Healthy Wholesomeness

The Government's attempts to achieve a balance between mere scientists and people who agree with it have resulted in a slightly embarrassing appointment to the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs. Dr Hans-Christian Raabe is medical co-ordinator of the superbly-named Council for Health and Wholeness, a Christian organisation on whose behalf he has turned out briefing documents in the usual healthy, wholesome Christian style. "Marriage is associated with greater happiness, less depression, less alcohol abuse and less smoking", while "the homosexual lifestyle" leads to disease, drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, suicide, paedophilia and "the movement to make paedophilia acceptable". Remarkably enough, according to the CHW, studies have shown that all these risks, except possibly those associated with paedophilia, can be significantly reduced by "religious commitment, religious involvement or being part of a religious community".

Opiates of the people excepted, Raabe has similarly trenchant views on drugs: "A person who uses cannabis by age 15 has more than a four-fold increased risk of developing schizophrenia symptoms over the next 11 years compared with a person starting to use cannabis by 18". Fortunately, despite the overwhelming evidence of a connection between the horrors of homosexuality and the depravities of drug use, Raabe does not intend to allow his principles to influence his position: "what views I may or may not have on homosexuality are irrelevant".