This is the kind of stuff my family reads everyday...

Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog

They rave about the peril of sunbeds... then let us fry our brains on cannabis

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The great puzzle of our time is why some pleasures are official sins, while others are smirkingly condoned by authority.

Understand why and you will know what is wrong with our degenerate ruling class.

In theory, the idea is that we all have a stern national duty to take lots of care of ourselves so that we do not become a burden on the holy, wonderful NHS. We guard ourselves from self-inflicted illness or injury for the sake of others.

Since my childhood I have been ceaselessly lectured about how to stay safe and healthy, with varying degrees of success.

The simple slogans of the TV campaigns still echo in my memory, and no doubt in millions of others. â??Donâ??t ask a man to drink and driveâ??, â??One for the road? None for the road!â??, â??Clunk Click every tripâ??.

Propaganda isnâ??t enough on its own. Law and fear are needed too.

Listen to an Englishman whinge when his driving licence is taken away, and you will see that there is still such a thing as punishment in our society, and it works.

I can remember the measurable change in the national atmosphere when the police began serious breathalysing.

Similar determination made us all wear seat belts. If only theyâ??d do the same about the arrogant, murderous cretins who use mobile phones while driving.

The authorities also quite clearly know that advertising and the behaviour of actors and presenters on TV and in films affect behaviour.

That is why they have banned tobacco commercials and why it now seems astonishing that Joan Bakewell used to smoke while presenting the BBCâ??s Late Night Line-Up in the Sixties.

Nobody ever said during any of these campaigns that it was all right to drive a bit above the alcohol limit, or that just a few cigarettes a day were safer than none, or that you could leave your seat-belt off for short trips.

The reason was simple. If you soften your message, you spread doubt about whether you really mean it.

Iâ??ll stay out of the savagely comical area of â??sex educationâ?? here because itâ??s just too big.

But look at the revelations that a Government-funded agency, supposed to discourage the use of illegal drugs, has been doing the exact opposite.

Callers have been told, apparently by giggling lunatics on â??helplinesâ??, that various forms of lawless brain-frying are really all right.

No surprise to me. Some years ago I emailed this outfit, which claimed to answer any questions about drugs, with the query: â??Is it wrong to take illegal drugs?â??.

I received an answer of bottomless uselessness, when â??yesâ?? was all they needed to say.

Then thereâ??s the endless shifting of â??classificationsâ?? of drugs.

Anyone who knows anything about the subject realises that cannabis is among the most dangerous drugs in existence, laying waste to young minds and rotting any society where it takes hold.

But the establishment, notably including Mr David Cameron and various joke policemen, make it almost impossible to get this message across by falling for the well funded and brilliantly directed global campaign to â??decriminaliseâ?? this poison.

Many of them would like to make it legal and are prevented only by the international treaties which forbid them to do so.

Instead they sap, weaken and confuse the law until it is a dead letter. Some even lie that cannabis has medical benefits.

Why are they so feeble in stamping out a major and rapidly growing mental health threat when they fret about the amount of salt in hamburgers, try to frighten us into drinking disgusting skimmed milk, rave about the danger of sun-tan parlours and would rather shut down all the pubs in Britain and Ireland than let even one of them allow people to smoke inside it?

Simple. Their generation has been, in the direct sense of the word, corrupted by the drug culture, one which believes profoundly that pleasure is the highest law and that reward should be available without effort.

This trumps any concern for health or safety. No civilisation can last long based on such sick principles.

We have to choose, and soon, between the self-serving, twisted lies of the soft-on-drugs lobby and the truth - which is that if you donâ??t ban cannabis with stern laws, you will get epidemic mental illness hand in hand with irreversible moral decay. You know it makes sense.

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Is it me or is journalism often just science based on opinion or science minus the facts. Seeing as cannabis is one of the few topics I actually have a decent knowledge of I see consistent bs about it in the newspapers, it makes me wonder what else they make up. While this is a low quality paper and I've come to expect this, it just annoys me because my family buys this paper everyday.

-- "Anyone who knows anything about the subject realises that cannabis is among the most dangerous drugs in existence" It is clear that he is not among the group who knows anything about the subject.

-- "with the query: â??Is it wrong to take illegal drugs?â??.
I received an answer of bottomless uselessness, when â??yesâ?? was all they needed to say." Morality is always black or white.......or, they should have just agreed with me because I know I am 'right'.

-- "Some even lie that cannabis has medical benefits." I'd bet I could find anecdotal evidence to the contrary as well as scientific journals suggesting otherwise.

-- "Why are they so feeble in stamping out a major and rapidly growing mental health threat when they fret about...the danger of sun-tan parlours". Hmm, melanoma and possible death versus a correlational link between cannabis and schizophrenia that people are struggling to prove has a causational link.

-- "You know it makes sense." Well he's swayed me with that emphatic sign off....

How do people like this hold down jobs? I just posted this because it was one of the more potent displays of ignorance towards cannabis.