editorial comment God forbid we should ever touvh these wonderful UN conventions. Seemed not so long ago that there were defined as quaint anyway. As for the dangerous clique....

It looks like a war of attrition is currently being waged within Whitehall over British drug policy. As has been widely reported, the government has decided to face down its own advisory body, the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs, over the proposed upward re-classification of cannabis, to which the ACMD – which is packed with would-be drug legalisers and allied useful idiots all parroting the legalisers’ cover story of ‘harm reduction’ -- is resolutely opposed.

The government rightly calculates that acting tough over drugs plays well with the public. All the more baffling therefore that it has appointed as the new chairman of the ACMD Professor David Nutt -- a man who is unlikely to take the committee in that direction.

In 2006, Prof Nutt said that LSD and Ecstasy

probably shouldn't be class A.

Last November, it was revealed that the ACMD was quietly reviewing the classification of Ecstasy and that senior members wanted it downgraded. Since the new ACMD chairman apparently comes to this review with his mind already made up, it’s a fair bet that the committee will recommend that Ecstasy be downgraded. In other words, just when the government has shut down one front in the legalisation war with the decision to upgrade the classification of cannabis, another one is being opened – and with it a whole new opportunity to propagandise that the whole concept of drug law and its enforcement is ridiculous, which will encourage yet more young people to take Ecstasy and other drugs having been further bamboozled into thinking that any harm comes not from drugs but from the law. As a result, more of them will die.

Nutt is also on record as wanting to completely overhaul the whole system of drug classification which he says doesn’t deter anyone from taking drugs. While there is room for criticism of that system, the fact is that abolishing it is on the agenda of the legalisation lobby which wants to end not just the way illegal drugs are classified but the very idea of classifying them as illegal at all – the ultimate aim being to overturn the UN drug conventions which commit the world to the aim of eradicating drug use.

No wonder the legalisers are purring at the appointment of Professor Nutt.

So why has the government done so, and created for itself yet another headache? One theory doing the rounds is that it thinks Nutt is better off in the Whitehall tent than out. I find that unconvincing. In my view, his appointment indicates that the fifth column of covert drug legalisers that has wormed its way into Whitehall is still firmly entrenched.

Just look at the ACMD’s proceedings on February 19. Its open meeting was followed by a closed session to hear evidence from the UK Drug Policy Commission. Why was this session closed? The UKDPC is a group of self-appointed busybodies of no status or authority whatever, but who are intent on bringing about the legalisation of drugs (although they will not admit it).

According to sources who were at the open session, when asked why the subsequent meeting with the UKDPC was closed to the public the ACMD chairman Professor Michael Rawlins said it was because it was

doing work we are interested in

– but he didn’t say what that was or why it had to be kept secret. The ACMD is a public body. Why is it refusing to say what this work is that it is so interested in? Why is that work not being opened up to public scrutiny like other research? What is the ACMD trying to hide?

Next, the committee was asked why Professor Simon Lenton from Australia had been invited to give two presentations at its meeting earlier that month where the cannabis classification had been discussed. Lenton is a direct opponent of the government’s support for the UN drug conventions. Who had paid his fare? the committee was asked.

Rawlins responded that Lenton had been invited because the committee wanted to hear from him – and the Home Office had paid his fare. Why is the British taxpayer funding someone who is working to end the UN conventions which proscribe drug use -- thus paving the way for drug legalisation -- to bring his subversive propaganda to Whitehall?

The suspicion has to be that the ACMD is – despite its setback over cannabis – running rings round the Home Office which, with legalisers on all sides, is finding it very difficult to escape their clutches. Indeed, Britain is a veritable hub of the international attempt to subvert the UN drug laws. Over the years, I have attended a number of high-powered international discussions about drug policy under the auspices of the British government, where leading apostles of drug legalisation have rubbed shoulders with all-too amenable British civil servants who lap up their every word – to the amazement and horror of the foreign government representatives present. A few years ago, I exposed the activities of Mike Trace, a self-designated ‘fifth columnist’ who was running an international operation working to overturn the UN drug conventions – from his position at the very heart of British government drug policy as the deputy drug ‘czar’.

Trace may have gone from Whitehall – but the grip of the manipulative, subversive and lethally dangerous clique of which he was a leading member is still locked firmly on the windpipe of the nation.

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