The Wrath Toward Khan
My story today comes from just south of Hogwarts and is reported the UK's Daily Mail:
THE SCOOP
According to the BBC, there were 30 teenagers murdered in London in 2021. Any crime like this is a tragedy, which they know well in Chicago where there were nearly 4 times as many.
But in Britain, The Land of Loquacity, some people take license to embellish – for example, Andy Cook, who claimed the London total, “It's an appalling toll, one that shames Britain and brings untold grief to families.” Well, one out of three hyperboles anyway…
Cook also said, “… it is an inescapable fact that in a vast number of cases, the cannabis trade is to blame.”
Of all the drugs and mental problems and COVID and soccer hooligans in England that could cause violence, Andy Cook wants to single out cannabis as the culprit.
Channeling, Nancy Reagan, old bean?
THE DEEP DIVE
Cook is CEO of the Centre for Social Justice who thinks it’s not ironic that he supports stop-and-frisk laws.
Combining that sardonic paradox with recent media coverage on our side of the pond, one wonders whether Justice might not be color-blind and Cook is thumbing his thesaurus because the Mayor of London is a Trump-target and known Muslim and brown person Sadiq Khan, and NOT that he has proposed to replace the criminalization of small amounts of cannabis with a counseling program as a way to reduce the weight of criminal records on young people.
This creative concept really has conservative knickers in a twist. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister with the face of a bulldog and the Johnny Rotten’s hair wants instead to ramp up the War on Drugs: “Backed by record investment, the strategy we're setting out will attack supply, and break the county lines model... Those who break the law will have nowhere to hide."
Good luck with that, Bo! The War on Drugs is a winner everywhere it’s been tried.
Back to Andy Cook, who calls the Muslim Mayor’s move a “lethal mistake”. Cook claims “A major deterrent to drug abuse is the threat of legal penalties. If people fear the chance of arrest … many will think twice … The power of that argument is wiped out by the mayor's plan.”
Sorry old chap, the power of that argument is knocked out by reality, such as: it didn’t seem to stop those teen murderers at the top of the article, just sayin' …
Instead, he suggests, "For young offenders … the best answer is to encourage them into better lives with [the three magic words that always turn around young people in poor communities] rehabilitation, education and family support… All the evidence shows that young people with full-time jobs have immeasurably better life chances."
Unfortunately, that balderdash is British for "Just Say No" and quite problematic, since according the London Standard, "[London's] youth unemployment has soared by 55 per cent … since the start of the pandemic with 21 per cent of young people seeking work … The figure is five times the national jobless rate."
Want to what the jobless rate is for young people with criminal records? Because that’s the problem Mayor Khan is trying to solve in that crazy brown Muslim way of his.
Meanwhile, Andy Cook and Uncle Boris would rather go medieval: threaten, attack, break, jail, stop-and-frisk…
No wonder the UK is decades behind virtually anyone in understanding cannabis. And young people. And poor people. And brown mayors with crazy ideas that just might work.
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