's precept think it possible that ye may be mistaken - not to do so is rank dogmatism. But in the context of adversarial debate, unilaterally admitting such a possibility in general terms is apt to be taken as a concession to the other side.

So arrogance aside, of course I may be mistaken. I may be mistaken about anything. Am I especially likely to be mistaken about this matter? No. In fact given that I've taken considerable interest in the matter, done a fair bit of research, and have some general training in methodology, pretty good analytical ability and even a personal connection with the world of psychiatric research, my judgement is that I'm less likely to be mistaken about this than many other things. The key is to address the issue of how likely one is to be mistaken before finalising an opinion, and thus moderating the certainty with which you hold that opinion. If you want to be really fancy about it, you can even consider some alternatives and assess how much credence you might give those, then formulate a complex opinion, with a probability distribution and everything. There is always a generalised risk (or uncertainty) that one might be mistaken, but that is a common factor which can be ignored so far as choosing among opinions goes.

So I am happy to 'fess up to the generalised and unquantified possibility of unknown error. But I don't consider such a possibility to undermine my opinions. And - importantly - I apply the same principle to my criticism of the research into this topic - I have a good and coherent reasons to think that there are specific problems with the research. I am not just taking pot shots at a view I'm hostile to, or waving my hands in the general direction of error and claiming victory for the 'druggies'. It is one thing to point out, for example, the common hazards of using complex statistical methods to derive conclusions from data. It is another to indicate specific ways in which such hazards appear to have affected research in this area. Doing that properly is not a straightforward business, though, and as a result these comments are lengthy and go into some detail.

Murray: marijuana warner

The research programme has been under way sporadically for some decades, but has not yet produced sufficiently impressive results for any scientist, even a true believer (and advocate) like Murray, to be willing unequivocally to assert, in an academic paper, a causal link leading from cannabis to schizophrenia. Murray, like anyone who thinks he is onto something, has a tendency to bury his caveats and forget them as quickly as possible, but he still has to include them, and their relative lack of prominence ought if anything to draw more attention to them.

Murray has been busy prematurely pseudo-replicating his findings in a variety of reports, survey articles, and meta-analyses, and has been involved in rehashing and revisiting existing studies, to squeeze every drop of statistical goodness from the data. I will consider at least one of these later, but for a foretaste, consider that a widely-cited survey article in which Murray was involved states:

Consistent with the previous findings, a follow-up study of the same Swedish conscript cohort showed that ‘heavy cannabis users’ by the age of 18 years were 6.7 times more likely than non-users to be diagnosed with schizophrenia 27 years later (Zammit et al, 2002). This risk held when the analysis was repeated on a subsample of men who used cannabis only, as opposed to using other drugs as well.

This is flatly incorrect: the first figure was in fact 3.1 rather than 6.7 - though because of an accident of the numbers, it is, thankfully, possible to attribute this to carelessness.

Murray is though without doubt committed - to a degree that I would consider prejudicial - to establishing a causal link between cannabis use and subsequent onset of schizophrenia. His writings in the press make this quite clear: for example, he claims that Nutt and the rest of the 2002 ACMD 'boobed' by advising that cannabis has no serious mental health consequences. He then states that the evidence that cannabis contributes causally to the onset of schizophrenia "although not yet conclusive, has been mounting steadily over the past six years." Since this was written in 2009, elementary arithmetic tells us that the inconclusive statistics Murray refers to had not even begun the process of 'mounting steadily' at the time the ACMD 'boobed' so badly by ignoring them! I should point out that I don't accept Murray's statement about the mounting data, nor much of anything else he says, at least not in newspaper commentary. My purpose is to expose one of the reasons for my lack of confidence in his capacity to maintain scientific detachment - or indeed basic coherence - in discussing these matters.

Murray states:

Professor Nutt contrasts a 2.6 fold increase in risk of psychosis carried by using cannabis with a twentyfold increase in risk of lung cancer if one smokes cigarettes. Unfortunately, he is not comparing like with like. The twentyfold increased risk is not carried by just being a cigarette smoker but rather by being a long-term heavy smoker. For cannabis, the risk of psychosis goes up to about six times if one is a long-term heavy cannabis smoker.

One of the more thoughtful of the proliferating survey articles, Semple et al, suggests that the best estimate of statistical correlation between cannabis use and subsequent schizophrenia diagnosis, adjusting for some but by no means all sources of error, is an odds ratio of around 1.41.

This ought to mean, if it were a directly usable statistic, that on finding out someone has smoked cannabis you should increase your assessment of the probability that they will subsequently receives a schizophrenia diagnosis by a factor of 0.4 (for an average person - somewhat less for a higher-risk individual) while for the very heaviest cannabis users, the best guess - though admittedly still probably too high, and by no means indicating causation - is given as an odds ratio of 3 - not 6, which is the figure Murray has cherry-picked from somewhere. Even if unlike me you think this research is on the right track, this figure can't be justified.

In 2007, too, Murray was at it, in the Independent, making strange claims about skunk:

Skunk is to old-fashioned hash as is whisky to lager. You can become alcoholic by just drinking lager; but you have to drink a lot more lager than whisky.

Hash is resin, and the more refined forms of it are roughly as strong, in terms of THC content, as skunk. Typical skunk is stronger than most other herbal cannabis - but is accordingly more expensive. And the difference in strength, i.e. bulk, is negligible - like the difference between whisky and whisky with a dash of water. There is nothing stopping people from getting just as stoned on relatively weak cannabis as they do on the strongest stuff.

Murray cites a UN report which, like his own article, reads like a polemical document. So much for no interest from government - the UN and various government bodies have sponsored a great deal of the work that has been done in pursuit of cannabis-induced schizophrenia). (I happened to notice p117 has a graphic showing a 5% increase in cannabis use over 12 years, but is described in the text as showing a 10% increase in a different 5 or 6 year period (between the 'late 90s' and publication in 2006. The graphic itself is a fantastically misleading, giving the visual impression of cannabis use shooting up from near zero to some huge figure.

In the preface to that UN report, Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, feels able to say

With supply virtually unlimited and demand subject to the vagaries of government policy, traffickers have invested heavily in increasing the potency - and therefore the market attractiveness - of cannabis. The result has been devastating: today, the characteristics of cannabis are no longer that different from those of other plant-based drugs such as cocaine and heroin. (emph. mine).

It is hard to say what this is supposed to mean, but it's even harder to find any possible meaning at all one which it comes out true.

(In an even less convincing variation on Murray's non-sequitur, the report also states on p.174 that "Most of the cannabis smoked in the 1960s would be considered to be of low quality today. In addition to seeds, it comprised a great deal of the large leaf, twigs, and other material that would be currently regarded as waste." But it would also have been regarded as waste then, and thrown away, with the possible exception of large leaves.)

The UN report's distinctly partial approach to cannabis might suggest that Hitchens is not on particularly strong ground when he suggests that funding for studies seeking a causal path from cannabis to schizophrenia is unlikely to be available from governmental sources. While funding is not a central issue in the absence of specific allegations of prejudicial motivation, I would suggest that neither drug companies, from whom much funding for medical research comes, nor - contrary to Hitchens's quixotic protestations - governments seem likely to be very interested in research which would debunk the findings of this recently-hewn niche in schizophrenia literature. And as I pointed out in my first post, alcohol interests have been known to give financial assistance to anti-cannabis causes. Trying to paint cannabis as a populist issue, with powerful pro-legalisation forces ranged against the little man who favours prohibition is not a viable position so far as I can see.

Having said that, as far as it is of any relevance at all, Murray himself makes it clear that, wedded though he is to the RM-causation hypothesis, he does not subscribe to Hitchens's prohibitionist agenda:

I care little whether cannabis is classified as a class B or class C drug. Fourteen year olds starting daily cannabis use do not agonise over its exact classification; many do not even think it is a drug and few have any knowledge of its hazards. By comparison, most adults in the UK drink alcohol in moderation, but do so in the knowledge that drinking a bottle of vodka a day is likely to be injurious to health, and few are in favour of daily drinking from age 14 years.

And that, for all my disagreement with Murray on science and rhetoric, is largely my approach. If there are significant dangers, then a properly independent agency staffed by professionals should be tasked with publicising them honestly and clearly. Peter Hitchens talks of the vulnerable and weak - I think he means teenagers - but there is a limit to how far we should go in trying to protect teenagers from danger, and attempting to eradicate cannabis from the country by instituting an enormous crackdown is too far. My personal opinion - in itself largely irrelevant since no-one need share it to reject increased criminalisation, nor to endorse legalisation - is that to justify a ban, the harms would have to exceptional - near-certain lethality, say - or the substance would have to be capable of taking people over and sapping all ability to resist taking it - something that neither I nor Hitchens think is remotely the case. I don't particularly approve of youngsters smoking dope in any case and under a legalisation regime I'd envisage similar - or should the evidence merit it, heavier and better enforced - penalties on selling to minors.

In fact, I have a question for PH - what kind of penalties, what expansion of prisons and of policing, do you suppose would be required to achieve your preferred cannabis-free UK? How much more stop-and-search would there have to be, how much drug testing, how many more homes smashed up looking for the stuff? Would we bring the import trade to a halt by searching every container that comes into the country?

So, to be clear: I consider that even accepting Murray's most egregious misrepresentations, the herb should still be legal. Why then, am I about to embark on extended criticism of the cannabis-induced-schizophrenia hypothesis? Well, in part simply because I consider it an interesting issue in itself, and a case study in how science works, and have accordingly done a good deal of research into the matter. That is a bad reason.

A slightly better reason is that I consider Murray in particular to have overstepped the bounds of scientific objectivity by some degree with his public statements, and suspect him of having done so - unconsciously, no doubt - in some of his academic work too. After all, here at 'Surely Some Mistake?', the policy is to aim the Cointreau of criticism squarely at the peach of privilege.

And then there is of course the urgency with which Hitchens has repeated his request - in all four tranches of his response - for me to state my position on the harms of cannabis, which of course most saliently involves the schizophrenia issue.

But the most pressing reason, as intimated in round one of the debate, is that overblown claims of cannabis-induced-schizophrenia have gained such traction with the public, and have been illustrated with highly emotive anecdotes calculated to appeal, in particular, to parents' deepest fears. Any attempt to actually change minds in favour of legalisation requires that this issue be put firmly in perspective, and the tenuous basis of the fearmongering be established.

The rhetoric of prohibition

One of the less decorative rhetorical devices in the canon is 'correctio' - making a bold statement, then moderating it - the aim of course being to gain an (unfair) advantage in debate. The stronger statement may be unjustified, but is more persuasive than a moderate one, so assent is first gained by use of the stronger proposition, and even after this is pared back to pre-empt criticism, the assent remains. In psychology, a similar tactic is known as the foot-in-the-door technique - a person is first asked to agree to some modest proposal, and once they have done so, the demand is ramped up. This can be done in stages, so as to avoid escalating demands too abruptly.

The engineering of public support for, among others, the US/NATO invasions of Kuwait, Iraq, and Libya all showed observable elements of this technique. A foot in the door was gained by telling extreme tales of the dreadful events that were going on or were imminent and which required military intervention (tales which to many were rather obviously fabricated; consent need not be universal). As it became clear that these tales were indeed false and fabricated (in the case of Libya, this has not yet really happened - that's progress for you), they were abandoned or replaced with slightly more realistic reasons for war. Classically, the psychological foot-in-the-door is supposed to depend on a 'preference for consistency'. War rhetoric is rather different - once you get people marching to that drum beat, the momentum gained owes more to the lower reaches of the brain than to any preference for consistency.

The same is true of an opening gambit that involves the highly emotive elements of parental protectiveness and the spectre of rampant insanity. Once the image of murderous lunatics is out there, and parents are provided with appropriately lurid scare stories about their own offspring's chances of developing schizophrenia, subsequent gradual moderation of the message has little effect.

Neither I nor, as far as I know, any other prominent advocate of cannabis legalisation denies that cannabis use by schizophrenics interferes with standard treatments and can worsen their prognosis. I don't challenge the idea that ongoing very heavy cannabis use and its associated lifestyle can be a factor in bringing forward the onset of frank psychosis in those who are on the pathway to schizophrenia. And as I suggest above, ongoing heavy cannabis use is itself likely to be associated with phenomena which will show up on a checklist of 'psychotic symptoms'. What I do deny is that there is good reason to believe in what I - in honour of the Mail story linked above - will call RM-causation (for 'Reefer Madness' - a famously lurid propaganda film of the 30s, when the failure and reversal of alcohol prohibition was leaving FBN agents short of work, and (some say) timber and Nylon interests were anxious to see off the threat of new hemp processing technology, among them a newspaper tycoon who was responsible for much 'yellow journalism' demonising hemp... but I digress). Furthermore, considerable effort has been made to establish that cannabis causes schizophrenia, and at least one scientist at the centre of these efforts shows signs of excessive zeal. Failure to discover a link in those circumstances, goes beyond mere absence of evidence to constitute evidence of absence.

RM-causation is the big headline item, the one that, thanks to the likes of Murray, gives every parent nightmares (and my interest in the issue was certainly influenced by my own parenthood). This is the claim that there is a more than negligible chance that a person who would otherwise have been unaffected by the horrors of schizophrenia might develop the condition through taking cannabis. I repeat, the key claim I am referring to as RM-causation and which has lodged - quite understandably - in the mind of the public, in particular of parents, is that cannabis is capable of causing schizophrenia in those who would otherwise not have developed the condition. Of course, at the margins it will no doubt be possible to point the finger to aspects of cannabis use, especially very heavy and prolonged use, as factors in tipping borderline cases into full schizophrenia - the same is true of almost anything you care to mention. Remember, social isolation is regarded as a risk factor for schizophrenia as is, for another example, being brought up in a city - the relative risk of that factor supposedly being higher than that currently claimed with any credibility at all - that is, assuming I am completely wrong - by the Murray camp.

Given what they are being told, I don't blame parents for being worried. While we didn't refuse the combined MMR vaccine on our son's behalf, we certainly gave it some thought before opting to volunteer our own flesh and blood in the cause of herd (and his own) immunity. And elsewhere, I've defended the decision other parents took to refuse the jab as not only understandable but rational, given the widely available information. The present case is of course not one of an Andrew Wakefield, though it is worth remembering that his research was published in the Lancet. the point is that his warnings, while not backed with strong evidence, concerned a sufficiently severe outcome to be of great concern even at low probability, especially given that the risk could be very easily avoided without much wider impact.

So a head-on approach seems better. I'll explain why I have been suspicious of this strand of research (other than the selfish desire to keep open the option of revisiting youthful habits with impunity), and why I believe it is on the wrong track. I reiterate that to do this I'll need to go into some detail, since otherwise my criticisms will amount to little more than denial, or else may appear to be general nitpicking objections of the kind which could be made to any study. It is important that the root problems I detect are all of the same two kinds, and that more ad hoc objections to individual studies are geared towards showing how these general problems are manifested.

I'll also point out how the claims currently being made bear little resemblance to those touted so loudly when the issue first found its way into our esteemed press. A quiet and gradual correctio has been under way, with the result that the original headline-grabbing claims of RM-causation are just about extinct, and some much more modest positions taken up in their stead - positions which would never on their own have been considered remarkable, and which I have very good reason to expect will as the research project continues, become more modest still.

The decline effect and bias

Once this vocal but heterodox group has made more headway in influencing scientific opinion, results which produce the finding 'nothing to see here' will become more interesting and might stand a chance of being published. The fact that negative results are commonly rejected for publication, especially when a new 'discovery' is in its infancy has, in conjunction with related forms of bias, been dubbed the decline effect. The linked article observes that initially promising findings tend to fall off, and even to disappear altogether, as further studies are conducted. There are a number of reasons for this: the usual standard of 95% confidence implies that one in 20 such statistical results should be expected to be wrong without containing any errors or design flaws, or to put it another way, the probability that a given statistic falls outside the 95% confidence range is higher than that of rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice. If a one-in twenty chance of this kind appears to make a new and exciting finding, a wild goose chase ensues. (And if multiple re-analyses are run on the same data, any bias in that data will be manifested on each occasion.)

Various forms of bias can of course creep in - including the all-too-human tendency for scientists to want to believe, and to interpret results accordingly, even to re-run a statistical analysis using a different test, then discard the 'anomalous' result (this, though generally impossible to detect, is entirely unethical and invalidates any findings). Not that I'm saying that Murray himself has ever done anything like that; this is a general point. Another reason why results 'disappear' from subsequent studies is that the subsequent studies refine and improve experimental design, and eliminate flaws that had affected previous work. That seems to be one of the things that has happened in the case of the RM-causation hypothesis.

(The popular article linked has been extensively criticised by scientists. The key criticism has been that it poses as a bold debunking of science, but is in fact just a perfectly ordinary account of how science works - to the scientists themselves, it is too obvious! I would agree with these criticisms as far as they apply, indeed I'd consider them to reflect the same point I have already made - that general possibilities of error are ubiquitous and care should be taken not to exaggerate their importance. In this case, the criticisms amount to pointing out that the proposition 'for every claim, it is possible that it is mistaken' is different from and far weaker than 'it is possible that every claim is mistaken'.)

The decline effect has certainly occurred in this case - in the academic literature, multiples like 6, and even 12, times increased expectation of schizophrenia in cannabis smokers are now nowhere to be seen. Instead, figures from recent studies have fallen below 2. 2 of course here represents a doubled expectation (or 'risk'), but that is double a very small starting probability, so even if it were accounted for entirely by RM-causation, that would still be a very small risk.

Publication bias is a real and widely-acknowledged problem. There are methods for detecting it, such as funnel plots though they are of limited usefulness, especially as a means of ruling it out. On the one occasion I have seen such methods used in this context, in a Semple et al. survey article, the funnel plot does seem to show skew:

(and the Egger bias plot, another test, fails to show a line passing close to the origin), yet the funnel plot is described as follows:

Where studies with results in a certain direction are not published or identified, the spread of studies about the horizontal line will tend to be asymmetrical. The study effect sizes shown above are approximately symmetrical about the line of overall effect and the presence of publication bias is not supported

But the study effect sizes are not symmetrical about the line - 5 of 7 lie above the line. Furthermore, it is the smaller studies which are supposed to reveal publication bias if it is present - the larger studies effectively decide the position of the line. All of the four smaller studies are above the line. If the plot is to be taken seriously, the conclusion from this one ought to be that there is evidence of bias.

(The Egger plot is also explained away by a very odd argument: although the line does not pass through the origin exactly, the confidence interval for the intercept (indicated by two small circles on the vertical axis) includes the origin. This may be interpreted as a lack of statistically significant publication bias.)

The pachyderm in the parlour - no rise in schizophrenia

Perhaps the most obvious stumbling block in the way of establishing RM-causation is the rather obvious fact that if cannabis were actually causing people to become schizophrenic who wouldn't otherwise have done, we should expect, in the absence of countervailing factors, to see a proportionate increase in the rate of schizophrenia.

This has of course been pointed out by a number of eminent academics in the field, for example:

there is no evidence that the incidence of schizophrenia has risen dramatically over the past 50 years, in parallel with the huge increase in cannabis use.
- Dr. Colin Blakemore, Chair of the Department of Physiology at the University of Oxford; Dec. 27, 2002 email to ProCon.org.

Given that the incidence of schizophrenia declined substantially in Western societies in the 1970s, at the same time cannabis use was rising, it seems highly unlikely that marijuana causes schizophrenia in otherwise healthy people....
Cannabis psychosis is self-limiting, disappearing in a few days with or without medical treatment. Toxic psychosis probably occurs more commonly in individuals with preexisting psychiatric disorders...
- Lynn Zimmer, Former Professor Emeritus at the Queens College, City University, New York (CUNY), in Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts, 1997)

Their prediction that 14% of psychotic outcomes in young adults in the UK may be due to cannabis use is not supported by the fact that the incidence of schizophrenia has not shown any significant change in the past 30 years.
- Professor Leslie Iverson, Oxford University. BBC News

To quote from the relatively thoughtful meta-analysis of Semple et al:

The question of whether cannabis is a precipitating or a causative factor in the development of schizophrenia remains. A recent study that used mathematical modelling to explore the possible effects of cannabis use and schizophrenia (Degenhardt et al., 2003) supported the possibility that cannabis precipitated psychosis in vulnerable individuals and that cannabis use is more likely among individuals with schizophrenia, but did not support a direct causal hypothesis. The main reason for this finding was the absence of any increase in the incidence of schizophrenia, despite clear increases in the use of cannabis in the Australian population studied. Any hypothesis that suggests that cannabis causes schizophrenia must explain this discrepancy in the epidemiological data.

Again, Degenhardt et al., Comorbidity between cannabis use and psychosis: modelling some possible relationships, Conclusions:

This study has examined a hotly debated issue from a different point of view - through the use of modelling, using data-based parameter estimates to predict what changes we would expect to see in the incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia if each of four hypotheses about the relationships were true. If cannabis caused schizophrenia among persons who would not otherwise have
developed the disorder, significant increases would have occurred in the number of persons with the illness. Given that the incidence of schizophrenia is either unchanged or decreasing, such a causal relationship is unlikely.

All other hypotheses provided a better fit to the available data. However, it is difficult to judge which of these is the best fit, or whether a combination of them is most appropriate. If cannabis use acts as a precipitant of psychosis, we would have seen small increases in the number of early onset cases. If cannabis use made relapse to psychotic symptoms, we would have seen small increases in the number of chronic cases. Finally, if persons with psychosis were simply more likely to become regular cannabis users, we would expect to see no differences in the number incident or chronic cases, but a higher prevalence of regular use in this population. Future research needs to examine these possibilities in prospective studies.

This approach has suggested that cannabis use is probably not causally related to psychosis in the strong sense of causing cases that would no otherwise have occurred. Nonetheless, cannabis use may affect persons who are vulnerable to developing psychosis, or who have already developed the disorder. This suggests that such persons may be advised of this possible relationship and counselled against using cannabis.

This is a big problem for Murray and, to the extent they share his premature zeal, others pursuing this line of investigation. It has led Murray to suggest that it is too early for the supposed effects to be seen in the general population, because it mostly affects young people, and is associated with the new 'super skunk' (something of a myth in itself, though I believe that newer strains and hybrids used in producing intensively cultivated sinsemilla have little or none of the chemical cannabidiol which, it has been suggested, moderates or otherwise interacts with the action of THC. Of course no large studies into that topic can be conducted, nor most probably would any recommendations be worth making, because without regulation, no-one knows what they are smoking).

The idea that RM-causation is restricted to those taking cannabis at a relatively young age in any case seems to have been forced on Murray since the results of recent, more rigorous studies are, not for want of trying, inconsistent with much of an effect in any other group.

In fact, this research programme, though not (yet) fairly describable as degenerating, exhibits a certain degree of retrenchment, not limited to the moderation of claimed effect sizes typical of the 'decline effect. In some ways, this retrenchment resembles the psychological 'foot-in-the-door' and rhetorical 'correctio' techniques, though of course it is not intended as a technique. Murray's readiness to proselytise for an unproven proposition and his insistence on sticking to what are by now clearly inflated figures have certainly had much the same effect as a deliberate foot-in-the-door though.

These retrenchments include, as mentioned, a reduction in the claimed effect size from initial estimates of increased risk, which I believe were at one time around a factor of 10 or even more, to a factor of about 2 (i.e., if this statistic were to apply to the average person at average risk, an increased risk of 1 percentage point).

Another slippage has been in the range of the effect - while no-one ever really suggested that those not already genetically vulnerable to developing schizophrenia (it appears that about 50% of schizophrenia incidence is down to genetics) is going to be 'infected' by cannabis use, it seems that recently it has been suggested that those who are 'vulnerable' in this sense form a very small proportion of the population. Some even seem to be veering dangerously close to agreeing that RM-causation itself may not occur, and instead the only causal influence of heavy cannabis use is only to speed up the course of an already existing condition.

There seems also to have been slippage regarding the extent of use required to find any effect. While the Mail story linked above claims a single exposure increases risk by a factor of 1.4, recent studies almost exclusively limit their conclusions to the supposed effects of relatively heavy use and 'dependence'.

Perhaps the most significant and slippage, however, is in the outcomes examined. Schizophrenia is a recognised and very serious chronic condition with a fairly well-understood course. Initially, studies were primarily concerned with diagnoses of that condition. But as later studies sought to extract more information from data, they began instead to measure schizophreniform disorder, symptoms of schizophrenia, schizophrenia-like symptoms, and psychotic symptoms, none of which are the same thing as, and none of which are necessarily very closely associated with, schizophrenia.

This leads me to the first of two problems which I see as manifested in this line of research, which I don't believe have yet been adequately addressed and which in combination provide a specific alternative explanation for the observed results, without relying on unspecified residual confounding factors nor on general problems with statistical methods such as multivariate regression analysis.

The two problems

1. Transient cannabis related psychotic symptoms.

In those studies which measure psychotic, or schizophrenia-like symptoms rather than schizophrenia proper, there is a danger that transient psychosis-like symptoms of cannabis use and of ongoing heavy cannabis use will be interpreted as manifestations of some independently subsisting psychosis. Such effects of cannabis as sensory or cognitive disturbances and so-called 'paranoia' would surely show up in test for psychotic symptoms. This possibility is explicitly acknowledged in some papers, and ought in any case to be taken account of by diagnostic criteria and methods, but it doesn't appear to have been addressed properly in many cases. As more recent studies have attempted to address the issue of confounding more thoroughly, they have also tended to expand the range of outcomes measured so as to include mere 'psychotic symptoms', thus introducing this new source of error. Little more can be said at this point. I'll return to the issue later in discussion of some individual papers.

2. 'Self-medication' (common predisposition)

In my first post, I used this term somewhat inaccurately to describe a wider phenomenon: a common predisposition both to take cannabis and to develop schizophrenia. Self-medication describes only those cases in which the subject is aware of taking cannabis to deal with symptoms of their illness. This does not accurately describe the case in which a person has some mild precursor or 'prodromal' mental disturbance which which motivates them, consciously or not, to seek cannabis or mind-altering substances in general.

Neither does it describe other explanations for taking cannabis which might be correlated with a predisposition to schizophrenia: tendency to rebellious behaviour (cannabis being illegal and generally frowned upon means taking it has this character - and smoking it all the time certainly does), propensity to 'addictive' behaviour, a general desire to alter consciousness and so on.

A substantial literature exists on the prodrome and precursor; to offer some haphazardly selected examples:

Cannon et al., Early and late neurodevelopmental influences in the prodrome to schizophrenia: contributions of genes, environment, and their interactions

Yung and McGorry, 'The Prodromal Phase of First-episode Psychosis: Past and Current Conceptualizations'

White et al., 'The Schizophrenia Prodrome'

Owens et al., 'Precursors and prodromata of schizophrenia: findings from the Edinburgh High Risk Study and their literature context.'

Amminger et al., 'Relationship Between Childhood Behavioral Disturbance and Later Schizophrenia in the New York High-Risk Project'

Kwapil, 'Social anhedonia as a predictor of the development of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders'

Hans et al., 'Interpersonal behavior of children at risk for schizophrenia'

Roff et al., 'Childhood antecedents of schizophrenia: developmental sequencing and specificity of problem behavior'

Self-medication properly so-called would be a case of reverse causation - schizophrenia causally contributing to cannabis use, rather than the other way round. Reverse causation is not a special kind of causation, just one that runs in in the opposite direction from that expected or hypothesised. Consider the fictitious tabloid headline: 'BLACK INFLUX LOWERS HOUSE PRICES'. The headline suggests that the arrival of black people in an area causes the house prices to drop. Reverse causation would be said to occur if in fact the reason for the co-incidence of lower prices and more black people arriving in the area is that black people have on average a lower income than the general population, and more were attracted to the area as a consequence of greater affordability.

In other cases of a common disposition, cannabis use might not be causally mediated by schizophrenia, but there may instead be a common causal influence - perhaps some genetic factor and/or an abnormal brain chemistry - which gives rise both to cannabis use and to schizophrenia. This would then be a confounding factor. Both reverse causation and confounding factors have to be addressed when a causal influence is to be established between correlated phenomena - most of the studies try to do this to some extent, though few of them, especially the earliest ones, even attempt to do so very thoroughly (by the way, one likely confounder, city living, is apparently believed to be associated risk of schizophrenia increasing by a factor of 3-4, substantially higher than that indicated by studies of RM-causation, even taken at face value).

In any case, I think it is sensible for my purposes to treat this family of explanations, variants of which have generally been considered the obvious explanation for high cannabis use, as one hypothesis, despite the fact that it cuts across the distinction between reverse causation and confounding factors. I'll refer to it by the catchy name 'common predisposition'.

The common predisposition hypothesis has been around in one form or another for a long time, and is the obvious competitor to the RM-causation hypothesis, as all the authors of RM papers acknowledge in one way or another. A range of scientific work supports the general idea that the schizophrenia-prone are also likely to be cannabis-prone.

This paper attempts a partial explanation of substance abuse by reference to underlying aspects of schizophrenia which need not be contemporaneous with manifestation of psychotic symptoms:

Chambers et al., A Neurobiological Basis for Substance Abuse Comorbidity in Schizophrenia

Other papers of of relevance examine various behaviours which can be precursor or prodromal predictors of schizophrenia, and link those directly to cannabis use:

Korhonen et al., 'Externalizing behavior problems and cigarette smoking as predictors of cannabis use: the TRAILS Study'

Buckner et al., 'Specificity of Social Anxiety Disorder as a Risk Factor for Alcohol and Cannabis Dependence'

This type of consideration might be of special relevance in the context of a finding that only heavy use is of relevance to subsequent development of schizophrenia, since it may be the case that such heavy use, as distinct from typical recreational and social use, tends to arise from other abnormal behaviours or dispositions.

As is the way of these things, those investigating (hoping to find) RM-causation have a natural tendency to regard the common predisposition hypothesis as an obstacle. It is to be controlled for, eliminated, ruled out. That is quite reasonable. Less reasonable but equally understandable is the inadequacy of the measures taken to rule it out. If you are, like Murray, a true believer in the RM-causation hypothesis, you will approach the matter as a necessary but rather tiresome technicality, much as a sleuth who's convinced he has his man may regard the task of observing proper procedures in gathering evidence. As a result, few of the attempts to rule out the common predisposition explanation in studies not directly aimed at that end are convincing, even among those which do attempt to account for a wide variety of other confounding factors.

Two brief examples:

Henquet et al., 'Prospective cohort study of cannabis use, predisposition for psychosis, and psychotic symptoms in young people', which appears to do a relatively thorough job in addressing standard confounding factors, seems vulnerable to challenge on both counts. The outcomes tested are merely 'psychotic symptoms - a far cry from schizophrenia, on which early studies concentrated, and which remains the headline topic of the kind of discussion in which papers such as this are commonly cited (or alluded to). So far as common predisposition is concerned, while the paper attempts to evaluate predisposition for psychosis, it states: we used self reported psychotic experiences on the symptom checklist to determine predisposition for psychosis. This is not a test of predisposition for psychosis, but of levels of psychosis itself.

Fergusson et al., 'Tests of causal linkages between cannabis use and psychotic symptoms' takes some trouble to attempt to adjust both for confounding factors and for common predisposition, but its results are solely in terms of 'psychotic symptoms'. It states:

participants were questioned on current (over the past month) psychotic symptomatology using items from the Symptom Checklist 90 (SCL-90) [20]. A series of 10 items were selected as representative of psychotic symptoms.These items spanned the following
symptoms: hearing voices that other people do not hear; the idea that someone else can control your thoughts; other people being aware of your private thoughts; having thoughts that are not your own; having ideas and beliefs that others do not share; the idea that something is seriously wrong with your body; never feeling close to another person; the idea that something is wrong with your mind; feeling other people cannot be trusted; feeling that you are watched or talked about by others.

Confirmatory factor analysis of the item set has shown previously that the items formed a unidimensional scale reflecting the extent of psychotic symptomatology. (p. 356)

It is far from clear that the claim that the item set forms a unidimensional scale is robust to the presence or absence of prolonged heavy cannabis use. The last three items in particular might seem especially likely to be found in heavy habitual users of cannabis as compared to the general population. It would be interesting to know whether these were especially heavily represented among heavy cannabis users. I'm not inclined to rest a great deal of weight on the presence of items like having ideas and beliefs that others do not share in questionnaires of this kind - even though both I and Hitchens, neither of whom are remotely psychotic, might well give a positive response. Questions and questionnaires of this kind have generally been carefully calibrated and weighted so as to provide results which are overall statistically accurate.

I should add that these two relatively refined studies reported low increases in risk rate compared to the kinds of figures quoted in newspapers. In Fergusson et al., the highest estimate - for the heaviest cannabis users - was a 1.77 times greater risk of 'psychotic symptoms'. Henquet et al. found an odds ratio (a comparable measure in this instance) of 2.44 for increased risk of any 'psychotic symptoms'; this occurred among the second most frequent users at 3-4 times/week.

And finally

In the second part of my response, to follow shortly, I'll attempt to nail down and substantiate the position outlined here by examining in more detail some prominent studies in this area. The third and concluding part of my response will return to moral and policy arguments relating to legalisation.

Apologies to Peter Hitchens for the delay in responding - other obligations have taken up a good deal of my free time over the past week, and though my opinions were clear enough, as intimated in my first post, I'd not anticipated focusing on this empirical issue. Revisiting and documenting references, and attempting to impose some semblance of organisation on the whole thing, has been quite time-consuming.

Further apologies to readers for the length and relatively technical nature of the discussion. There seemed little point in addressing the issue of harm without addressing this central rhetorical issue, and there seemed in turn little point in addressing that without going into some detail, especially since RM-causation has a considerable head start so far as public discourse is concerned.

Finally, apologies to any scientists whom I may have offended - while I do think Robin Murray has gone further than he ought in his newspaper articles, the remaining limited ascriptions of bias and my criticism of specific papers, are not intended to suggest that any of those engaged in this research were acting in bad faith, nor that their conduct was in any way atypical of the normal progress of scientific inquiry.

[Edited 15 Jul 2011 11:30 - minor corrections, added missing references for prodrome and precursors]
[Edited 15 Jul 2011 16:01: moved references from one list to another]
[Edited 17 Jul 2011 17:55: belated minor corrections to spelling, syntax, sentence construction etc.]
[Edited 20 Jul 2011 10:44: 'correctio', not 'retractio']

R. v Haddock (Is it a Free Country?)

2011-06-29T18:03:00.005+01:00

The Australian:

In December last year, after WikiLeaks's publication of a large volume of leaked US diplomatic cables, Australia's Prime Minister agreed with US leaders that WikiLeaks founder, Australian citizen Julian Assange, must have broken the law. This proved to be a premature over-reaction. Not only was the law Assange had broken not identified, but the Australian Federal Police could not identify him as having broken any law.

----ooOoo----

REX v. HADDOCK

IS IT A FREE COUNTRY?

THE Court of Criminal Appeal considered to-day an important case involving the rights and liberties of the subject, if any.

Lord Light, L.C.J.: This is in substance an appeal by an appellant appealing in statu quo against a decision of the West London Half-Sessions, confirming a conviction by the magistrates of South Hammersmith sitting in Petty Court some four or five years ago. The ancillary proceedings have included two hearings in sessu and an appeal rampant on the case, as a result of which the record was ordered to be torn up and the evidence reprinted backwards ad legem. With these transactions, however, the Court need not concern itself, except to observe that, as for our learned brother Mumble, whose judgments we have read with diligence and something approaching to nausea, it were better that a millstone should be hanged round his neck and he be cast into the uttermost depths of the sea.

The present issue is one of comparative simplicity. That is to say, the facts of the case are intelligible to the least-instructed layman, and the only persons utterly at sea are those connected with the law. But factum clarum, jus nebulosum, or, 'the clearer the facts the more dubious the law'. What the appellant did in fact is simple and manifest, but what offence, if any, he has committed in law is a question of the gravest difficulty.

What he did in fact was to jump off Hammersmith Bridge in the afternoon of August 18th, 1922, during the Hammersmith Regatta. The motive of the act is less clear. A bystander named Snooker, who, like himself, was watching the regatta from the bridge, has sworn in evidence that he addressed the appellant in the following terms: 'Betcher a pound you won't jump over, mate,' that the appellant, who had had a beer or (as he frankly admitted) two, replied in these words: 'Bet you I will, then,' after which pronouncement he removed his coat, handed it to the man Snooker, climbed on to the rail, and jumped into the water below, which, as was sworn by Professor Rugg of the Royal Geographical Society, forms part of the River Thames. The appellant is a strong swimmer, and, on rising to the surface, he swam in a leisurely fashion towards the Middlesex bank. When still a few yards from the shore, however, he was overtaken by a river police boat, the officers in which had observed his entrance into the water and considered it their duty to rescue the swimmer. They therefore took him, unwilling, it appears, into their boat, and landed him. He was then arrested by an officer of the Metropolitan Police engaged in controlling the crowds who had gathered to watch the regatta, was taken to the police station and subsequently charged before the magistrates, when he was ordered to pay a fine of two pounds.

The charges were various, and it is difficult to say upon which of them the conviction was ultimately based. The appellant was accused of:

(a.) Causing an obstruction

(b.) Being drunk and disorderly

(c.) Attempting to commit suicide

(d.) Conducting the business of a street bookmaker

(e.) (Under the Navigation Acts) endangering the lives of mariners

(f.) (Under the Port of London Authority By-laws) interfering with an authorized regatta.

It may be said at once that in any case no blame whatever attaches to the persons responsible for the framing of these charges, who were placed in a most difficult position by the appellant's unfortunate act. It is a principle of English law that a person who appears in a police court has done something undesirable, and citizens who take it upon themselves to do unusual actions which attract the attention of the police should be careful to bring these actions into one of the recognized categories of crimes and offences, for it is intolerable that the police should be put to the pains of inventing reasons for finding them undesirable.

The appellant's answer to the charges severally were these. He said that he had not caused an obstruction by doing an act which gathered a crowd together, for a crowd had already gathered to watch the regatta, both on the bridge and on the banks. He said that although he had had one beer, or even two, he was neither drunk nor disorderly. Snooker and others about him swore that he showed no signs of either condition when on the bridge, and it was powerfully argued that the fact of a man jumping from a high place into water was not prima facie evidence of intoxication. Witnesses were called to show that a man at Bournemouth had constantly jumped from the pier in flames without any such suggestion, and indeed with the connivance of the police and in the presence of the Mayor and Council. In the alternative, the appellant said that, assuming that he was intoxicated before his immersion, which he denied, he must obviously have been, and in fact was, sober when arrested, which is admitted; while the river police in cross-examination were unable to say that he was swimming in a disorderly manner, or with any unseemly splashes or loud cries such as might have supported an accusation of riotous behaviour.

In answer to the charge of attempted suicide the appellant said (a.) that only the most unconventional suicide would select for his attempt an occasion on which there were numerous police boats and other craft within view, (b.) that it is not the natural action of a suicide to remove his coat before the fatal plunge, and (c.) that his first act on rising to the surface was in fact to swim methodically to a place of safety.

As to the betting charge, the appellant said that he had never made a bet in his life; no other person but Snooker heard or saw anything of the transaction; and since Snooker, who on his own showing had lost the wager, confessed in cross-examination that he had not in fact passed any money to the appellant, but, on the contrary, had walked off quietly with the appellant's coat, the credit of this witness was a little shaken, and this charge may be said to have fallen to the ground. The appellant himself said that he did what he did (to use his own curious phrase) ‘For fun'.

Finally, as to the Navigation and Port of London Authority Acts, the appellant called overwhelming evidence to prove that, at the time of his immersion, no race was actually in progress and no craft or vessel was within fifty yards from the bridge.

But in addition to these particular answers, all of which in my judgment have substance, the appellant made the general answer that this was a free country and a man can do what he likes if he does nobody any harm. And with that observation the appellant's case takes on at once an entirely new aspect. If I may use an expression which I have used many times before in this Court, it is like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock, which not only is itself discredited but casts a shade of doubt over all previous assertions. For it would be idle to deny that a man capable of that remark would be capable of the grossest forms of licence and disorder. It cannot be too clearly understood that this is not a free country, and it will be an evil day for the legal profession when it is. The citizens of London must realize that there is almost nothing they are allowed to do. Prima facie all actions are illegal, if not by Act of Parliament, by Order in Council; and if not by Order in Council, by Departmental or Police Regulations, or By-laws. They may not eat where they like, drink where they like, walk where they like, drive where they like, sing where they like, or sleep where they like. And least of all may they do unusual actions 'for fun'. People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament. If anything is said in this Court to encourage a belief that Englishmen are entitled to jump off bridges for their own amusement the next thing to go will be the Constitution. For these reasons, therefore, I have come to the conclusion that this appeal must fail. It is not for me to say what offence the appellant has committed, but I am satisfied that he has committed some offence, for which he has been most properly punished.

Mudd, J., said that in his opinion the appellant had polluted a water-course under the Public Health Act, 1875.

Adder, J., concurred. He thought that the appellant had attempted to pull down a bridge, under the Malicious Damage Act, 1861.

The appeal was dismissed.

NOTE - See also H.M. Customs and Excise v. Bathbourne Literary Society for the law relating to fun and laughter.

(A.P. Herbert. In - inter alia - Uncommon Law, MCMXXXV)

Tim Wilkinson v Peter Hitchens on Cannabis and the Law - Part 1

2011-06-23T17:10:00.006+01:00

These are my opening remarks in a debate on the legal status of recreational cannabis, agreed with Peter Hitchens, who will respond as time permits.

Neither of us is in favour of the status quo. I support full legalisation and regulation; he - I hope this is a fair characterisation - supports harsher penalties and stringent enforcement aimed at near-eradication of recreational cannabis use.

My remarks are intended as a starting point for debate - I've drawn on three of Hitchens's blog posts and addressed a variety of points (his remarks, taken from the specified blog post in each case, are in bold), without pretending to present a comprehensive manifesto for cannabis legalisation.

My starting point is that we should presume that behaviours should be legal, and then ask - are there good reasons to make this behaviour a criminal offence? My answer is no. Ordinary cannabis users derive great enjoyment and – yes – pleasure from their indulgence in the weed. Many report taking it in modest quantities and find that it aids relaxation, enhances their appreciation of food, music, art and sex, and even stimulates creativity. To deny these benefits by more effective prohibition would involve far more oppressive measures, for the sake of preventing abusive overindulgence and the risk of cancer which accompanies smoking (though not as far as I know ingestion or inhalation of vapour). Those risks could be adequately mitigated, or in the case of the cancer risk, properly and – one might hope - honestly publicised, under legalisation and regulation.

Overblown claims about the dangers are rightly seen as ridiculous by those who know anything about it, which makes officialdom look foolish and means that even accurate information is likely to be disregarded. Legal regulated cannabis would be of known strength and free from such very harmful adulterants as wax, petrol, even plastic, which can be found in poor-quality illegal hashish. The current system already exposes users to criminal sanctions and means they must become involved at the margins of the criminal world to get hold of it, with the concomitant aversion to police and contempt for the law.

People need to be treated like adults, rather than infantilised by what some might refer to as the nanny state. Danger may be a reason for regulation, but with few exceptions like weapons, not for criminal sanctions on behaviour which need not be dangerous, and specifically not dangerous to others.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/03/i-was-wrong-on-cigarettes-but-believe-me-im-right-on-cannabis-.html
The ban on displaying cigarettes in shops will cause fewer people to smoke, as all the other measures have since the first health warning appeared on the first packet. And in time this strange, self-destructive habit, which is actually very new and only really invaded the civilised world during two disastrous wars, will be banished to the margins of life.

But this is not prohibition – it is regulation. A legalised cannabis would surely face the same – or stronger – restrictions. And that would, on the parallel used here, lead to its use being 'banished to the margins of life'. Prohibition – especially the thoroughgoing, stamp-it-out prohibition that is apparently required, is a very different matter, with criminal records, prison sentences (which impact on family of course) and a vastly expanded police operation.

Then we will have proof prohibition does sometimes work, if it is intelligently and persistently imposed. And the stupid, fashionable claim that there is no point in applying the laws against that sinister poison, cannabis, will be shown up for what it is – selfish, dangerous tripe. Where we can save people from destroying themselves, we must do so.

We will not have such proof, since this is not prohibition, and is also following rather than leading public attitudes (quite apart from other confounding factors which mean this is nothing like a controlled experiment).

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/03/in-defence-of-prohibition-and-other-matters.html
In the case of cannabis and other illegal drugs, it is still quite possible, through enforcement, to discourage all but the most determined from taking up the use of drugs which are not part of our culture and which are widely (and justly) viewed with suspicion. For that, possession must remain an offence and be effectively prosecuted.
By the way, I really do hope those posting here who continue to deny the possibility of a link between cannabis and mental illness will soon grow up and start acting responsibly. Don't they realise that some young person, acting on their complacent, ill-informed advice, might end up needlessly in a locked ward? And it will be their fault. Can they really not face the infinitesimally small risk of prosecution, and the still smaller one of actual punishment, as the price of their nasty pleasure? In that case, are they really the bold revolutionaries they imagine themselves to be? Must they sacrifice others for it? And how long will they continue to expect that the rest of us will take their insistence that 'it never did me any harm' at face value? As I've pointed out before, they're not the ones to say. The self-regard of these people is limitless, and is perhaps a sign of the deeper damage done by this drug even to those who appear superficially to be unharmed by it.

I can’t agree with this: the reason given for extending much harsher penalties to a substantial proportion of the population is that cannabis is 'not part of the culture' and 'widely (and justly) viewed with suspicion'. The justice of the suspicion is treated as an afterthought, despite being the important point.
If cannabis use is so harmful that we must attempt to stamp it out by the use of harsh penalties and vastly expanded detection efforts, rather than bringing it under regulatory control by legalisation, one would expect to be able to find good evidence of such extreme harmfulness (assuming that we are willing to accept that extreme social engineering should be brought to bear in any case). So where is this evidence? There actually doesn't seem to be any worth the name.

There is a burgeoning industry of producing studies that aim to find a link between cannabis and diagnoses of psychotic conditions, and of publishing those which do purport to find some evidence of such a link. But almost every such study includes a caveat stating that it has not been possible to establish a causal link from cannabis use to psychosis. The fact that those diagnosed with mental illness are much more likely to smoke tobacco, more likely to smoke cannabis and more likely to drink than the general population is not as far as I know in doubt among mental health professionals, and is generally regarded as a form of attempted self-medication. But of course there are no studies being done into the effects of alcohol or tobacco on psychosis, because this hasn't been rendered salient by the talking points of the pro-alcohol and other interest groups.

The fact that schizophrenia tends to emerge at around the age of twenty in the population at large, and that most people who start smoking cannabis do so in their late teens provides a ready source of bad statistics. Perhaps the most important kind of bad evidence adduced in support of this thesis is anecdote, often accepted by the general public because it is vivid and emotive and may come from a trustworthy individual who is not to be suspected of lying. But first, there a crashingly obvious selection bias here (as in the publication criteria for 'reefer madness' studies) - parents are not queueing up to testify that their offspring smoke a fair bit of cannabis without ill-effect, and if any were, their accounts would not be considered newsworthy. And second, there is a more personal source of bias - cannabis provides a handy exogenous explanation for a variety of ill-effects, from truancy to chronic paranoid schizophrenia.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/11/free-to-be-slaves-the-real-point-of-the-drugs-debate.html
The real division between me and the druggies - who can't see it because the concept that anything *they* do might be wrong is foreign to them - is this: I contend that it is morally wrong to stupefy yourself, and morally wrong to damage yourself or take a conscious risk of damaging yourself, with the aim of getting physical pleasure...in a period of moral weakness, relativism and uncertainty, such as we now live in, the law must intervene where personal self-restraint has failed, or the weak and gullible will suffer at the hands of the strong and greedy.

Stupefaction: that it is morally wrong does not of course entail that it should be subject to criminal sanction. The hoary example of adultery will do for one. Further, the claim that it is morally wrong in itself – rather than when done in some specifically irresponsible way such as when driving or in charge of children - is a hard one to justify. I confess to not really knowing where to start in rebutting thus argument – it just seems obvious to me that this isn’t the case, and that's not going to convince anyone who disagrees with me. I suppose I would say the burden of proof, as with regard to the need for prohibition, lies on those who make the claim.

But certainly Peter Geach – an eminent philosopher who has examined the issue in depth from a traditionalist, Christian perspective - concludes in The Virtues that such a case can't be made out – a view shared by his wife Elizabeth Anscombe:

p133:
If drinking alcohol is wrong, the reason is not that it makes you less alert than you might possibly be, but that makes you less alert than you then and there ought to be; and the degree to which you ought to be alert varies very much… a man safe tucked up in bed has no duty for even the lowest degree of alertness, for he could lawfully just go to sleep. There are mediate cases, into the casuistry of which I will not enter.
If we may for the moment abstract from the question whether the law-breaking that may be involved is morally objectionable, then we ought, I think, to judge about cannabis indica much as we judge about alcohol…

p134:
I have only considered the relaxation of the intellect from the height of attentiveness; a height, let me repeat, that we have no obligation to try to maintain.

(I should add here that Geach slightly obfuscates his first formulation of the principle that drinking in bed is acceptable by making it conditional on the aim of self-healing by consumption of hot toddy – but he makes it clear that there is no obligation to remain fully alert. In eth section that follows he makes a curt and I think inadequate argument against 'blowing one's mind' with hallucinogenics, but that need not really concern us.)

Conscious risk: I would dispute the degree of risk, though of course for those who smoke cannabis rather than ingesting it or using a vaporiser there is a risk similar to that of smoking tobacco. But I would simply say that this seems a highly paternalistic doctrine, and recalling that the discussion is of imposing harsh penalties on users, it seems to grant unacceptable power to the state to regulate private conduct, by means of a 'cure' that would impose severe penalties and intrusive policing so as to be worse than the 'disease'.

Obviously this prohibition doesn't apply to pain-killers or anaesthetics properly used, since these do not have this trivial aim.

This is to rest a good deal of weight on one's assessment of what is a trivial aim – by this standard, who is to say that bungee jumping, hang-gliding, driving through country roads, watching television, playing scrabble do not have a trivial aim and merit prohibition? Are we really going to legislate this kind of question?

It does apply to people who smoke tobacco (on the wilful self-damage argument), hence my support for legal restrictions on its sale and use.

But not stamping it out by a comprehensive prohibition campaign.

It applies to some, but in my view not to all, drinking of alcohol. The distinctions here (unlike with cannabis) are usually a matter of quantity, so I support laws limiting the sale of alcohol and taxes and pricing policies intended to discourage public drunkenness, and acts of violence committed when drunk.

But alcohol is just as much a matter of quantity as cannabis. And again, alcohol gets regulation and laws directly addressing its ill-effects, while cannabis is to be eradicated if at all possible.

The rank injustice of criminalising weed-smokers while pubcos are allowed to churn out alcopops is notable. And the laws which regulate alcohol use are not notably successful in moderating its ill effects – effects which are absent in the case of cannabis. You don't get the A&Es full of dope-smokers at the weekends: you don't have dope-smokers crowding the city centres fighting and swearing and smashing the place up. You don't have wife beating-cannabis-smoker syndrome. You don't have people traumatising their children by being visibly psychotically drunk when they smoke dope.

It's worth mentioning too that cannabis is a competitor for alcohol as a way to spend the night - and to a large degree the later hours of the night out - which is much less damaging to the individual than heavy drinking and makes people more considerate and much less aggressive than a drunk while they're on it.

I also support the teaching as truth of the Christian religion, which specifically counsels moderation in drinking and by implication opposes the stupefaction provided by the illegal narcotics.
...
A law which failed to distinguish between the person who drank a couple of glasses of wine or beer with a meal, and the person who consumed several pints of strong lager followed by large quantities of vodka would be a silly law, because it treated wholly different actions as the same.
Whereas anyone who smokes dope or takes cocaine or heroin 'at all' is in the same category.

Again, this is incorrect.

Drugged, zonked, stupefied, self-deludingly euphoric and in some cases hallucinating. That's why they take these things, for heaven's sake.

See my introduction for an alternative – and of course I would say much more accurate – view.
...
Drunks know they are drunk. Dope-smokers often don't know that they are stoned, or how stoned they are, or that they are talking or writing gibberish.

Again, they do know they are stoned, and how stoned they are – and of course drinking alcohol has been known to make people talk nonsense, often aggressive nonsense – and this effect does not necessarily require a very heavy dose. But so what if people talk a bit of nonsense when they are having a smoke?
...
Of course the pro-legalisers have a lot of big money behind them, and one has to wonder where it comes from, given that the legalisation of the major narcotics would be an enormously lucrative business among the wealthy pleasure-seekers of Western Europe and the Anglosphere.

I don’t think this is accurate, either. while at one point (in the 70s I believe) tobacco firms did prepare packaging for legal joints in case legalisation should become a reality, I'm not aware that anyone has found them to be lobbying directly for such legalisation, nor funding the pro-legalisation movement. On the contrary, cannabis being in large part a competitor with alcohol, the campaign against it is known to be supported financially by those with an interest in the big drinks companies. See e.g. http://blog.mpp.org/tax-and-regulate/alcohol-lobby-teams-with-law-enforcement-to-fund-anti-marijuana-campaign/09152010/).

Spurious Retraction: Goldstone

2011-06-23T13:25:00.002+01:00

This is overdue; I'd been planning a longish post analysing the Goldstone 'retraction' which Israel and allies have of course accepted at face value - face value, that is, if you're not reading too closely and stick to the headline message.

But I think Ha'aretz pretty well has the essentials covered, and even provides an explanation for the spurious retraction.

Fear and Loathing in the Press Pack

2011-06-18T12:02:00.000+01:00

An assortment of vids illustrating the stitch-ups and shut-outs of the corporate media, in case you hadn't noticed anything amiss. Got round to posting these as a result of Bensix's coverage of the media's non-coverage of the indoor pachyderm that is the Bilderberg Group's latest meeting.

First, a feature from BBC Radio 4's PM from 25 May 2011. Eddie Mair discusses press subservience with a sample of 4 hacks, the sample suitably diluted by the presence of fashion, sport and gossip correspondents. Ridicule is mentioned as a common means of keeping awkward correspondents in line, but another method, banning them, is also mentioned as what seems a pretty robust back-up plan.

(Quote from Humbert Wolfe.)

Next, a couple of clips of everyone's favourite cartoon neocon John Bolton throwing his weight around, illustrating the US approach to these matters. (He claims not to be a neocon, not sure on what grounds - the moustache perhaps.) Rajesh Mirchandani should be sacked for the very mildly challenging interview shown, apparently - the mind boggles as to what treatment the intrepid correspondent in the second segment merits.

And finally, a reporter daring to ask interesting questions of a politician is firmly rebuffed by members of the US media clique:

The Difficulty of Cynicism - Julie Nicholson on the July 7 inquest

2011-06-18T06:32:00.002+01:00

Julie Nicholson, relative of one of those who died in the Jul 7 attacks, frankly discusses her reaction to the coroner's report into the deaths, her desire to lay inquiry to rest and the need to adopt an attitude of trust, even though one may recognise that such trust is not objectively speaking merited.

Julie Nicholson interviewed by Eddie Mair for PM, BBC Radio 4, 6 May 2011

"We will never knowingly risk a civilian life" - ISAF

2011-06-17T22:54:00.001+01:00

Lt-Col. Mark Wenham, speaking for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), enunciates a previously unknown rule of engagement for 'coalition' forces in Afghanistan. From an interview with Shaun Ley on The World at One, BBC Radio 4, 30th May 2011.

[UPDATE 24 Jun 2011: the LA Times reports an interesting response from Wenham's colleagues to what seems a reasonable request from the Afghan president:

Karzai said at a news conference in Kabul: "This should be the last attack on people's houses. Such attacks will no longer be allowed."

His call was viewed as mainly symbolic. Western military officials cited existing cooperation with Afghan authorities and pledged to continue consultations, but said privately that Karzai's presidential authority does not include veto power over specific targeting decisions made in the heat of battle.

(via Glenn Greenwald, via Anonymous at Aaronovitch Watch)]

Walter Schwarz on the phenomenology of self-censorship

2011-06-17T22:52:00.000+01:00

Walter Schwarz gives a creditably (and unusually) honest account of how and why he decided not to report outrageous remarks made by a member of the Likud party - remarks which were a forewarning of the official policies and attitudes of that party and of Israeli officialdom.

Taken from an interview with Libby Purves on Midweek, BBC Radio 4, Wed 5 May, 2011.

"The Crowning Attainment of Historical Study" - David Aaronovitch on the Death of Osama bin Laden

2011-05-29T23:23:00.007+01:00

THE TIMES | Tuesday May 10 2011

Times Modern, pp4-5

Bin Laden dead? Only in theory

With the death of Osama bin Laden, the conspiracy theorists have mined a rich vein of incredulity. Yet, asks David Aaronovitch, are the internet and 24-hour news channels making us all susceptible to exotic disbelief

What Americans now "needed" to do, the BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner told Radio 5 listeners on Saturday night, was to match the newly released video of a blanketed Osama bin Laden watching TV with the rooms in the house where he was killed. And to do it so that we could all see. That was what was required.

But, the sceptical soul demands, why would President Obama and company "need" to do any such odd thing? Might such "proof" be of assistance to the US in fighting the remnants of al-Qaeda? Hard to see how. Or could it help to reassure the world community — some of whom seem to believe that bin Laden should have been taken as though he were a local villain being apprehended by the parish plod — that the killing was justified? Nope.

Sceptical? What is the scepticism about here? Sceptical about what Obama "needs" to do? That's a funny kind of thing to claim scepticism about; more a practical matter than one of belief. Or is the scepticism about there being any necessity to provide evidence? Again, that's a funny thing to be sceptical about. It's almost a one-liner: You say we should not believe things without evidence, but I'm sceptical. (You can have that one for your next dinner party.)

I think it's really a matter of the 'sceptical soul' - that is the person who is by nature a sceptic - and I think Aaronovitch is suggesting that scepticism is relevant here because - you guessed it - he's about to go off on another sneering binge, in which he and the rest of the quietists are, despite appearances, sceptical by nature, while the rest of us are flaky weirdos with fixed ideas.

Gardner's concern was not, in fact, connected with the practicalities or ethics of what we may not any longer call the War on Terror. His advice was aimed at quieting the idea that it wasn't bin Laden who was shot that night in Abbottabad, or that if it was bin Laden he was already dead, or any of the other exotic conspiracy theories that started almost the instant the news broke.

The fact that Aaronovitch has chosen Frank Gardner, of all people, to upbraid for conceding too much to the shabby basement-dwellers illustrates just how implacable his demand for orthodoxy is. And see how the sceptical stance 'account of covert op not to be trusted' has been transformed into a positive thesis - that what actually happened was one of (x,y,z...), that is, anything incompatible with the official account, including its bare denial. In other words, the rejection of a claim has been presented as a family of positive assertions, the only common component of which is of course the rejection of the claim. Thus scepticism becomes credulity, credulity scepticism. Voodoo Bollocks!

Producers on the BBC World Service described themselves as "astonished" by the number of listeners round the globe who contacted them by phone, tweet and e-mail to say that they did not believe that OBL was extinct On the BBC's website Have Your Say communicants such as one Honor Savage Scott mailed that "I'm not into conspiracy theories, but it seems odd they wouldn't take a picture for proof before throwing his body in the sea"

'I'm not into conspiracy theories, but' - no, that won't wash. Of course you're into conspiracy theories - otherwise how could you find an aspect of an official story odd? I mean, by any reasonable standard, it is indeed odd, but if you should say so, Aaronovitch's paranoid ear will hear an insinuation of... well, something or other; he'll let you know what you're insinuating later. But whatever it is, it's a conspiracy theory. That much is certain, bedrock of Aaronovitch's intellectual life.

Of course you might mean you're not into conspiracy theories as a rule, you're not a conspiracy theory hobbyist. But that's not good enough. Any hint that there could be any funny business, so much as a simple bit of noble lying, means not only that you're propounding some impossibly detailed theory as truth, but that you believe anything else Aaronovitch can dream up.

Within hours there were internet sites pointing to the imagined strange coincidence of the raid with the anniversary of George W. Bush's "mission accomplished" soundbite, with Hitler's birthday and even the event's proximity to the royal wedding. (Alas, conspiracists missed what my colleague Daniel Finkelstein noticed: that Osama bin Laden is an anagram of "lob da man in sea". Very fishy.)

There were - yes I bet there were, along with internet sites saying just about anything else you can imagine. What of it? The anagram, though - nice. I love anagrams. They're funny and clever. Not. Especially not when they require deviant spelling/strained slang. You have to admire Aaronovitch for this though - he can't resist this: it's the kind of faux-'clue' the conspiracists in his head would love, so he reports that they 'missed' this one.

In the lexicon of conspiracy theory, "truthers" refers to those who believe that George Bush brought down the twin towers. "Birthers" are those who contend that Obama was not born a US citizen and therefore was not qualified to become leader of the free world. To which we can now add "deathers" — the people who argue that bin Laden was not killed last week by US Navy Seals, for the uncomplicated reason that he had expired a few years earlier.

The 9/11 truthers are rather forced into this view by the logic of their own favoured conspiracy theory. If the malignant, omnipotent Bush conspired to fake the attacks on September 11, then it follows that bin Laden was not responsible. In which case one has to account for the subsequent videos claiming responsibility. Answer? They were faked. But why did bin Laden not disown these forgeries? Because, dummy, he was no more. According to a man who'd met a man who knew a doctor in Dubai, he'd been pushing up desert daisies since 2001. So whose was the body that the Americans let slide into the Persian Gulf? Either that of the long-frozen bin Laden brought out of cold storage like a timely casserole, or of a doppelganger.

Ah, I see - it came from some recess of David Aaronovitch. What do we call him and his ilk then? Spoofers?

Truthers and birthers are both served by such a narrative. For anti-Obama conspiracists in the US there is something too "convenient" about the business in Abbottabad. How fortunate for the beleaguered President, criticised for his weakness abroad, that — just eight months before the presidential election cycle kicks in again — he should be afforded such a masculine success. It all reminds them of the so-called October Surprise theory from the Carter-Reagan election in 1980. According to this story Ronald Reagan's intermediaries secretly acted to prevent the release of the Iranian hostages, for fear that it would assist the incumbent Jimmy Carter. They weren't released in time and Carter lost.

Divide and rule. Think there may be something in the October Surprise (and why wouldn't you)? Turn to defending that - by showing how it's different from whatever Aaronovitch says the 'deathers' believe. Think it must be rubbish? Well, exactly - then so must the story believed by the 'deep-freezers', deathers, truthers, birthers, what was it? Them, anyway. What you're unlikely to do, as Aaronovitch knows, is infer from the fact that the October Surprise scenario is plausible that the hotch-potch theory devised by Aaronovitch is too.

Conspiracy theories, like other stories, tend to some shapes more than others. The idea of body swaps or body movements is a favourite conspiracist notion. John Kennedy's brain was supposed to have gone missing, Lee Harvey Oswald was said to have a double, the murdered anti-nuclear campaigner Hilda Murrell's body was theorised to have been moved by British state servants, as was that of Dr David Kelly, as was the corpse of Bill Clinton's dead aide, Vince Foster, in 1994. The bin Laden theories fit this preoccupation with cadaver mobility.

Aaronovitch, of course, also believes that fact tends to some shapes (the cock-up, the co-incidence) more than others (the sneaky trick, the institutional stitch-up). In his Voodoo book, he claims to have reached The crowning attainment of historical study...an intuitive understanding of how things do not happen.

And the 'shape' Aaronovitch observes is not of course common to conspiracy theories that are not about suspicious deaths. And those that are are, it's entirely reasonable that they should take this 'shape'. Cover-ups of suspicious deaths may be expected to involve some degree of tampering with the body or parts thereof. Tampering with dead bodies is suggestive of concealment of what really happened to them. How Lee and Harvey Oswald are supposed to fit in to Aaronovitch's latest voodoo theory is anyone's guess.

This stuff can seem maddening, but is it, in any way, dangerous? In the US and here, whatever some may say, conspiracism is a minority pastime. Obama's stated reason for not releasing photographs of the dead bin Laden — that the gruesome nature of the pictures might inflame opinion against the US (Arab sites are not known for their squeamishness) — seem solid to Americans. An NBC poll showed that nearly two thirds agreed with Obama's view. Unlike Frank Gardner, the President took the view that even if he produced a whole album of kicked-bucket photos, there would still be those convinced that bin Laden was not killed on May 2.

Maddening. Well, he said it. But the premise seems to be that the only reason why the public deserve to be provided with any kind of evidence is to stop them slandering the state. And even if we accept that, we certainly shouldn't suppose that providing such evidence would be pointless just because 'there would still be those convinced that bin Laden was not killed on May 2' - the sceptical switch is openly done here - the aim is not to convince the public of a narrative, but merely to prevent them from clinging to mad delusions. As if Aaronovitch would be satisfied if the population reserved judgement.

Aaronovitch also tries the reverse bandwagon by saying 'conspiracism' is a minority pastime (not something you, dear reader, would want to get involved in). This is obviously at odds with the message of his voodoo book, which presents 'conspiracism' as a source of all history's ills and associates the 'role of the conspiracy theory in shaping history' with Hitler, Stalin, McCarthy/HUAC, and about 15 flavours of virulent antisemitism), but a propagandist must use whichever tool is needed on a given occasion, and of course consistency (thus truth) is one of the first casualties of such an approach.

But there are places where conspiracism is not such a harmless hobby. At the weekend the pollster YouGov published the results of a survey in Pakistan, conducted just after the Abbottabad raid. The poll, probably over-representing Pakistan's educated classes, was not reassuring. No less than 66 per cent of the sample believed that, whatever else happened that night, the death of Osama bin Laden didn't. And less than 25 per cent thought that al-Qaeda had brought down the twin towers in the first place.

Ah yes, the curious habit of ex-colonials to be distrustful of the West. Being a conspiracist is evidently one of those Yes, Minister irregular verbs. 'I am a judicious consumer of credible intelligence, you are a pathetic loser who should be embarrassed, they are dangerous maniacs who must be stopped. Just for the record, the answer that 66% of respondents chose was 'No, I suspect the person they say they killed was not Osama Bin Laden'. The precise semantics of this labyrinthine formula resist analysis (I'm pretty sure the person they say they killed was UBL), but the verb 'suspect', rather than 'believe' is rather prominent.

Also for the record, the less-than-25% figure excludes both the 46% who said 'Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda had nothing to do with the attacks', and the 31% in the 'Don't know/ prefer not to say' camp. The usual Aaronovitch shenanigans when it comes to interpreting doubt and uncertainty: suspicion or doubt is translated into certainty one way or the other, as it suits him.

Notice that we haven't had any explanation of why Aaronovitch says that in Pakistan, 'conspiracism is not a harmless hobby'. If he had established anything relevant at all, it would be that 'conspiracism' is quite widespread, which is not the same thing.

The political context of this finding was more worrying. Maybe as a consequence of this conspiracism, maybe as its precursor, three quarters agreed with the view that the US "does not respect Islam and considers itself at war with the Muslim world" — 86 per cent opposed drone attacks and 70 per cent were against accepting economic aid from America. In other words, conspiracist thought fits the pattern of distrust of America. If bin Laden didn't launch the 9/11 attack, then everything subsequently done in Afghanistan and Pakistan is based on another, ulterior motive.

OK, so this is worrying rather than harmless because conspiracist thought fits the pattern of distrust of America? This is weasellyer than a Kenneth Graham battle scene. Fits the pattern? What does that even mean? Correlation? Where is this correlation? And do we have any reason to suppose that such a correlation would indicate causation from the 'conspiracism' of "don't trust their story about a recent covert op" to the virulent anti_Americanism of "don't like their flying killer robots" and "don't want to be dependent on their largesse/have the junta borrowing money from them and saddling us with the repayments"?

Surely if the point is to establish that 'conspiracism' has harmful effects, we should have something a bit more convincing than a transparently evasive remark about 'fitting a pattern'? (And note that Aaronovitch is very fond of accusing the 'conspiracists' of imposing patterns where there aren't any.) Still, Aaronovitch wasn't able to establish this thesis in the course of a sizable book supposedly dedicated to exactly that purpose, so we shouldn't expect too much from him here. I suppose the point must lie in the final sentence, which exemplifies another favourite tactic of Aaronovitch's - telling other people what they 'must' believe. For one thing, believing that everything subsequently done in Afghanistan and Pakistan is based on a motive other than - what? Catching UBL? is neither an odd belief, nor one that depends on any view at all about who did 9/11.

But what about the inference that Aaronovitch does attribute to the mad Pakistani conspiracists? If Bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11, then... what? Well, Aaronovitch supposes (as anti-9/11 strawmanners will) that the only alternative is that 'Bush' dunnit. Non-USians are of course capable of observing that the erstwhile Mr President is not the sharpest apple in the barrel, so this idea itself is hardly going to be a runner. More to the point, Aaronovitch is rather obviously not using one of his favourite tools here: the anti-semitism card. Surely everyone knows that conspiracy theories are intimately intertwined with antisemitic accusations that the Mossad get up to dodgy activities, especially in the mid-East/Muslim Central Asia, all round there, you know what they're like. And many of the more substantial and detailed 9/11 hypotheses posit Israeli (and domestic pro-Israeli) involvement. So the fact that he's overlooked that possibility would be very odd, except of course that it doesn't suit his purposes in this particular sentence to consider it.

Then there was another finding, just as relevant. By far the biggest concern among Pakistanis was official corruption. There is no trust whatsoever in officialdom, or government sources. Indeed, government tells you one thing in Pakistan, it seems most prudent to believe the opposite, no matter how far-fetched.

One question is whether, over time, Pakistan will become more like us, or we'll become more like them. Is it possible that the capacity of the internet to permit the rapid dissemination of bizarre "truths" is making more of us liable to conspiracist thought?

Possible? Weeell, yes, I suppose so. (It's good to ask people questions to which they can only really answer 'yes'. It softens them up and makes them think they agree with you.)

But just to piss in Aaronovitch's swimming pool a bit, I'd like to point out that the biggest concern among Pakistanis was official corruption is not actually the same as, and doesn't imply, There is no trust whatsoever in officialdom, or government sources. Oh yeah, and neither of these implies the ridiculous government tells you one thing in Pakistan, it seems most prudent to believe the opposite, no matter how far-fetched. No-one uses heuristics like that - not even Aaronovitch and his anti-conspiratorial colleagues, who are concerned about opinion, not provenance. Maybe characters in logic puzzles, or something.

But, really. I mean, Aaronovitch actually is saying what he says: that Pakistanis automatically believe the opposite of the official story - no matter how far fetched. (Let's hope the junta don't find out, or they might work out a cunning logic trick to get round the problem of mistrust at a stroke.) What a knob-end.

So, to re-program all you bovine consumers, let me provide my own push-polling question: is it possible that distrust of the government is due to having a corrupt government, rather than something to do with a mysterious infection called 'conspiracism'? Say yes. No, actually say it. Good.

This last weekend the online Guardian newspaper published an article by the actor Keith Allen (Lily's dad, for you youngsters). The subject was a "documentary" that Allen is showing at the Cannes Film Festival this week.. The film is called Unlawful Killing and concerns itself with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the subsequent inquest in 2007-8. Allen's ostensible complaint was that the film couldn't be shown in Britain because "lawyers" had demanded 87 cuts that he wasn't prepared to make. Allen portrayed this as a sinister form of muzzling by the British Establishment of a film that clearly raised big questions about Establishment complicity in Diana's death.

What Allen doesn't tell readers is that the censoring lawyers were almost certainly his, and that their advice [almost certainly?] was based on his vulnerability to actions for libel and slander. [slander?] This is unsurprising, given the tone of a five-minute YouTube section of the film linked to by Allen himself in his article. In essence [rather than actually] this clip accuses the Duke of Edinburgh of being a Nazi when younger because he attended a school in Germany in the 1930s and "marched" in a filmed funeral procession alongside Nazi bigwigs. In fact the Duke followed the Jewish founder of the German school Kurt Hahn to Britain after two terms, and was just 17 at the time of the funeral of his sister, brother-in-law and two nephews who had been killed in an air crash in Ostend.

Allen claims to have been convinced by Michael Mansfield, the vain but brilliant QC who represented

Mohamed AI Fayed at the Diana inquest, that there was something very suspicious about the crash that killed her. Mansfield has repeated his suspicions in his recent autobiography. But the actor fails somehow to notice what happened at that inquest. In summary Mansfield was humiliated by the difficulty in providing even the most basic evidence for Al Fayed's contentions. His cross-examination of Diana and Dodi's Fayed-hired bodyguards was at times catastrophic.

[For more conspiracy theories and to tell us yours, go to thetimes.co.uk/life]

Shhhhlpp..unh? Whassat? Oh it's a sidebar. Nodded off for a bit there. Sorry, I think I may have dribbled on your shoulder. Let me know if we get back to the topic.

Even so, the film is instructive in technique and intention. He claims there was a conspiracy-not just by the Royal Family and MI5 "but collectively by the British Establishment— judges, lawyers, politicians, police chiefs; secret services, even newspaper editors". Allen includes interviews with a Simone Simmons (Diana's medium), the schlock biographer Kitty Kelley, his own researcher, an American comedienne, the late Tony Curtis (an interview conducted, one hopes, before his death) and the former newspaper editor and now star of CNN Piers Morgan.

Hang on, I think that was a gag. The late.. Yes. Definitely a gag.

Morgan is interviewed by Allen in a restaurant. He tells Allen of his incredulity on hearing the claim that the British security agencies hadn't assassinated anyone for 50 years.

Morgan: "I laughed out loud! What's the point of them then? We've all been to James Bond movies ... So if you don't believe that where does that leave the rest of the Establishment evidence? It's weird when you think that the British Establishment can think of nothing worse than Dodi Al Fayed impregnating and possibly marrying Diana, that she's conducting an international offensive against landmines, with all the crippling economic problems that would bring for the British Establishment again, and the British Government .. .

Allen: "And America."

Morgan: "And America. If you add all those to the mix then if you were going to do something dodgy to Diana then that's the time you would do it. As she used to say to me. 'I'm trouble to them. I won't go away. I won't go quietly'."

Allen (voiceover): "Presidents have been killed for less."

Viewed as Allen presents it, Morgan's comments are the essence of conspiracism. It defies his intuitive belief in how things happen that Diana would not have been a target for the royals and the "Establishment", and therefore she probably was.

Ah, the intuitive belief in how things happen. Where have I heard that before? Ah yes, Voodoo Theories:

fraught though the understanding of history is, and although there can be no science of historical probability, those who understand history develop an intuitive sense of likelihood and unlikelihood. This does not mean they are endorsing the status quo. As the great British historian Lewis Namier wrote, 'The crowning attainment of historical study is a historical sense — an intuitive under-standing of how things do not happen.'' Conspiracy theories are theories that, among other things, offend my understanding of how things happen by positing as a norm how they do not happen.

It may be that, in this case, Morgan was the victim. According to him, his interview was misrepresented by Allen. "I don't think Diana was killed," he tweeted on Sunday, "nor do I think there was a plot to kill her. I was asked why I thought others believed that"

Because they wanted to, Piers. Because they wanted to. And something else that increasingly unites the Pakistani truthers and recreational theorists in the West. [sic.] The era of 24-hour satellite news means that people who now see so much and who hardly trust what they do see, will certainly not trust what they don't see. From Cairo to Java, they expect to be shown the thing, from the body to the birth certificate. Meanwhile, internet access turns everyone into their own instant expert, surfing the sites to see which truths they prefer, and which authority (no matter how precariously claimed) they wish to acknowledge. So much so that countering the claims of these faux experts can be seen, as Frank Gardner saw it, as being almost as important as fighting terrorism itself.

The era of 24-hour satellite news means that people who now see so much and who hardly trust what they do see, will certainly not trust what they don't see? Can you run that past me again, please? Actually, don't bother.

[UPDATE 30 May 2011 16:30: spelling, grammar, style, minor expansions and clarifications]

These Are Secrecy, Not Privacy Laws.(+ Aaronovitch on sexual frugality)

2011-05-29T20:53:00.005+01:00

The big problem with recent developments in common law 'privacy' protection is that they are happening under the rubric of the tort of breach of confidence. They are thus highly likely to be used by corporations to press even further the absurd degree of 'commercial confidentiality' and even 'taxpayer confidentiality' that they already enjoy, and which helps to obscure the workings of what is now in effect the ruling class.

Once precedents and principles have been set by personal privacy cases, they are likely to be used by corporate lawyers. Given the huge resources at the disposal of big corporations, they can afford to wait for favourable cases, then press their advantage to the full. An example of one such principle is the idea that confidentiality can be owed to someone you've never had anything to do with before, rather than resting on a duty that emerges from some particular relationship.

Talking of 'privacy' law as protecting corporations and other impersonal entities is of course quite out of place. Describing laws about what may be published, however the information was obtained, as being about privacy rather than secrecy is somewhat strained too. I tend to think of privacy as being concerned with such issues as freedom from intrusive surveillance, spying and indeed phone hacking, which is a criminal matter apart from anything else. I'm not sure I've made out an utterly clear distinction here, but I think there is one to be made which is of some importance.

The recent civil actions that have carved out the new doctrines have tended to rely not solely on the tort of confidentiality as extended in reponse to the HRA and Convention, but also on such actual invasions of privacy. This tends to muddy the waters, since the 'anti-invasive' conception of privacy undoubtedly has an influence on what is seen by the judge as the desirable outcome, but given the prior state of the common law and an incremental approach to developing it, the legal doctrines enunciated in their decisions tend to fall on the secrecy/confidentiality side of the distinction.

For example, Naomi Campbell received an award in relation to surreptitious photography and subsequent publication:

The Law Lords reinstated the High Court award of £3,500, based on breach of confidentiality and breach of duty under the 1998 Data Protection Act.

And Max Mosley, of whose award Eady J. remarked:

Naturally, the very fact of clandestine recording may be regarded as an intrusion and an unacceptable infringement of Article 8 rights. That is one issue. Once such recording has taken place, however, a separate issue may need to be considered as to the appropriateness of onward publication, either on a limited basis or more generally to the world at large. In this case, the pleaded claim is confined to publication of the information; it does not include the intrusive method by which it was acquired. Yet obviously the nature and scale of the distress caused is in large measure due to the clandestine filming and the pictures acquired as a result.

Again, Eady, deciding CTB v Thomas:

It now seems that the Claimant may well have been "set up" so that photographs could be taken of Ms Thomas going to one or other, or both, of the hotels. Although the position is not yet by any means clear, the evidence before me on 14 April appeared to suggest that Ms Thomas had arranged the hotel rendezvous in collaboration with photographers and/or journalists. He first began to "smell a rat" when she told him at the first April meeting, perhaps feigning innocence, that she had been followed and recognised when she visited the first hotel.

The law is certainly developing on the basis that the extension of confidentiality protections applies to individuals and is based on the Convention and HRA, but the first Trafigura injunction, which only unravelled (and was not reversed) due to a combination of Parliamentary privilege and internet traffic, seems to have been granted in recognition of commercial confidentiality being applied to a party not itself participating in a relationship of confidence.

As far as I can tell, this was a new move, and may well have gone through by some kind of vague analogy with cases involving individual privacy. In effect, this makes the right over confidential information an in rem claim, like a property right, which attaches to the information and protects it against the world at large, not merely an in personam one, based on particular obligations. (These are not legal terms strictly applicable in this context, but denote general juridical concepts.)

If that is the case (and it's very hard to tell since the proceedings seem to be shrouded in some mystery), then this effectively gives companies the same protections as individuals: since confidentiality is not a matter of intrusion, and if the protection of 'confidential' information (as opposed to a relationship of confidence) is to be good against the world, then corporations can prevent publication of certain information simply because the information is held in confidence by some third party. This is a very easy condition to meet - if, for example, the corporations' lawyers have been told about it.

The other problematic aspect of the Trafigura and similar super-injunctions is that of prior restraint. The courts have been increasingly wiling to enjoin non-publication rather than granting compensation for damage after the fact. This development too seems to have been developed primarily with an eye to interests in individual privacy, which makes sense since it is far easier to argue that a natural person has an interest which is not open to trade-offs (is incompensable) than that a corporation, especially a profit-seeking one, does. And yet such injunctive relief has, almost as night follows day, also been granted to corporate claimants like Trafigura.

This is a common enough pattern: rights are first granted to to natural persons, who have a strong claim to various protections, and once established, are made use of by artificial, merely legal 'persons' like commercial companies. In the US, for example, there has been a steady trend of corporate 'persons' claiming, and being granted constitutional protections which were not originally envisaged as applying to such entities, and which it is counterintuitive and highly dubious to grant to them.

If the Trafigura case should find a slightly more worthy successor, especially if in the meantime decisions in cases with natural persons as plaintiffs should have been made in expansive language, or the justifications for 'privacy' injunctions come unmoored from their origins in the HRA and Convention, we can expect to see even less transparency and even more power to suppress information being accorded to the corporations which are already probably the primary locus of power and influence worldwide, and whose power is increasing as they capture regulators and take over state functions through privatisation.

This aspect of things might play a part in explaining why the business class, even including Murdoch, seem happy to let the courts keep developing 'privacy' law.

But what, I hear you cry, of Aaronovitch? What Voodoo Bollocks has he come up with on this topic from behind his paywall? The answer: I don't know. I do know that he's not yet in a position to jack in the Times gig in favour of a permanent Radio 4 job, so is still churning out his column, and has evidently recently done something broadly in favour of injunctive relief based on an expanded conception of breach of confidence, though framed as a discussion of adultery by public figures.

And how do I know this? Because, in a vaguely Carrolian move (Aaronovitch Watch having shifted its attention to Nick Cohen more than anyone else) Philipa of Christopher Hitchens Watch has addressed the 'Vitch's article, quoting:

"anyone can see that there's no read-across from sexual frugality to professional capacity"

As Philipa points out, there is equally no 'read-across' (not to be confused with 'read-ahead', which I've been known to accuse Aaronovitch of) from a lack of sexual 'frugality' to adultery. I'm inclined to disagree with her that adultery by those in positions of trust should be presumed to suggest dishonest character, and that there is therefore a legitimate public interest in reporting it.

Marriage is a sensitive business, people have their own arrangements, and infidelities are not always secret from the spouse (e.g. Mary Archer), even though they might well not want the details of such 'arrangements' made public, nor indeed to fully recognise the situation. Unhappy though such spouses might be, it is not always going to be the case that dishonesty is involved of a kind that will be reflected in public life. And I speak as one who agrees that ethical standards in public life are abysmal and worsening.

Another issue that might be thought to justify publication is security: Philipa mentions Profumo as an example. This is basically a counter-espionage issue, and applies to those with access to national secrets. What Fred Goodwin got up to is not therefore terribly relevant, to my eye. If he was involved in cosy corruption between the sheets, that would need to be established rather than presumed or, like a conflict of interest, regarded as discrediting in a quasi-presumptive way.

In cases of counter-espionage there are two strands. One is pillow-talk and the risk that sexual intimacy loosens tongues. I suppose one could just about argue that the threat of publicity - if it acts to deter - might help by reducing the incidence of sex with relative strangers, but that is pretty tenuous and a funny way of going about things.

Vulnerability to blackmail is the second aspect. This was used, especially but not only, pre-1967, as justification for (very, very selectively) treating homosexual activity as a bar. If anything, secrecy laws might be thought to reduce blackmail risk from those in high office with guilty secrets, at least insofar as the potential blackmailee perceives the risk of exposure as non-negligible. But this too is highly implausible.

Not being embarrassed or feeling the need for secrecy, however, is enough to remove the danger of blackmail entirely, as I think vetters have more or less acknowedged in recent years with regard to open homosexuality. Philipa says:

the public are right to mistrust a politician given to deceit and debauchery if Lord Boothby is any example. More recently David Laws' deceit about his expenses was fraud.

I'm not sure exactly what the Boothby point is - there seems to be some speculation that he might have been involved with murders, and he was certainly involved with the Krays. However, the fact that he was protected from publicity (and that apparently to an extent the Krays benefited from this press reticence) was not of course due to secrecy laws, but to informal influence - including, it seems a strange kind of implied reverse blackmail: don't publish this or you will expose the Macmillan family. Laws' blaming his fraud on closet homosexuality sounds to me like a contrived mitigation, but even if accurate, rests on the same points already made in connection with blackmail, and doesn't indicate a connection between deceit and fraud - there was as far as I know no deceit apart from the fraud.

To address what I take to be Aaronovitch's argument: while I don't necessarily disagree with him (or rather with what he wrote) on the substantive point that marital infidelity doesn't indicate unfitness for office, the fact remains that if adultery, or indeed Oaten-style 'hardsports' (trickier, though, that one) are to be irrelevant to peoples' careers, that has to be because the public accept that fact and behave accordingly, and not because the facts are hushed up by secrecy laws.

Philipa has an interesting remark on the need for trust, though I think in the context it must be about intra-marital trust. If so, I'd suppose it appeals to the likelihood - or at least possibility - of public exposure, and sees that as supplying a general deterrent to adultery, and/or a reassurance that undiscovered adultery is less likely. I don't think these would be strong points, but in a wider context, the same kind of point might be, given that we are talking about 'confidentiality' and not privacy.

we need to trust. I know that. Life is far too scary without it.

Unfortunately I think this is often true, even (or especially) when such trust is not well-founded. What do you do when trust can't be justified, yet it's too scary not to trust? Trust unjustifiably, that's what. That's why Aaro's particular brand of authoritarian quietism is so successful in my opinion. But I'll give the prolonged discursus on the topic of 'conspiracy theories', attitudes to, self-censorship, wilful ignorance etc. a miss for now.

[EDIT 31 Mar 2011 - typo, 'extended by' the HRA etc altered to 'extended in response to']

Aaronovitch, Lies - a retraction

2011-05-29T00:48:00.006+01:00

In my last post, David Aaronovitch: expert on lies, I stated that Aaronovitch's 2005 article we weren't lied to was "bollocks". It has come to my attention that this is a misleading statement.

Andrew Watt, of the voluminous and absorbing Chilcot's Cheating Us blog has pointed out that in fact the article is Voodoo Bollocks.

I acknowledge that while I did not intend to mislead, this was a half-truth which might have given an inaccurate impression, and that Dr Watt is entirely correct in his observations.

I am therefore glad to accord this correction prominence commensurate with that of the original statement.

I had considered merely appending a little footnote somewhere unobtrusive, perhaps even including a dismissive remark instructing the reader to conclude that it doesn't affect my main argument. I might even have adopted the common technique of silently editing the post, or the less common one of just deleting the original while avoiding embarrassing 'page not found' errors by substituting a blank page. However, not being a paid journalist, I can afford some professional ethics.

Apologies to both of my readers. I should have been more careful.

UPDATE 29 May 2011:

via Jay Rosen, via Crooked Timber: the most spurious and creepy retraction I've come across yet.

As reported by the Washington Times
:
John DiIulio, the former director of the White House faith-based initiative office, yesterday apologized for saying that President Bush's domestic priorities are determined exclusively by political considerations.

Using words uttered hours earlier by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who called Mr. DiIulio's remarks in the January edition of Esquire magazine "baseless and groundless," the first high-ranking Bush official to leave the administration asked for forgiveness and vowed never to speak or write again about his short White House stint.

"My criticisms were groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples. I sincerely apologize and I am deeply remorseful," Mr. DiIulio said in a statement.

David Aaronovitch: expert on lies

2011-05-15T21:25:00.011+01:00

Accountability depends on long memories. Alistair Campbell's performance over the Iraq war was transparently mendacious to rather a lot of us, but it's apparently only now, at a comfortable temporal distance, after he has 'moved on' and nothing is likely to be done about it, that his lies on behalf of the Blair government are being nailed down.

Major-General Michael Laurie, a former intelligence official involved in the dossier that's not already known as 'dodgy' and which was defended so passionately by 'tears on tap' Campbell has recently given evidence to the Chilcot inquiry:

In written evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Maj-Gen Laurie rejected Mr Campbell's claim that the dossier was not intended to make the case for war: "This was exactly its purpose and these very words were used."

Among former and current members of the BBC news department, the comments were received yesterday with mixed feelings that combined a sense of vindication with anger at the way the organisation's journalism has been treated. Mr Marsh said he was unhappy with the implications by Lord Hutton in his 2004 report that the staff on Today had shown a lack of professionalism. "This vindicates our position and shows Hutton was wrong in criticising Andrew, criticising me and criticising the Today team," he said. "Just flat wrong." Rod Liddle, a former Today editor who hired Mr Gilligan, said: "These comments tell us what we knew already – that the BBC told the truth, Gilligan told the truth and Alastair Campbell's outrage was confected and it was a lie."

While we're revisiting old lies, it's worth having a quick shufti at what David Aaronovitch had to say about the dossier and the wider case (such as it was) for war. After all, Aaronovitch certainly seems to consider himself an authority on who is or isn't lying, as the ex cathedra pronouncements throughout his voodoo theories book bear witness.

So his expert opinion on this little matter? We weren't lied to.

That's bollocks of course, but perhaps Aaronovitch suffered from the same problem that, if he is to be believed, afflicted the Blair government: The government didn't deceive anybody over Iraq and WMD, but was misled itself. I couldn't possibly comment - let the reader be the judge.

To assist in that process, here's a pertinent passage:

In May 2003, Andrew Gilligan famously asserted that 'a week before publication' (of the September dossier), Downing Street 'ordered it to be sexed up ... and ordered more facts to be discovered'. The following weekend in the Mail on Sunday, Gilligan elaborated: 'I asked my intelligence source why Blair misled us all over Saddam's WMD. His response? One word ... Campbell.' For weeks, various parts of the BBC continued to make the claim that the complaint of government ill-doing came from the heart of spookery. News 24 on 4 June 2003, for example, began an item: 'An unnamed intelligence officer has told a BBC journalist that the government probably exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam in order to justify the war.'

This source was David Kelly and the recollection was Gilligan's. But around the same time, Kelly had had a conversation with Newsnight reporter Susan Watts. This conversation was taped. Kelly told Watts: 'You have to remember I'm not part of the intelligence community.' Watts asked him about WMD. 'My own perception is, yes, they have weapons,' said Kelly. 'A "clear and imminent threat?"' 'Yes.'

That's: Watts asked him about WMD. 'My own perception is, yes, they have weapons,' said Kelly. 'A "clear and imminent threat?"' 'Yes.'

And here's the full passage Aaronovitch is quoting, from the transcript of the interview:

SW: Do you think there ought to be a security and intelligence committee inquiry?

DK: Yes but not now I think that has to be done in about six months time when we actually have come to the end of the evaluation of Iraq and the information that is going to come out of it.

I still think it's far too early to be talking about the intelligence that is there, a lot of intelligence that would appear to be good quality intelligence, some of which is not and it takes a long long time to get the information that's required from Iraq.

The process has only just started I think one of the problems with the dossier - and again I think you and I have talked about it in the past is that it was presented in a very black and white way without any sort of quantitative aspects.

The only quantitative aspects were the figures derived essentially from Unscom figures, which in turn are Iraq's figures presented to Unscom - you know the inaudible litres anthrax, the 4 tonnes VX - all of that actually is Iraqi figures - but there was nothing else in there that was quantitative or even remotely qualitative - I mean it was just a black and white thing - they have weapons or they don't have weapons

That in turn has been interpreted as being a vast arsenal and I'm not sure any of us ever said that, people have said to me that that was what was implied.

Again we discussed it, and I discussed it with many people, that my own perception is that yes they have weapons but actually not inaudible [not problem] at this point in time

The PROBLEM [sic - TW] was that one could anticipate that without any form of inspection, and that forms a real deterrence, other than the sanctions side of things, then that that would develop I think that was the real concern that everyone had, it was not so much what they have now but what they would have in the future.

But that unfortunately wasn't expressed strongly in the dossier because that takes away the case for war [cough] to a certain extent.

SW: A clear and present, imminent threat?

DK:Yes.

And now a reverse-angle zoom shot of the two quotes (presented as one by Aaronovitch) in context:

First, Aaronovitch's 'My own perception is, yes, they have weapons,':

And the original: my own perception is that yes they have weapons but actually [not problem] at this point in time. The problem was that one could anticipate that without any form of inspection, and that forms a real deterrence...it was not so much what they have now but what they would have in the future.

And now, a super slo-mo hi-def split-screen replay of the second quote, side-by side with the original:

Aaronovitch version:

'A "clear and imminent threat?"' 'Yes.'

And the original:

[DK:]...it was not so much what they have now but what they would have in the future. But that unfortunately wasn't expressed strongly in the dossier because that takes away the case for war [cough] to a certain extent.

SW: A clear and present, imminent threat?

DK:Yes.

It's a mistake anyone could make.

UPDATE May 16 2011:

Bensix has politely pointed out that (as I should have guessed, and indeed checked) Aaro retracted the claim in question:

Two weeks ago, on this page, I attacked the notion that we had been lied to by Tony Blair about the threat from Iraq. My main argument was that scrutiny of the Joint Intelligence Committee reports in the period up to and including 2003 would have left a reasonable person to conclude that there was a significant threat from Iraqi WMD.

However, in one passage in the article, I quoted a transcript of a conversation between Dr David Kelly and the Newsnight reporter Susan Watts. In it, Kelly says: 'My own perception is, yes, they have weapons.'

'A "clear and imminent threat"?' asks Watts.

'Yes,' replies Kelly.

A reader subsequently wrote to The Observer's readers' editor, pointing out that the context of these remarks made it clear that Dr Kelly actually meant the opposite, that, in fact, there was little by the way of imminent threat. I went back to the Hutton documents, and the reader is right and I was wrong.

I am sorry about this; I should have been more careful. And although this doesn't affect the argument about the government lying, it does narrow the gap somewhat between the account of events supposedly given by Dr Kelly to Andrew Gilligan and that given by Kelly to Susan Watts.

Bensix also points out that Gilligan had some pointed remarks on the topic too.

It was a bit of a quick post, but I should have done me due diligence (not to be confused with Aaronovitch's kind of 'being more careful'). I think because I hadn't heard about this one before, I may have subliminally assumed that the transcript had only become widely available some time later.

So, ignore me.

Prison Works (better with offender management and probation services, and not at all without them)

2011-05-11T23:32:00.000+01:00

In the news: Longer prison sentences deter re-offending, study shows.

Yes, this is just one study, yes it seems to have been picked out for publicity by the Cons, yes it only looks at the effects on a specific individual of past punishment directed at them, more relevant to a 'short sharp shock' doctrine than a more general conception of prudential deterrence. But does it indeed show that longer prison sentences reduce reoffending - or in four-legs-good terms, that 'prison works'? Not really.

From the study, produced under the rubric of the DoJ's Compendium of reoffending statistics and analysis

Those sentenced to 1 to 2 years in custody had lower re-offending rates than those given sentences of less than 12 months – the difference in proven re-offending rates was 4.4 percentage points in 2008.

Custodial sentences of less than twelve months were less effective at reducing re-offending than both community orders and suspended sentence orders – between 5 and 9 percentage points in 2008. This reinforces the finding in the 2010 Compendium which was only based on 2007 data. The findings were similar for both community orders and suspended sentence orders.

The findings are not conclusive on whether the deterrent effect of longer custodial sentences is effective at reducing re-offending. Despite higher re-offending rates, offenders receiving sentences of less than 12 months do not have access to offender management programmes and are not subject to supervision by the Probation Service upon release. This latter factor is also likely to explain some of the difference between community sentences/suspended sentence orders and short prison sentences. However, the true impact of offender management programmes and Probation supervision cannot be reliably established using current Ministry of Justice administrative data.

I won't try to assess the multiplicity of considerations (e.g. small samples, arcane statuistical disputes) that may mean the study is of little or no value in showing anything. So, taking the report on its own terms:

Sentences under one year are less effective at reducing reoffending than non-custodial sentences.
Sentences under one year, which are not accompanied by offender management programmes and probation service supervision, are less effective than sentences between 1 and 2 years, which are.

From this we might infer that prison makes things worse, but supervision etc. is so effective that it more than compensates for that.

This doesn't address the matter of the comparison of 1-2 year sentences with 2-4 years, though. The report seems to show that the longer sentence is correlated with a lower reoffending rate (during the year after release). I'm not trying to rustle up some comprehensive rebuttal here - a study is a study, there is a large literature on these questions, and for all I know longer sentences in this range do have some effect on reoffending (how that happens is another question - there are many factors that might be involved, some of which might be achieveable without custodial sentences). I will permit myslef to say that longer stences fior the same offcne might reflect other factors which could in turn lead to closer supeervision in that post-release year - i.e. there might be an informal or less clearly-documented difference of the same kind as that already addressed.

But no further. Let the last word go to the report itself:

The findings from this paper are not conclusive on whether the deterrent effect of longer custodial sentences is effective at reducing re-offending.

Conspiracy for Dummies, Lesson 1: don't write it down

2011-05-11T15:18:00.006+01:00

A rare - minor - case in which the conspiratorial (dishonest, co-ordinated, unacknowledged) behaviour that's an integral part of big business as usual is actually blown wide open.

BBC News:

Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE), has been found guilty of tricking people into switching from their existing energy firms.
...
Steve Playle, of Surrey County Council Trading Standards, which brought the prosecution, said he was delighted with the court's decision.

"When we first became aware of the sales script being used by Scottish and Southern Energy we were convinced that it overstepped the mark and was misleading to potential customers," he said.

"A doorstep seller had a print out which he claimed showed consumers were paying too much with their current energy supplier, but the print out did not show this.

"The seller didn't actually have a clue but the sales script was cleverly designed to put potential customers on the back foot and to open the door to a sale," he added.

'Wilful mis-selling'

It is thought to be the first time that one of the big six energy firms has been prosecuted for using dishonest sales techniques.

The problem of doorstep trickery has plagued gas and electricity consumers since the industry was privatised in the 1990s.

Audrey Gallacher, of Consumer Focus, said the firm's behaviour had involved "deliberate and wilful mis-selling."

"'Misleading doorstep energy sales have been a nightmare for consumers for years, leaving many switching to a worse energy deal," she said.

"This verdict has revealed a deliberate tactic by SSE, not the behaviour of a rogue salesperson."

Honestly, it's really not difficult to do it properly: you employ the right kind of people (this can be by trial and error - just sack those who don't reach their targets) and rely on them to use a bit of initiative in making up the gap between your required result and what they can get by being honest. Even if managers coach the slower sales staff to improve their dirty tricks skills, they don't actually build it into a written script. That way, you have ample deniability, because as intimated, without the script, if you get caught you can simply blame "the behaviour of a rogue salesperson". No controlling mind, no awareness at upper management level, one expendable drone sacked and replaced, business as usual.

Let that be a lesson to these firms. Consumer protection means you do have to put a modicum of effort into making it look good.

Still, it's no biggy. The appeals process will no doubt be pursued (by the richer side) until such time as it's exhausted or finds that this was a case of a rogue manager and not the company's fault. And if past form is anything to go by, the fine will be manageable enough: for all I know it will be outweighed by the financial benefits of running a fraud without needing to pay for staff who have enough initiative to take a hint.

UPDATE, originally 12 May (Blogger has had a meltdown and quietly rolled back a few days' changes to this and other blogs, it seems):

Audrey Gallacher, Head of Energy at something called Consumer Focus agrees that This verdict is a wake-up call for the energy industry, but seems to take a more sanguine view than I do about what lessons might actually be learned:

Firms should be reviewing their...pay and incentives systems for salespeople...

Since this must be intended as a remedy for 'don't ask don't tell' sharp practice on the doorstep, it amounts to the suggestion that sales as we know it be abolished.

Hysteria for Women, or: What has Julian Assange got that David Aaronovitch hasn't?

2011-03-15T16:05:00.008Z

So did Wikileaks really help spark the Tunisian revolt? Probably. I think commenter 'eleny' on some messageboard I was looking at had it right:

"Maybe people believed that there was corruption. But when they had concrete examples in the words of their leaders it infuriated the citizenry."

Believing is one thing but knowing is all important. And facts appear to be what WikiLeaks provides.

Secrecy, its degrees and varieties and its penumbra of deniability and doubt, is a favourite topic in these my sporadic and desultory remarks. I haven't attempted anything approaching thorough investigation or analysis of the situation in Tunisia, but the idea that a credible source certifying previously penumbral factoids can catalyse latent resentment seems fairly plausible to me. (One aspect is the idea that publicity provides a standard around which previously private opinion can rally, as in the Emperor's New Clothes parable.)

But letting that issue dangle unargued, I'll turn instead to the burning question of the moment: what would Serious Political Analyst and unwonted but determined Radio 4 colonist David Aaronovitch have to say about this? I don't know the answer to that either, which is probably good for the old equanimity. I imagine he subscribes to one of the 'power to the people as long as they do what we want' arguments that have emerged among the neocons and all the usual suspects, but again, I don't actually know, and don't intend coughing up whatever it costs to find out.

What I do know, though, thanks to a recent foraging expedition among some old chip wrappers, is what Aaronovitch was writing about Wikileaks in his Times column a few months ago. And in light of some evidence that Wikileaks is capable of having a role in some pretty spectacular and broadly welcome events, it seems worth looking at what he was saying then in some detail.

The Times, Thursday December 9 2010, Opinion, p33

This is no Robin Hood. They were our secrets

The Assangeists don't trust the State to run foreign or defence policy. So why do they trust it to run everything else?

David Aaronovitch

I had the same conversation half a dozen times yesterday in different forms and on different media. Wasn't there something strangely "convenient" about the legal process under way to investigate sexual allegations against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks? What this must mean, if anything, is this: is there some kind of plot whereby Mr Assange's enemies have somehow procured these charges to silence him? In other words the Yanks have secretly (ha!) leant on the Swedes, the Swedes have silently manipulated two women, and there we are, halfway to the fourth Stieg Larsson novel, The Girl with the Badly Constructed Condom.

Aaronovitch has approximated accuracy here: what people were saying - huge numbers of people who are not normally interested in observing conspiratorial behaviour - is that Mr Assange's enemies have had a hand in these charges. But not necessarily to silence him - perhaps to spoil his attempt to gain permanent residence in Sweden, perhaps to taint his reputation, perhaps to hobble, disrupt or undermine the work of Wikileaks, and perhaps of course - watch this space - in order to get him into custody while they decide on the best way to inveigle him into the US penal system or its Kafkaesque shadowland. The latest development in the extradition proceedings against Assange have an irrelevant magistrate giving his decision (against Assange), in the certain knowledge that appeal proceedings will begin with his words still hanging in the air. [Edit: since that was written, a District Judge has taken the appeals procedure another unedifying step closer to exhaustion.]

Anyone who is interested in the motivation and merits of the action taken against Assange by Swedish prosecutors can find plenty of material on the web; I'm not going to analyse it in detail here. One can certainly say, though, that these suspicions are not exactly tinfoil-hat territory - the US is indisputably out to get Assange, the charges are incredibly dubious on a large number of counts, and the announcement that Assange had surrendered to custody was followed with amazing swiftness by an announcement from the US state department that they 'may' seek to extradite Mr Assange - out of the Anglo-Swedish frying pan and directly into the inferno, Stateside.

Aaronovitch does his best to isolate a weak and paranoid-sounding strand from the web of evidence: so his chosen quote is "convenient" ( not that he is necessarily quoting any actual words he has actually heard, of course). "Isn't this a bit convenient?", as in 'isn't it convenient for the international Jewish Illuminati that this earthquake should keep the West Kettering UFO Working Group's inaugural conference and buffet off the front pages?'. The idea is to suggest a very weak circumstantial case, one so weak that it can only be hinted at. But Aaronovitch is really pushing it here - not many are going to fall for his Emperor's New Clothes schtick this time. Avert your eyes, gentle reader, for the Grand Panjandrum Aaronovitch stands before us, naked and quivering with indignation. (My concern is not of course to spare his ample blushes, but to save you from a disturbing and, I fear, indelible image.)

Leave aside the fact that Aaronovitch has chosen the word himself, rather than have to face the unpleasant task of directy confronting bold assertions like 'this appears to be a honeytrap' or 'the Swedish authorities have been leant on'. 'Convenient' is presented here as a sneaky way of suggesting a hidden agenda, of turning coincidence into conspiracy. Of course this euphemistic usage is generally used as an ironic understatement, as for example in a 2003 article from Media Lens: With the convenient discovery of a deadly poison in Wood Green, London, Tony Blair has again made explicit reference to the "related" threats of international terrorism and Iraq - here we hardly need point out that the context made this discovery rather suspect - whether planted, provoked, or merely trawled for by an unprecedentedly thorough kidney-bean hunt.

We can be a little more precise here: the term 'convenient' implies motive. If some event is convenient for an actor, then it serves that actor's ends. This means that the actor would have had an objective motive to bring about that event. And the existence of an objective motive (as in the 'cui bono' principle) is some kind of evidence. The evidence is far stronger if it can be shown that the suspect believed that the event would be useful, that it could be brought about, and that bringing it about would have low costs in time money and foregone opportunity. (And if the suspect believed these things, then they need not even be true to establish motive.)

Conveniently enough for my purposes, the Media Lens report makes scathing reference to Aaronovitch's own contribution to the Bush administration's second burst of scattergun propaganda, in an article entitled 'A few inconvenient facts about Saddam. Inconvenience here is also used to impute motive - a motive assumed to be thwarted. (This is the poor man's conspiracy - the rich and powerful may be accused of carrying out a conspiracy, the powerless must make do with wanting or trying to.) The opponents of the war are presented as motivated by something other than the humanitarian imperative, which as any fool knows mandates immediately dispatching a horde of burger-eating murder-monkeys. So the 'facts' that Aaronovitch has pulled out of some noisome crevice are 'inconvenient' - they frustrate and expose the evil motives of the anti-war constituency¹

It's no great shock to discover that Aaronovitch is unaverse to imputing motive to others while ever ready with the tinfoil hat quip for any opponent who may mention the M-word. Of course, for motive to be of much interest or the cui bono? question to be apt, there must be a crime, something identifiable with some plausibility as a human action of which we may ask - who would do such a thing? In the absence of anything that looks dodgy, there is little point in looking at motive. But the charges against Assange are dodgy - hugely dodgy. They're the dodgiest thing since Jammy Dodgers, they're Roger the Dodger dodging a dodgem, they're a hotwired Dodge convertible speeding through the dodgy end of Dodge City, they're the Grand Master of the Grand Dodge…you see what I'm hinting at here. And given that, it is not exactly a stretch to point the finger at the US as being involved.

But when pointing that finger, you had better be aware of a sneaky little pest at your elbow - yes, it's Aaronovitch again, tugging at your sleeve, pulling you insistently in the direction of a peculiar little scenario of his own devising. 'What this must mean...' he informs us, and '..in other words...' - oh, these are other words, all right. Other, entirely different, words, with an entirely different meaning. With studied incompetence, Aaronovitch has come up with a peculiarly specific, convoluted and implausible-sounding scenario, which he insistently presses us to accept - and immediately of course reject - as the only possible implication of all this crazy talk about how the US dirty tricks machine is trying to get Assange. The Yanks told the Swedes, and the Swedes told the groupies, do you have some honey for my trap? Of course there are plenty of other scenarios, which I hardly need to enumerate. Few of them involve a chain of command which goes from the CIA (say) to some Swedish government agency and thence to Assange's accuser.

Oh yes, and into this slim paragraph Aaronovitch manages to cram two suggestions that any behind-the-scenes manoeuvring is implausible because it would have to be 'secret' and 'silent' - 'ha!' he interjects, hoping perhaps to jab-and-move before the reader has a chance to reflect that he seems to be trying to suggest that Wikileaks now publishes live updates on CIA black ops.

On Twitter yesterday Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine, opined that "rape is being used in the Assange prosecution in the same way that women's freedom was used to invade Afghanistan. Wake up!" (But anyone actually awake in 2001 will remember that women's freedom was not at all the pretext for toppling the Taleban).

It was indeed not the pretext, though note that Aaronovitch now seems to accept that there was a pretext, rather than, say, a good reason honestly presented. But anyone who was awake in 2001 and had an interest in women's rights will agree that it was an issue used to bolster support for the invasion. The accumulation of inadequate reasons for war was of course to come to the fore in the case of Iraq, but it was already being used in the run-up to the Afghan war:

Orlando Sentinel, October 01, 2001: Spotlight Is On Taliban Oppression Of Women - Until the days after Sept. 11, most Americans knew nothing of the horrific treatment of Afghan women living under Taliban rule. But for longtime feminist Eleanor Smeal, the fight against the Taliban started years ago....

Los Angeles Daily News, Oct 14, 2001 : Speaking for Those Who Can't - Mavis Leno finally has won the attention of the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, major network news divisions, respected newspapers and the general public for the impoverished, oppressed women of Afghanistan.

Washington Post, Oct. 6, 2001: Text: President Bush's Weekly Radio Address BUSH: Good morning. Today I want to update Americans on our global campaign against terror. The United States is presenting a clear choice to every nation: Stand with the civilized world, or stand with the terrorists. And for those nations that stand with the terrorists, there will be a heavy price. America is determined to oppose the state sponsors of terror. Yet we are equally determined to respect and help the men and women those regimes oppress [...] Afghanistan is a case in point. Its Taliban regime has made that nation into a sanctuary and training ground for international terrorists--terrorists who have killed innocent citizens of many nations, including our own. The Taliban promotes terror abroad and practices terror against its people, oppressing women and persecuting all who dissent.

Aaronovitch though, was too noisily engaged in cheer-leading from the War on Terror bandwagon to hear the 'feminism' dog-whistle. Even on day two of the New American Century the tribal drums of war are audible, albeit decorously muffled:

The Independent, Sep 12 2001 David Aaronovitch: Anger is the first response, but understanding is better - This...was the terrorist's Pearl Harbor...we feel more vulnerable than ever, even here in Britain...perhaps we can destroy those who would attack us?...hell, this is war. The stakes have been raised beyond a point that any have imagined possible. I would love to do this. I want to see cross-haired pictures of cruise missiles smacking into terrorist bunkers; I want to see A10 gunships blast camps; I want to see mad mullahs and fanatic sheikhs dragged from their bunkers to trial in the United States and Europe. This is, after all, war....

But this is only the insistently belligerent subtext, shorn of the more-in-sorrow-than-anger platitudes that give it a sheen of judicious moderation. So in the interest of balance, readers who have not recently eaten are invited to follow the link, while for the rest, we note Aaronovitch's pious observation that In the middle of this great desire for revenge, we have a duty to the dead – and to those who will otherwise die – to remember that, even in the post- modern world, terrorism (and especially terrorism like this) always requires a context.

But hang on, what's this? Nine days later, the black crepe is off. Gone the velvet glove, gone the soft soap, Aaronovich has clenched his pudgy palms into a fist of furious fulmination. First - beep beep, flashing light - he reverses out of his parking bay:

The Independent, 21 Sep 2001 David Aaronovitch: Help! There's been an outbreak of Pinterism ...a part of their argument – that certain forms of military action could act merely to create more terrorism – seems to me to be mere common sense. But there is nevertheless something wrong here...There is a reflex reaction, an instinctive, almost involuntary response, the result of 50 years of Cold War. According to the nine actors and authors, children die in Iraq because of UN sanctions, not because of the way in which Saddam has used the resources available to him.

Now it's not the warmongers who are impulsively irrational, but the peaceniks (or 'Pinterists' - Aaronovitch likes to cultivate the appearance of a cult, and we'll see this stunt in action against Assange later). And only ten days into the New American Century, we're on the topic of Saddam. And what of the dangers of an 'angry' response?

In the past week I have watched mono-causalists like this get themselves into the incredible position of arguing that the US, alone among nations, should have no great reason to be hurt and angry when its citizens are butchered. The Afghans might have cause to go all blood-lusty if some of their folks are killed, but not the Yanks...Are the Americans...saints who we can call upon to forgive the extraordinary act of war of 11 September?...there has been no cowboy action by the US. Bush, far from going around stoking up anti-Muslim hatred, has been at pains to visit mosques and reassure the Muslims of America. In this country Blunkett has not rushed in to curtail civil liberties

Brilliant. Aaronovitch is really earning his money as a heavyweight political commentator and Very Serious Person with this analysis. 9-11 is an act of war, and since the Americans are not saints, bloodlust is fine. Concerns about anti-Muslim propaganda and the curtailment of civil liberties are unfounded.

I fear the consequences of inaction or incomplete action more than the risks of actually intervening. Those who opposed the Gulf War or the Kosovan actions would, if successful, have had more blood on their inert hands than the allies did. It was, in hindsight, a mistake not to topple Saddam back in 1991. So I want America there.

No wonder Aaronovitch didn't notice that the Bush administration's attempts to co-opt the feminist movement and the cause of women's rights - he had not only swallowed the case for the Afghan War; he had adopted it as his own, and was already getting started on Saddam - again, note this is only day ten of the War on Terror. And just in case anyone is in doubt:

I want more America in our lives, not less.

That was 2001. By 2010, Aaronovitch had so much America in his life that US Army war logs and State Department cables had become 'our secrets'.

So back to Assange and Wikileaks. Aaronovitch' seems for some reason to have rather underestimated Naomi Klein, assuming apparently without checking that she, silly cow, doesn't know what she is talking about. As a result his attempt to score points with an irrelevant gotcha fails. It does succeed though in inching him a little closer to the end of his screed without having to address the fact that allegations written down under a heading of 'rape' don't provide a throw-Assange-in-jail-free-of-scrutiny card.

For his next trick, another ephemeral remark from a female commentator, this time smallholder of bad puns, Kathy Lette:

Kathy Lette threatened tweeters with the information that: "Hubby Geoff Robertson has rushed back from Oz 2 represent heroic Julian Assange", adding, "Obviously America now believes in Freedom of the Suppress."

Aaronovitch rises to this new challenge by outdoing Lette with a particularly witless conceit of his own, filling a few more lines in the process:

One hopes that hubby can, at least, tell his DC from his Stockholm.

And so on. Other tweets linked to blogs, blogs to YouTube, and in minutes you could know the identities of the women accusers, and find their reputations, motives and physical appearances being torn to pieces by commentators, conspiracy theorists and freedom-of-information purists. If there was a lynch mob in town, it wasn't wanting to hang the celebrity WikiLeaks man, whom John Pilger declared to be innocent (as he may well be), and who Jemima Khan gushed over outside the court. As Mr Assange's Dickensian lawyer promised: "This is going to go viral. Many people believe Mr Assange to be innocent, including myself. [They] believe that this prosecution is politically motivated."

This is great stuff - the widely-held and justified suspicion of US involvement is - just as Klein suggests - presented as a witchhunt. The fact that one of the first things Assange's accusers did was to go to the press might be thought relevant to the issue of whether the scrutiny of their conduct and speculation about their motives really amounts to unfair 'tearing to pieces' (and Aaronovitch's mention of denigrating peoples' physical appearance is as far as I can tell just down to projection).

It's worth remembering that Assange is the one in prison, not his accusers. If we are to try to guess whether the charges are justified, awaiting the outcome of any trial that might occur would be too late - it is likely that the US would extradite him before that even happens. The court deciding his bail application has to prejudge the case in that way, the court which will adjudicate the Swedish extradition application must do so, and so must anyone who has even the vaguest intention of arguing or protesting about the case. And if one is going to try to assess the case, it would be ridiculous to be squeamish about the obvious possibility that the charges are unfounded. Instead, we address the probabilities unflinchingly - and if our conclusion happens to support the conclusion that two false allegations have been made, and even that the allegations were, nominally at least, of rape, then we will have to live with it.

Aaronovitch dislikes this Telegraph piece, twittering Brilliant, now the Telegraph insinuates a conspiracy in #wikleak Assange charges - though in fact the article quotes Wikileaks, not insinuating but openly asserting strong suspicion of such a conspiracy. But most of the story is a report of Wikileaked US cables stating that Sweden's Justice Department were involved in a secret deal with US intelligence, hidden from the Swedish Parliament and public. This is obviously relevant to the matter of whether Assange was the victim of a political prosecution, because a Justice Department that is already engaged in a conspiratorial pact with US intelligence is, other things equal, more likely to instigate a political prosecution on its behalf than one that has no such murky relationship. (Just as someone who has been hanging around with the Cuban opposition has ipso facto, knowingly or not, almost certainly been hanging around with agents of the CIA - and is therefore more likely to have been recruited or manipulated by them than the general population is.)

Nate Silver attempts, with some success, to use the analogy of the Bayesian calculus in illustrating some of the issues here. Aaronovitch Watch's Daniel Davies even tweeted his way though a conversation with Aaronovitch on the topic of that analysis:

daaronovitch Brilliant, now the Telegraph insinuates a conspiracy in #wikleaks - http://goo.gl/7sLDa - and admire the way it is implied, not stated.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch you say "insinuates a conspiracy", I say "actually describes a decision to undermine parliamentary oversight", potato, tomato?
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest I was talking specifically about the bracketing together of the desire to avoid oversight and the Assange charges.
dsquareddigest Nate Silver explains why you have to look at the Assange charges in context of the political angle http://tinyurl.com/2f589jy @daaronovitch
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest Does that not simply come down to the possibility (& nothing more) that the well-known are more likely to be pursued?
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch I think the point is that unless you think politically motivated prsecutions never happen you have to accept this might be one
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest There is no evidence at all of a "Get Assange" in this, but theoretical "possibility" is highlighted. Classic.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch The possibility of a"Get Assange" isnt theoretical, it's practical. Might or might not;can't be ruled out nor asserted as fact
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest That makes you religious, at any rate. Thinking about it there are some serious problems with Silver's thesis.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch I think it makes me agnostic - you're the one asserting a taboo on considering the possibility of something that often happens
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest Not at all. If there's no evidence for something existing I don't emphasise its possibility alone among many others.
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest Trying to find the link posted earlier by Linda Grant from Time magazine on why Swedes are so sensitive about sex charges.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch Silver's point is that "political prosecutions are often launched at people like JA" is (by Bayes Theorem) evidence.
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest Tweeted by @lindasgrant - Time magazine report, which makes Silver's stuff look too clever-clever - http://bit.ly/dT34em
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch I really don't see how this bears on Nate's point. How would these laws make a politically motivated charge less feasible?
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest U miss the point. Which is about extreme sensitivity to the charge making it more likely that case like this wd be pursued.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch This case was in fact dropped and then picked up again. Possibly for political reasons possibly not. Can't rule it out.
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest Maybe it was done because the Swedish prosecutor was flashed at when a child. No evidence for it but can't rule it out.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch True, although that would leave he fact that this unusual prosecution happened when and to whom it did as a mere coincidence
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest Assange was in Sweden in August and the allegations relate to then. What is coincidental (mere or unmere) about any of that?
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch Well your Freudian theory doesn't explain why prosecutor picked up charges against JA in wk before cable dump, specifically.
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest It isn't Freudian at all. It's far more small p "political". Which week in last 4 months wdn't have been "coincidental"?
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch The week in which charges were dropped. Political prosecutions happen, so odd cases with political defendants are suspicious
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest Why "odd"? And why "political" (in yr sense) rather than "high-profile"?
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch "odd" because it's unusual for a prosecutor to close a case then re-open it a week later ...
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest How "odd" is it?
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch "political" rather than "high profile"becuase JA is highprofile for specifically political reasons - he didnt win X factor
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch that's Nate's point. "Juxtaposing" the political context is exactly the right thing to do. It's part of the information set.
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest Just seen your latest re juxtaposing and information sets. You now sound like the writers of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch You sound like someone who doesn't understand Bayes' Theorem.
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest You got that right. But I did understand Silver's article.
...
daaronovitch Classic #assange conspiracising from Sydney Morning Herald - http://bit.ly/hIs6UF - note the 'coulds', 'mights' etc & total absence of fact.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch straight up, what, as a %age chance, do you think the probability is that Assange is the victim of a political prosecution?
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest Political in what way, and political by who? Answer those and I'll try and answer your question, dd.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch Either a totally fictious case, or a real (but weak) case pursued due to political pressure, tracing back to US intelligence.
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest You mean fictitious by accusers? I can't assess the probability of that, but it must exist. You mean political pressure....
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest ..in Sweden cos Assange is high-profile (as against letting it go if no-one had heard of him)? No idea cos don't know with..
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest ...what alacrity they've pursued other extraditions for similar offences. Political cos the Swedes want to kiss US ass? 1%..
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch Either. Lets just say we're talking about the probability that this case wouldn't have been brought without external pressure.
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest ...Political cos US secretly leaning on them to do it? 1%. And that's generous where there is ZERO evidence.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch thanks. I think you're off by a factor of at least 10.
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest You mean you think it's 10% Yanks and 10% Swedes, making 20%?
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch we went through this last night. US intelligence track record is relevant evidence, as is the Swe/US secret intel sharing deal
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest What IS the US track record in getting a Scandinavian government to prosecute third party internationals against its will?
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch I think my baseline estimate of the likelihood of intelligence involvement in prosecution of a US enemy is 10% ex any info
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest That is not an estimate, baseline or centreline, dd. That is known as a guess.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch well yes, but I think your guess implies an implausibly passive US intelligence operation. Also, Scott Ritter.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch Swedish government did allow rendition flights; Swedish military later prevented them.
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest This is all a way of saying that, tho you have no evidence of it and no reason to suspect it, you just kinda believe it.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch don't think that assigning a 10% probabilty can be fairly paraphrased as "kinda believe it". I think it's possible. so do you.
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest I think it's possible that you are an asset of Pakistani intelligence, ISI. But it's fucking unlikely.
dsquareddigest @daaronovitch If I showed up causing trouble for an enemy of ISI, perhaps you'd upgrade that from "fucking unlikely" to "very unlikely"
daaronovitch @dsquareddigest I'm not keen on them and you're being a pain in the arse to me.

Note: you have no evidence of it and no reason to suspect it. 'No reason to suspect it' is entirely unjustified; there is plenty of reason to suspect it. And in Bayesian terms, if you have a reason to suspect something then you have evidence for it. It may not be strong evidence, it may be outweighed, but it is evidence. But then Aaronovitch, in Voodoo Histories, lays claim to 'the crowning achievement of historical study, a sense of how things don't happen' - and in this conversation that seems to translate into assigning a 1% subjective probability to them.

At the risk of getting too incestuously AaroWatch-based and self-referential, I'd also note that someone plausibly purporting to be Aaronovitch appears quite unconcerned about tangible evidence when it comes to things that seem obvious to him.

Of Aaronovitch and 'Phil D'Bap', the pseudonymous commenter whose defence of Aaronovitch provoked the previously linked comment marathon, I recently remarked: I will confess I did actually think they were one and the same, without having any real evidence and without being willing to rely on that (purported) fact in any way...(when I say 'real' evidence, I mean concrete, firm, clear etc.) Brushing aside concerns about the strength and tangibility of evidence, someone plausibly purporting to be Aaronovitch airily announced of course I was Phil D'Bap. Of course he was. But the very same kind of speculation about someone sneaking around under a pseudonym might just as easily have prompted accusations of paranoid conspiracy mindedness, and remarks about 'ZERO evidence', had Aaronovitch (for it was very plausibly he) happened to take issue with it.

So anyway, Aaronovitch is careful to acknowledge that this phenomenon cuts both ways:

Of course, on the other side of the divide (although not in this country) are those who cannot be bothered to wait for anything as superfluous as a charge or a trial and have prejudged Mr Assange as a rapist because of his WikiLeaks activities. Here, such opinions are decidedly unfashionable.

The mild sarcasm about a rush to judgement is trumped by the subtle yet firm approval implicit in choosing to describe such views as 'unfashionable'; a term only ever used to indicate approval of an unpopular opinion, to suggest that its unpopularity is due only to some fad, to mark it clearly as the doggedly toughminded option.

What has been lost in this furore is that some big and difficult questions lie behind the WikiLeaks affair. I can best illustrate this by repeating Ms Khan's al fresco whoosh on Tuesday: "I am here because I believe this is about the principle of the universal right of freedom of information and our right to be told the truth."

Sorry, which Ms Khan is this? Oh yes. I'm losing track of the straw women Aaronovitch is contriving to knock the stuffing out of.

A cursory examination of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shows that, compendious as it is, it contains no such provision. There are rights to free expression, assembly, association, participation, legal representation, nationality and so on, but not to freedom of information.

I wonder if Aaronovitch is in the habit of leafing through the UDHR in response to any comment involving the word 'right'? He has no right to do so, even in principle, as I'm sure he would agree. If he were a little less quick with the patronising put down, he might have reflected that the right to vote is hostage to the information one has about what the government has been up to, and that the right to freedom of expression is founded as much on the interests of those receiving information as those expressing it. He could then explain exactly why he thinks, if he does, that the existing situation is just fine and that there is therefore no need for Wikileaks or similar organisations (and perhaps - I think we should be told - no need for investigative journalism, whistleblowing or indeed anything beyond a subscription to the Times 'opinion' pages).

The casual invention in the internet age of such a new right can lead to some interesting confusions. In the past few days I,ve spotted a new trope among some writers, in effect comparing Mr Assange, wearing his WikiLeaks hat, to Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese dissident and Nobel prizewinner. Wasn't it the case, asked one, that if Mr Assange had been a Chinese whistleblower, Hillary Clinton would have praised him, rather than strongly criticising him?

There is no such useful parallel. Dr Liu got II years in prison for expressing an opinion, He was not tried for being a conduit for hundreds of thousands of stolen confidential state documents. This should be obvious to all but the most challenged, but somehow the "creation" of the new information right has put, in many people's minds, the two situations on a par.

'In effect' is a favourite of Aaronovitch's. Logically equivalent to 'not', it's a kind of verbal finger-crossing that provides cover for him to say whatever comes into his head. Here, Aaronovitch has come across a blog comment that suggests a double standard in the treatment of state secrecy according to which state we are talking about. And that means, 'in effect' that he can start wittering on about the Nobel peace prize.

The Peace Prize has somehow retained its capacity to impress (just as the Booker prize may yet survive The Finkler Question) despite having memorably rendered political satire pointless by being awarded to Kissinger, and having been handed to an embarassed Obama, presumably in recognition of his ability to climb the greasy pole of US politics. So it's hardly any great surprise (to those of us who unlike Aaronovitch are paying attention) that Liu appears an unlikely choice of recipient for this dubious honour.

And it is the 'new' right to know what the government is up to that has apparently led to some over-literal parallel being drawn between Assange and Liu, in "many peoples' minds". Many people's minds? Who? Does it matter? Why are we even discussing this? At this point, patience stretched, one is tempted to fling down the greasy sheaf of newsprint with the cry of "for pity's sake get on with it and stop dredging up irrelevances to sneer at, you tedious little man". But we forebear. Let us talk of happier things: of moles, probable and unlikely.

This absolutism casts Mr Assange and his probable mole, Private Bradley Manning, as unnegotiable goodies in an eternal battle between "power" (them) and "the people" (us). Mr Assange is on our side against our governments. He is the Robin Hood of information, or as one tweeter put it, "the new Jason Bourne". What is being fought out is the first great battle between "the established order" and the white info-knights of cyberspace. Whose side are you on?

Sorry, what were the choices again? And who is actually demanding we pick sides? Is it Aaronovitch, reporting someone else? Or just Aaronovitch himself? More importantly, since when is Manning the 'probable mole', i.e. the source of the diplomatic cables? (Notice, not 'probably the mole', but 'the probable mole' - the kind of mole that may be only probable, but is still, subliminally speaking, a mole.)

Let me make a quick observation ahout how, in this supposed war, contradictory positions are adopted. We have Tea Party types who bellow that the State having anything to do with the health of its citizens is outrageous, but who want to stop access to any information about what that same State does abroad or when it deploys its weapons. The government can't be trusted with a hernia payment, but nor should it be questioned over a misplaced bunker-buster.

Symmetrically the discussosphere resounds to the moaning of those who love the State to run everything, take responsibility for everything — except anything to do with policing, defence or foreign policy. When it comes to these, the default assumption is that government suddenly becomes de facto corrupt and that the people must be protected from it.

Oh, there's more. Now we have the Tea party, and on the other side, people who 'love the State to run everything' - anyone would think Aaronovitch had turned Tory, with this kind of rhetoric. Of course in the real world of actual political opinions, as opposed to the cardbaord cutout caricatures that Aaronovitch likes to set up, there isn't really anything contradictory about thinking that the state should perform certain functions but that there is also a tendency to for it to be too authoritarian. And reducing the secrecy of the state's operations is not going to interfere with making hernia payments or indeed any other legitimate function. This really is poor stuff, even for Aaronovitch.

Let us reiterate the democratic problem that freedom-of-information purists never want to discuss: that, as citizens, we may prefer that some of what the government does should remain confidential, not least from us. Indeed, were such a proposition to be put to a hypothetical referendum, it is hard to imagine voters not agreeing that there should be secrecy in some things. We would probably agree, for example, that diplomats should be able to discuss matters in confidence, or that defence plans be kept secret.

Yes, maybe - though we may actually think that diplomats might benefit from a bit of scrutiny. It is not written in the heavens that international relations must be a hole-and-corner business continuous with espionage. How much good has ever come of secret deals and deniable assurances (if you think the two Gulf Wars were good, you answer may differ from mine).

But since at this late stage in the article, Aaronovitch has finally attempted something approaching an actual argument, we had better give it the consideration it deserves.

Right, done it. The problem with Aaronovitch's remark is that Wikileaks is a publiciser of leaks, not a hacker, not a burglar, not a spy. And leaks occur when those who have access to information decide that it ought to be made public. Notice that the Wikileaks model is intended to protect anonymity, and thus does not allow leakers to receive payment for their revelations. And it cannot guarantee that a whistleblower will not be unmasked and face punishment. The possible motives for leaking state secrets are thus pretty restricted. They are basically: treachery (and being a spy, for example, is an option open to the whistleblower in any case) or conscience.

Random malice or lone nuttery are of course possibilities common to all situations (Aaronovitch believes lone nuts to have shaped 20th century US political history via a string of assassinations), so can be factored out. The other possible motive for leaks of this kind is of course to disinform, discredit, or distract; but Aaronovitch would never suggest such a possibility, even as a means of hurting Wikileaks. There are some things ('our' secrets) that we may not know - there are other things we should not even think. And the CIA playing dirty tricks as trump cards is one of those unserious ideas from which one averts one's gaze as from a beggar or street preacher.

If that's true, theft of information of those conversations, secrets and plans is a theft from us too — not necessarily the great gift that Assangeists always make it out to be. It would seem peculiar to worry about nubile Russian spies hanging round Westminster if you're happy to give away everything on the anarchical say-so of WikiLeaks.

Well, actually I don't remember anyone worrying about Russian spies much - nubile or otherwise. (And what is it with all the females and nubiles and their hubbies and their gushing over Assange? It's hard to tell whether Aaronovitch is delierately trying to suggest some kind of sexually-charged cult, or whether the whole Swedish bed-hopping angle has just (oh vile prospect) got him a bit hot under the collar in some wretched but mercifully obscure way.)

But neither can we live under the automatic presumption that the government will always use secrecy in ways we approve of. So we need the capacity to monitor what it does, and to allow the possibility that an individual or an organisation might reveal things that are best uncovered.

No shit, Sherlock.

And who judges that? Well, judges do. Or should. We make and maintain laws precisely to decide when disclosures are and are not in the public interest. Damn. There it is, neatly tied up and a bow put on it,

I don't know what Aaronovitch has tied up here, but it may as well have been the uneaten portion of the saveloy I'd by this point long since laid aside in appalled fascination. I've never heard of any law that establishes to anything but the vaguest of standards which disclosures are or are not in the public interest (in fact, that should be: 'against the national interest' - the onus should be on the suppressor, not the would-be revealer). Laws about official secrecy tend to delegate such decisions to members of the government, with little or no restriction. As to the idea that judges might have a hand in the process, well, this recent court decision shows those judges in action protecting 'our' US government secrets from prying eyes - by asserting that provided the government makes some effort to provide a pretext, the courts are not to challenge its decisions about what is to be kept secret.

the district court was required to defer to the government’s assessment of the harm to foreign relations and national security that would result from officially disclosing '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''. As we explained in Fitzgibbon, the failure to give deference when it is due is error. 911 F.2d at 755. There, pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request, the district court ordered the CIA to disclose information about a former CIA station location, over the CIA’s objection that such disclosure would cause harm to national security. Id. at 758–59. We faulted the district court for “essentially perform[ing] its own calculus as to whether or not harm to the national security . . . would result from disclosure” of the information, and held it should have “accord[ed] substantial weight and deference” to the Executive Branch’s “determination of possible harm.” Id. at 766. Thus, “declin[ing] to adopt the abuse-of-discretion review that [the plaintiff] urge[d] upon us,” we reversed. Id. Here, the district court simply declared: I don’t understand how [declining to protect ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' '''' ''' ''' ''' '' ' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ] will interfere in anything. . . . ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' '''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' '''' ''' '''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' '''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' 16 ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' '''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' '''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' '''''' '''' ''' ''' '''' '''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' '''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' '''''' '''' ''' ''' '''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''''' '''' ''' ''' '''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' ''' '''' ''' ''' ''' June 30 Tr. ''' ''' ''' ''' ; see also July 8 Op. ''' ''' (rejecting as “speculative and conclusory” government’s “arguments that the release ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' ''' '''' would cause significant harm to the interests of the government”)

So the court was 'required to defer to the government’s assessment', which makes a perverse kind of sense given that it is the 'interests of the government' that are being protected. And just in case Aaronovitch is interested in those of 'our' secrets that are kept from us by our own government, rather than a foreign one, the same is generally the case in the UK - the government classifies documents, bringing them under the Official Secrets Act, refuses FOI requests, issues D-Notices and makes a variety of other determinations about secrecy, and the only court oversight of such governmental discretion is a similarly deferential mechanism of judicial review - except in the case of D-notices which are a purely informal system entirely invisible to the courts and observed by the press voluntarily, though entirely reliably.

and then you realise that the days of such solutions are probably over. The use of the law to judge whistleblowers and info-knights must be pre-emptive if it's to be effective, and that means governments taking suppressive powers to prevent unauthorised publication pending judgment. Quite apart from the Jemiman howls of outrage, it is increasingly hard to imagine how that can be achieved in the Web 2.0 era. In information, in free societies, the individual now has the whip hand over the community. This may not be a cause for celebration.

Well, what Aaronovitch's point here is I'm not sure, and frankly even I'm getting a bit fed up with this post by now. I'd be inclined to let him have that one, whatever it is exactly. Except that the kind of stuff Wikileaks has published is not on a par with vital state secrets that cannot be allowed to leak out for a moment, even if quickly suppressed and thus unverifiable. If it were, we would basically be talking about spying - giving secrets away to the enemy. And that in any case, The use of the law to judge whistleblowers and info-knights must be pre-emptive if it's to be effective is not true - obviously any real crime is better prevented than punished, but that doesn't mean criminal sanctions are pointless. Spies are punished, rapists and murderers are punished, and that's done after the crime has happened. That's how it goes, outside the worlds of sci-fi.

So much for argument. What is striking about the piece as a whole, is the weirdly lubricious rhetoric. We opened with Swedes silently manipulating two women; since then we've toyed with Naomi and her silly mistakes, Kathy with her 'hubby', and had a quick flirtation with nubile Russian spies. In pride of place, though, Jemima Khan, who not satisfied with an al fresco whoosh, gushes over Julian Assange outside the court.

The 'nubile Russian spy' motif takes us firmly into tabloid excess territory so perhaps it's unsurprising that Aaronovitch, who seems consciously or not to have strayed into the weird attiitude that there's something significant about the fact that Assange had sex with a woman, having had sex with a different woman only a few days before. And it looks to me as though the subtext here is that all these women have had their heads turned by Assange's sexual magnetism. Readers of Voodoo Histories will remember of coursethat one of Aaronovitch's themes, culled from skimming a few pages of some pop psychology book, is that conspiracy theories are 'hysteria for men'. Presumably Aaronovitch is showing us 'hysteria' back in its proper place now, among these female Assange groupies. But of course the worthy and sober reader of these pages will not be much impressed with insinuation about Assange's (Cultic?) ability to mesmerise the laydees with his quirky charm, any more than with speculation about his prowess or otherwise as a lover.

Aaronovitch himself does not seem to aspire to the status of great lover, not even of dog lover - 'dog owner' he calls himself - but he certainly seems to take a rather avuncular, if stern, attitude to the naughty but negligible, scatty, scanty Mrs Khan. She really is making a fool of herself, you know, I mean not that Aaronovitch is bothered, but what has Assange got that, I don't know, say, Aaronovitch himself hasn't? So silly, these women.

Still, when it comes to reasoned argument, Aaronovitch certainly think he has - what was the phrase? - ah yes, the 'whip hand' over her, but this is little more than fantasy: the howls, of outrage or indeed anything else, that he provokes in her are only in his head.

And there it is, dammit. Sticking out like a sore thumb, with a neat little bow on it.

¹presumably the idea is that the anti-war mob are 'anti-American' - an interesting term which like 'antisemitism' is used to describe opposition to a particular state. Of course this use of 'antisemitism' is illicit, since the proper referent of the term is a real (if over-emphasised) kind of bigotry against a collectivity of individuals, not political opposition to actions done in the name of a particular state. That's why, with some exceptions, it's often introduced by association: 'antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment'. 'Anti-Americanism' seems to be used in terms of outrage apt to personal prejudice and hatred against individuals, even though there is not really any suggestion of such an underlying attitude. The scurrilous suggestion lingers nonetheless - otherwise it wouldn't start with 'anti' and end with 'ism', would it.

Scarlett in the Black

2011-03-03T11:02:00.001Z

John Scarlett, who as head of the JIC showed such independence in ensuring that nothing dodgy could get into any dossiers or anything like that, has now been appointed to the board of News International (Roy Greenslade, his background link.), which is supposedly meant to ensure the independence of the Times papers (you know, the ones hidden from the scrutiny of bloggers behind a paywall.)

Which for the most part a nice sinecure to add to his previous rewards in the shape of a brief stint as head of the SIS, and the consequent KCMG.

But the Eye (1283, 4 Mar 2011, p5) points out that this is splendid timing given that the Chilcott inquiry is going to be rolling out its bland admonishments soon, to be analysed in forensic detail by the News Corp titles, no doubt.

From the link supplied by Greenslade:

217. It is questionable how effective the Independent National Directors have been, even with the increased powers that Rupert Murdoch agreed to give them. The system was strongly criticised by Harold Evans who was Editor of The Sunday Times when Rupert Murdoch bought it, and who was then appointed as Editor of The Times. Mr Evans had fought for the increased powers of the Independent National Directors but in practice, he found they provided him with no effective protection. In his autobiography he wrote that none of the guarantees that Rupert Murdoch gave to safeguard editorial independence "are worth the paper they are written on—unless the proprietor shares the spirit of them. If he does, they are merely ornamental; if he does not, they are unworkable … Internal freedom cannot be acquired by external rules"[91]. Andrew Neil, Editor of The Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994, agreed "It was a conceit invented ... to allow Mr Murdoch to take over these papers in the first place, and it was put in place for that reason. It was not really put in place to protect the independence of the editors" (Q 1689).

I'm sure Scarlett will feel very much at home in such a setup, especially one run by the equally reputable Murdoch.

How to Finish Off the Welfare State, in One Easy Term

2011-01-18T12:22:00.044Z

Cameron looks obliquely through the window, surveying his domain. He leans lightly against the right-hand frame, as though the Overton window itself had somehow crystallised into real hardwood and Heritage eggshell and bulletproof glass.

He idly contemplates life after his successful foray into parliamentary politics. In this rare quiet moment of stillness, Cameron permits himself, too, a few idle thoughts about the present.

Life is good.

A PM with captive backbenchers and no concern for the next ballot is remarkably close to a dictator, he muses. And his backbenchers are as caged as they come. The Orange-Bookers of course are happy as pigs in shit; the bovine remainder of the Lib Dems, those not wedged firmly in government salaried stalls waiting to be milked for votes, are irrelevant.

His own backbenchers are a mixture of neophyte lambs to the electoral slaughter, carnivorous lemmings in the grip of the privatising bloodlust, and baffled Tory dinosaurs with nowhere to go but the Lords. Altogether a very managable menagerie.

Initiating the final phase of NHS privatisation has been easy enough. To spice up the task, he has played a private little game. The challenge: to do it without explicit recourse to the standing pretext, the economic state of emergency, and indeed without giving any reason at all for pushing through this particular 'modernisation', and at such a pace.

He has simply relied on the capacity of the press to internalise the government's position and forget how they got there. The economic state of emergency is, well, a banker. It's estalished to the point that 'deficit-denier' is used without irony. The need for cuts elided into 'reforms' that don't actually involve any short-term savings, that was the main pinch-point, and went through without demur.

Another cheeky on-air pseudo-gaffe, this time a less-than-Freudian slip of the tongue describing the NHS as 'second rate' - he'd enjoyed that one. And the rest was repetition, repetition, repetition.

This must be done. It has to be done. If not now then when? There is no time to lose. We cannot delay.

Which is true of course - we cannot delay, cannot lose momentum, or it's just possible that someone who matters might start asking questions. And we certainly can't delay beyond the parliamentary term: there may very well not be a second. Which would not be a bad thing, with such a huge quantity of shit hitting an accelerating fan: a second term really could be rather tedious.

Yes, it has been a good day's work. Cameron is particularly pleased at having spelled it out quite clearly: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform our public services. The press loved that little soundbite. They lapped it up without a murmer, never asking why exactly, especially if the reforms are really such a good idea, this moment is the one opportunity in a lifetime to carry them out. None dare call it opportunism, even when he insists that it is.

Yes, David Cameron is very much amused.

[edit @ 19 Jan 2008 07:50 - clarified and expanded main points, cut verbiage]

Fetishising the Threat Level (the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien)

2010-12-20T17:46:00.002Z

Counter terrorism arrests 'absolutely necessary', says police chief

This afternoon, standing outside New Scotland Yard, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner John Yates said it was "absolutely vital" that the public remained vigilant.

"...what I would say is that with the current threat level in the UK at severe and with the information we have, I believe today's arrests were absolutely necessary in order to keep the public safe."

So the threat level is severe is it? Let's take that at face value. Either the threat level is (1) related to the information and allegations involved in these arrests, or (2) unrelated to them.

If it's (1), then citing the threat level is blatant double-counting - you have the information, and the fact that as a result the 'threat level' has been increased is a side-effect, not an additional cause for concern.

If it's (2), then the threat level is irrelevant.

In either case, there's an odd kind of fetishisation of this Threat Level. It's treated as if it were some kind of terror-barometer, a source rather than a summary of information. It's also treated as if it measured some free-floating ambient substance, 'terror-risk', which somehow ebbs and flows, casting its baleful influence quite independently of particular facts about suspects or bombs or suspicious behaviour.

Wikileaks Cables: Possibly a Plant of Selective Information? (A comment montage)

2010-12-09T11:53:00.012Z

I've been speculating in the blog comments for a while about the possibility that the leaker of the latest Wikileaks dump might have been selective about what was leaked. Now I call in those comments, being far too lazy to type it all out again, still less to reorganise
it and tidy up. Come home, my pretties!

from http://aaronovitch.blogspot.com/2010/11/sort-of-response-to-recent-anonymous.html, 2-5 Dec 2010:

Tim Wilkinson said...

[...] so undamaging to the US - and so convenient in many cases for their PR effort - is

the preponderance of the documents I've come across so far that I'm inclined to give some consideration to the possibility that Akhmadi-Najad is on the right track when he claims that this latest batch was an engineered 'leak' of selected material.

Though the pronounced (though not too blatant, obviously) pro-US bias could just be down to what the papers have focussed on. It may be that this is influenced by the pseudo-coercive machinery of D-notices rather than just their customary obesiance to the authorities, though the latter could probably explain it.

But at some point Wikileaks was/is bound to be on the wrong end of such a trick (which is after all a standard bit of spy work, including adding just enough material just damaging enough to make it convincing).

Ideally I'd like to see some evidence that the selection of cables leaked doesn't have gaps in it. But I don;t really know what such evidence would look like, let alone think it likely that any is going to be forthcoming.

12/02/2010 05:02:00 PM

Tim Wilkinson said...

Hasan's examples are diplomats spying and Islamo-arabo-terror-fascists being tortured in
far-away places. These are (o tempora, o mores) pretty low-impact disclosures.

As ever in the conspiratorial realm, evidence, especially direct evidence, is going to be very hard to come by, but the possibility is not an absurdly remote one (the disinfo hypothesis, that is - the helpfulness of the MSM and esp. Murdoch press is very far from a remote
poss.)

12/02/2010 05:51:00 PM

Tim Wilkinson said...

One kind of tenuous, and in itself hard-to-establish, evidence might be whether there is a

serious attempt to find and punish a leaker, I suppose.

12/02/2010 06:51:00 PM

Tim Wilkinson said...

Hmm, should perhaps emph. I'm only mentioning that as a possibility, not as a strong
probability, firm conclusion, fervently held article of faith etc., but having done so, I have to go some way to making an outline case in its favour.

12/03/2010 09:49:00 AM

from http://aaronovitch.blogspot.com/2010/12/they-were-shining-there-for-you-and-me.html, 5 Dec 2010

Tim Wilkinson said...

[...]

On the other suspicions I voiced so echoingly on the previous thread:

1. press complicity in selective reportage - a bit of a no-brainer, but
nice to have it confirmed (that's 'confirmed' in the technical sense of
'supported by some evidence'): Gareth Porter: Wikileaks Exposes Complicity of the Press.

2. The much more speculative bit: well, notorious tinfoil hatter Zbigniev Brzezinski is reported to think there may be something in it: Agendas & Intel Ops Behind Wikileaks? - The Washington Note.

12/05/2010 04:30:00 AM

Tim Wilkinson said...

One more point and I'll shut up. Maybe obvious but in light of previous remarks should be

acknowledged explicitly - the cables are of course US govt cables and thus show the world as seen through the prism of US diplomats - often not privy to the big picture, often self-censoring, often thick or just spouting off.

Various kinds of bias are already there in the raw unfiltered data, e.g. prejudiced attitudes or telling people what they want to hear. And what is written is not true just because it's somewhat secret - whether it reflects well or badly on US agencies' motives or competence. It's also written in diplomatese, thus in any case less likely to be somewhat guarded, if only out of habit.

12/05/2010 01:28:00 PM

Tim Wilkinson said...

oh bollo, sorry - forgot to clarify that another obvious point has not passed me by -

that Brzezinski is not necessarily authoritative nor trustworthy.

12/05/2010 01:39:00 PM

from http://crookedtimber.org/2010/12/06/tom-slee-on-wikileaks/#comments, 6-7 Dec 2010

Tim Wilkinson 12.06.10 at 4:43 pm

(elm has got in first with some of this, but)

most of it seems to be readily inferrable from publicly-available information, and clear-headed analysis of the objective interests of the parties.

there are such things as evidence and deniability though aren’t there. Not that the most cast-iron physical and documentary evidence can’t be ignored, finessed or trumped by effective impunity
given the right climate (and we are in that climate, no matter what the bulk of the population might jadedly and resignedly believe.)

It’s true that much of the stuff seems relatively uninteresting (o tempora, o mores), and what has been presented as newsworthy and is actually new is largely quite convenient for the US govt but it’s worth considering the filters the stuff has been through:

‘intel’
gathering process (in some cases)

decision
by intel agencies etc on what to tell diplomats

diplomats’
own ability to understand or recognise info and its implications

diplomats’ decisions on what is sayable/what their interlocutors want to hear

diplomatic language and habitual circumlocution

the leaker’s selection of cables (Brzezinski – as well as Akhmadi-Najad of course – has voiced some apparent suspicion about that – and it would be a standard espionage move to leak false info (and selective = false), either to promote false beliefs, or to muddy waters, or as a strawman operation (where the info is later proved false, discrediting the source). Alternatively large volumes of uninteresting info may be leaked to keeping WL busy, or to achieve a form of soft discrediting by leak-fatigue. I’m disinclined to believe that the leak was a plant on current evidence though.)

Wikileaks deselection of cables, if any – possibly in consultation with interested parties

And for most people: press decisions on what to publish – which is undoubtedly done in consultation with/obedience to other

parties.

Tim Wilkinson 12.06.10 at 8:48 pm

What they say they are offering is effective anonymity combined with some degree of validation (which is where the branding is most relevant) and guaranteed publicity. These are all things which whistleblowers want, and which ordinary journalistic media are failing to deliver.

Whistleblowing is a risky business, hence anonymity (corporate media have a nasty
tendency to respond to whistleblowers by making a phone call to the Pentagon, naming names and asking for a denial.

Failed whistleblowing not only makes the risks pointless, but is actually more risky. Whistleblowers who are not in the public eye by dint of high-profile leaks or worse still, those who are yet to effectively
divulge their secrets at all can far more easily be dealt with in a variety of unpleasant
ways.

Tim Wilkinson 12.06.10
at 11:48 pm

bianca: I’m not saying Wikileaks is itself a whistleblower – but its main role has been as a conduit for whistleblowing.
This latest batch is a bit odd, because unlike previous stuff it’s not clear what the whistle is being blown on; but unless WL has started using active espionage techniques, somebody presumably made a free and deliberate decision to leak it – and that person counts as a whistleblower (or possibly a disinformation agent) I suppose. ‘Whistleblower’ can be replaced with ‘leaker’ without affecting any point I’ve made, I think.

And WL doesn’t seem to object to secrets per se, either – it apparently accepts that some secrets should not be revealed. But its advertised commitment is to publish what is passed to it unless there
is very good reason not to.

Tim Wilkinson 12.07.10 at 2:07 pm

weaver:
Yes, there is undoubtedly interesting and new stuff and little has yet been released – I did not and would not suggest otherwise. And very useful to historians much of it would be if they were inclined
to address events less than a declassification window ago. But WL’s advertised commitment is (has hitherto been) to get maximum impact for the revelations of whistleblowers – and if there is some one thing in particular here that’s having the whistle blown on it, it’s unclear what it is, which means it
has not been given maximal impact.

It’s easy to overestimate the impact of leaks, and in fact the House of Cards model, which exaggerates the impact of leaks, is often used as an anti-conspiratorial argument. A leak is successful only when it gains critical mass with the right audience. For example, o mores (not so much tempora – one of Eco’s idiocies is to suggest that diplomacy has only recently befcome intimately linked with espionage), things like spying on the UN is not a big deal – like much of this stuff, the other parties aren’t going to object much because they are all at it – this is dirty washing and governments – esp permanent elements therein – like to keep this stuff away from the public eye, as do the rest of the political class and the corporate media. That’s why the absence of clearly presented smoking guns is so important, because this stuff is dog-whistleblowing as it stands. Yes, to you and me this stuff lays bare skullduggery – but just watch as it’s finessed and excused, and the international hue and cry remains unraised. In the meantime, the way this stuff is coming out means the ‘all arabs want Iran bombed, ergo nothing to do with Israeli agitation’ dogwhistles its way into the headlines.

It may be that this deviation presages a new direction for WL, away from its proclaimed model which includes a string editorial element in pursuit of publicity and impact. If so, I suspect it is likely to retreat into the background as just another source to be acknowledged or ignored by the press. And if it does so, the motivation for genuine whistleblowers to risk leaking to it will be diminished.

Another example:
British assurances that ‘measures’ would be put in place to ‘protect US interests’ in the Chilcot
inquiry. De-diplomatising the language (which is there partly because this stuff can leak) suggests that the inquiry was nobbled – and I didn’t imagine that it wasn’t nobbled in a number of ways – but there is no smoking gun, no clear detail – basically, it is near-worthless.

If this had been the only thing leaked, then more resources might have been put into following it up, we might have front pages, questions in parliament, letters to gthe times from solid respectable types, etc., and more might come to light. You haev to look at it from an opinion dynamics point of view, and this kind of vague stuff, presented in bland and transient headlines, is not going to change anyone’s mind (force anyone to overturn their entrenched opinions).

from: http://crookedtimber.org/2010/12/07/the-shameful-attacks-on-wikileaks/,
8 Dec 2010

Tim Wilkinson 12.08.10 at 4:06 pm

[...]

This whole latest batch is anomalous. Brezhinski has suggested a plant – sincerely or not.

I’ve been mentioning this possibility on AWatch and the previous thread, and like a lot of these things, my assessment shifts from ‘actually quite plausible’ to ‘really not at all likely’, a bit like one of those shaded drawings of cubes that seem to switch from protruding to receding and back again.

from: http://crookedtimber.org/2010/12/08/state-power-and-the-response-to-wikileaks/

Tim Wilkinson 12.09.10 at 12:14 pm

Sam Chevre @48:

Whether WikiLeaks is providing complete-enough-to-be-accurate information, or all the information it has, or all the information that slants a particular direction, is not determinable. With the US government, I have some idea of what they are likely spinning/concealing; I don’t with WikiLeaks.

think this is right, and is relevant in the specific circumstances of the latest batch of leaks, which is alnomalous. This batch (a few specifics apart), is very much like a dataset that gives an overall

impression, which can be tweaked effectively by biased selection. (Obviously the cables themselves are subject to this, as I’ve pointed out before – as well as being based on what the diplomats are allowed to know, there is plenty of self-censorship, selection bias, fixing evidence around the policy, etc).

This differs from the standard model of whistleblowing, which is based not on a kind of quasi-statistical overview, but on single assertions which can stand alone and speak for themselves. (Obviously these could be defeated or undermined by some conceivable further evidence, but

basically they are smoking guns – deductive rather than inductive evidence, you might say.) Even the Afghan dump (or the Pentagon Papers) were of the deductive kind – the revelations were simply numerous rather than cumulative.

That is not the case here, and that is a big change, which in conjunction with the concomitant unclarity of exactly what is being leaked, and (what so far appears to be) the rather convenient nature of the content for the US, provides some (perhaps rather slim, I can’t decide) grounds for suspicion about their origin.

The Bleeding Obvious Part 3562 - Local Planning

2010-12-05T12:14:00.000Z

Just heard on radio 4 news that the 'Coalition' are planning to introduce - as part of its localisation agenda blah blah - local planning schemes set up by the locals blah blah. The bit that got my attention was where they mentioned that 'residents' would be able to make alteration to their homes without getting planning approval from the (local!) council.

Here's the bleeding obvious bit - this is about making things easier for Tesco and other corporate developers. That's the whole thing, end of story, all the rest is window dressing.
Right I'm in a hurry so I won't go off on a two thousand word ramble for once. I'm not even going to look it up ont web.

Expect the penny to drop with media commentators in about two days time.

Annie Machon v Christopher Andrew on MI5

2010-12-01T13:43:00.002Z

...on Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4:

Less interesting and entertaining, but included for completeness, the first half of the segment:

UPDATE: Machon's book Spies Lies and Whistleblowers can be found here.

No Smoky Room, No Smoking Gun: Corporate priorities in the case of BP

2010-11-21T14:46:00.002Z

Reportage relating to the the US commission into BP's catastrophic oil spillage:

BP, firms did not shirk safety for money - panel

Well, that is the headline, but what was actually said is:

"To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favour dollars over safety," the commission's Chief Counsel Fred Bartlit said at a meeting exploring the causes of the Gulf of Mexico spill.

This is a general problem in corporate governance: heads of corporations operate by setting incentives, and really don't want to know (certainly not undeniably) the dirty details of how objectives are met. No-one needs to say 'prioritise profit over safety'. We know that safety regimes on oil rigs are dreadful, and it's pretty clear that the reason is one of cost (what else? Love of carnage?). Budgets are set, regulators are captured. Of course profit has priority over safety: the safest course would be to go out of business, and the reason that course is not taken is profit. The rest is haggling, and the 'Health and Safety' side in that arbitration is very obviously not going to get the better of that arbitration.

To take a slight tangent 'Heath and Safety', thanks to a media campaign which goes in tandem with the anti-EU-regulation crusade, has becone a dirty word in common parlance, not by coincidence. Both campaigns resemble that mounted in the early 80's, most notably by the Sun, against the 'Loony Left' and what would now be called 'political correctness', particularly in their cherry-picking and gross exaggeration and distortion of anecdotal accounts - 'baa baa green sheep' and other stories. Poltical correctness is now a confirmed third member of the unholy trinity, though opposition to it is less obviously (or less directly) related to the interests of business.

Back to that general problem: this is not only an issue in corporate governance, but governance in general, and indeed corporacy in general. Wrongdoing by governments or other groups can occur without anyone involved being consciously directly focused on the objectionable aspect of the group's activities.

In this case, all it takes is for the budget to be allocated in a certain way, skimping on technical safety advice for example, and hey presto, no conscious decision to reduce safety. Not only is 'conscious decision' avoided when the status quo is acceptable and needs no intervention, but negligence and recklessness are precisely not a question of 'conscious decision'. The subtleties of of self-deception, special pleading and bias also have a part to play in 'quasi-conspiracy' - thrusting business types can easily transmute their desire to save time and money by disregarding safety into impatience with troublemakers and spoilers - and so certain regulators may be lobbied against, certain employees dismissed or moved to positions in which their bad attitude, lack of team spirit, etc. won't cause problems.

Quasi-conspiracy as I've called it is a recurring aspect of many episodes I've looked into while researching general aspects of conspiracy and coinspiracy theories. This is an excellent example of the way in which the 'smoky room' model of conspiracy (or quasi-conspiracy) theories can obscure the rather more subtle realities. This image of conspiracy is commonly used to dismiss 'conspiracy theories' - because the 'smoky room' scenario, accompanied by explicit and direct command and control, is generally somewhat implausible (though nowhere near as implausible as it's often painted).

Another account of Bartlit's remarks includes this direct invocation of the 'smoky room' model.

We've studied the hell out of this. We welcome anybody that gives us something we've missed, but we don't see a person or three people, sitting there at a table considering safety and costs, and giving up safety for costs. We have not seen that, and you have to be sure you understand that.

One big problem is that the 'smoky room' image puts off those on the left who do think that business acts in business interests and does so in hidden (though discoverable) ways. Noam Chomsky, for example, has a fairly hostile attitude to 'conspiracy theories' in the abstract, though whether he is pandering to the dominant image or actually subscrbes to it is unclear (and of little importance). I've examined Chomsky's attitude before and noted that when it comes to actual individual cases of conspiracy Chomsky takes a much more reasonable attitude.

And in general, the left has tended to reject conspiratorial accounts because of a lingering commitment to a structural or institutional analysis of power relations which is incorrectly thought to preclude any reference to plots and more generally (and even more ludicrously) to individual motives and actions. There was some dispute over this matter in the 80s, in which Ralph Miliband, father of David and Ed, appealed for proper empirical research into the actual operation of power, in particular state power, but I get the impression that many of the posturing pseudo-intellectuals who did so much to piss away Marx's legacy in the 70s considered such a project far too much like hard work, and far too unglamorous to sit well with their own legover-orientated project.

Motives aside, the headline technical issue here is in a way the opposite of the right-wing (defenders of those currently powerful) approach, such as that manifested by Popper, and for once provides a reasonably good example of the meeting-round-the-back of left and right that is such a favourite theme of the soi-disant moderate.

The right-wing approach tends to emphasise unpredictability and human error, which chimes in nicely with the general idea that getting anything done by co-operation is basically impossible. The neoclassical Liberal supplants co-ordinated action with individual actions coordinated only by 'market forces', price 'signalling' etc. (The invisible hand that 'co-ordinates' actions in this model is we are told, handily enough, a benevolent one.)

Left and right approaches as described here have in common the bizarre consequence that what actual people actually do drops out of the analysis altogether. Actual plans, intentions, actions and motives are either determined from above by the forces of history, or driven from below by market forces. I have no implacable abstract objection to either approach - no theoological insistence on transcendent freedom of the will, no jowly Johnsonian harrumphing about common sense, no romantic preoccupation with kings and heroes and great deeds. My objections are more humdrum - that both accounts are basically just made up for transparently ideological reasons, and that neither comes anywhere near accurately describing what is going on, nor of predicting what will go on, nor of explaining what has actually gone on.

Which is not to say that there is no room for systematic and technical treatments of the mechanisms - maybe even general laws - involved in conspiratorial and quasi-conspiratorial activity. Social psychology, sociology, historiography, poltical science, even the much-maligned media studies: all are of relevance. Unfortunately, it's very much a case of 'sociologist, study thyself' - because there has been relatively little work in this area that I've been able to identify. As in the 70s, radicalism and rebellion in the academy seems to be diverted into fairly harmless theorising - only now rather than Althusser and Marxisticism we have postmodern textual analysis of things which are not texts, and ironic wanking about 'popular' culture. Looking into the real mechanisms of power seems to be too daunting an uphill struggle for your average radical academic. No doubt this is somewhat unfair, but unfortunately only somewhat. I wish someone would prove me wrong.

...but back to BP: as well as being limited to the question of whether a human being made a conscious decision of a very specific content, Bartlitt's remark of course only asserted a lack of evidence for any such decision, and did not amount to the claim that there was no such decision. Unless you think that all top-level decisions made by execs are fully documented in minutes rather than, say, being informally scoped out at the club or on the golf course, it should be fairly obvious that the distinction between absence of evidence and evidence of absence is germane in this case.

"The possibility of becoming the most powerful man on the planet is irresistibly beguiling to many rich men"

2010-11-21T00:05:00.001Z

Robert Gavron has some useful comments on Murdoch's bid to take full ownership of Sky News, though he is either being diplomatic in that nakedly arbitrary 'present company excepted' kind of way, or he has fallen prey to the 'I've met him and he seems qute affable' fallacy, or he's placing quite a bit of weight on the term 'comparatively' in his record as a media proprietor in the UK will stand up comparatively well.

Still, the sentiment quoted in this post's title showed a refreshingly forthright realism, in contrast to the usual approach of the commentariat which is to regard this kind of observation as lurid and jejune. Maybe it is, but if so, it would appear that reality exhibits a pronounced lurid and jejune bias.

Lords Hansard 4 Nov 2010, Column 1783

Lord Gavron:

Rupert Murdoch was described the other day by the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, as the most powerful man on the planet. I have known Rupert Murdoch for a great many years. I have found him to be straight, loyal and honourable. He is a man of his word. Although I have frequently, if not usually, disagreed with him, his record as a media proprietor in the UK will stand up comparatively well to analysis by future historians.

However, I am against his plan to acquire the rest of Sky. People have said, "He already controls Sky, so buying the rest will make no difference". We can all talk about the difference, but Rupert Murdoch is not the sort of man who would spend £7.8 billion buying shares which make no difference. Sky, as the Economist of 16 October said, is Britain's leading media company. It has almost 10 million subscribers and almost £6 billion of annual revenue-already almost double that of the BBC. Apparently, we spend more on Sky than we spend on bread. In addition to its 39 per cent of Sky, News Corporation's four newspapers already have 37 per cent of our total national newspaper circulation-a share that is as much as the next two biggest newspaper groups combined.

Next March, Rupert Murdoch will be 80. He enters what I heard rather unattractively defined last week as "the drop zone". He has said that when his health gives out he will get out of the way. He has made plans for succession. However, history tells us that when a great tycoon goes, his assets tend to change hands. Rupert Murdoch has not maximised his corporation's profits. He is sentimental about newspapers. There are media experts who think that News Corporation, valued in the market at some $38 billion, is undervalued by almost 30 per cent. So it is an attractive takeover prospect in financial terms alone. In addition, the possibility of becoming the most powerful man on the planet is irresistibly beguiling to many rich men. Quite a few of them have access to, or can raise, the means to acquire the company. We could end up with a Russian oligarch, an Arab prince, or a hedge fund billionaire. Whoever it is might be honourable and principled-or they might not be.

We have the power to prevent a media baron from extending his empire. We have tended not to use that power. I hope that this time we will. Even if we do, my major concern remains. It is very difficult to stop someone who has the money from buying a public company. It is very difficult to say, "We let Rupert Murdoch have it, but we like you less, so we are going to stop you from buying it". The potential influence of News Corporation in the United Kingdom is enormous. The damage that could be done if it fell into the wrong hands is incalculable. We should be extremely worried.