Bore On Drugs!

If you ask me, the worst thing about the Michael Gove drug revelations was that - last week of all weeks - he tried to pass it all off as a youthful indiscretion.

Hey, you guys, he was just another misguided thirty-something yoof.

There is no better barometer for what's gone wrong in Britain than that in the week where we remembered D-Day, members of the snoot class are seriously claiming that a guy almost twice the age of some of the troops who hit the beaches was just a poor mixed-up kid.

As far as the issue itself goes, I think I'm like most people: I can see reasons to abandon the war on drugs, and I can see reasons to step it up, but I can't see any reason for a war on drugs where there's a ceasefire every time some snoot enters the kill zone.

Still, at least Michael Gove has killed one of the more ludicrous myths about drugs.

Here's Mark Steyn:

He applied for a job round about that time at a publication for which I then wrote, and the chum of mine who took the interview reported back that Gove was one of the most boring men he'd ever had the misfortune to sit through lunch with. If he was snorting in the bog between the soup and fish, it evidently didn't add any sparkle to his repartee. For American readers, the notion of Michael Gove as a cokehead is roughly analogous to discovering Mike Pence spends his weekends in a gay leather bar: It renders the very concept of transgression pointless. Given what he's like on his face, the idea of Gove off his face is too surreal to contemplate.

Well, quite.

Yes, plenty of alleged 'creatives' use drugs but that's a consequence of their lifestyle, not a cause of it. Like Robin Williams said, cocaine is God's way of telling you you've got too much cash. Add in too much free time on the tour bus/in your trailer on set/whatever and the temptation is obvious. They needed their talent to get there in the first place, the drugs came later. Like some singer once said, drugs had a definite influence on his creativity - he'd have created a lot more music  if he hadn't been stoned all the time.

To the point: despite what the wannabe rebels in the MSM like to imply, boring people on drugs are still boring, just with a side order of annoying as well. Getting high on coke to feel cool is just an upper-middle class version of fat footy fans wearing replica shirts to feel more like their heroes.

Teachers: stop showing the kids unlikely public information films about how one tab of molly will turn them into a werewolf and just lay it out to them. Ask the kids: seriously, do you want to be as cool as Michael Gove?

Alternative Culture Update

I'm shocked - shocked - to find drugs involved in this incident.

Nevertheless, I am quite sure that if you don't think guys like this are the modern incarnations of Wordworth and Shelley then you're *still* a really huge raaycist!

He's Not Galileo, He's The Pope

Yep. I feel the same way about the Prof Nutt pity party.

All things considered, Nutt would appear to lack at least two of the main qualifications for martyrdom. Take his supposed claim to victimhood: he was a quangocrat, now he's not. Ah well. Burning at the stake this isn't.

Hey, it's hard to say anything nice about our politicians, but at least we can throw them out every now and again. Fringe kooks like Nutt worm their way into the body politic without the barest public scrutiny, and push their own agendas without any democratic mandate whatsoever. Rooting out rogues who hijack public office to advance extreme ideologies is exactly what our elected representatives should be doing.

This is Humbug No 1 right there: Nutt is exactly the kind of quangocrat member of our permanent ruling class who libertarians routinely denounce, but now it turns out he's a fellow drug bore, he's Leonidas at Thermopylae. Huh?

Then there's the other thing: what principle if he defending anyway? The supremacy of science? But science-based arguments have to be balanced against the wider social issues. Again, this is exactly why we have a Parliament in the first place.

More to the point, what science is this exactly? When he says that horseriding is more dangerous than Ectasy, does that mean in the sense that more people are called each year falling down stairs than going over Niagra Falls in a barrel? Or maybe he means people who die while in the act of taking drugs vs riding? Or does he mean in some other sense? To the point: how dangerous drugs are is a live issue in science, but now here's Professor Nutt announcing Ex Cathedra The Correct Scientific View on Drugs.

Well, no: nothing is more antithetical to science than some pompous prat arbitrarily deciding that his views are certified scientific and everybody who disagrees is an ignorant savage.

For that matter where's the evidence that Nutt's preferred model of credentialed ubermen producing centrally planned truth is any better than the market place of ideas? True, the free market gave us reality TV, but at least The X Factor never caused mass starvation.

No, Nutt is not about the science, but he's a great example of a modern scientist: whiny, entitled and actually quite nasty when it all comes down to it.