PETER HITCHENS: Spare me all the abuse over Matthew Perry. He might be alive if he'd listened to me

When I failed to worship and flatter Friends actor Matthew Perry live on the BBC, I became hated by large numbers of people. Since he died, those numbers have grown.

My crime, before the court of modish public opinion, was to say that he could, if he wished, stop taking the drugs which wrecked his life and eventually killed him.

Anti-social media are infested with articles and remarks about how cruel and unfeeling I was. A new Netflix series on Mr Perry's sad life will make this worse.

I have now decided to say to his supporters that he might now be alive if he had listened to me.

I do not mean to be hurtful. But the best defence against drugs and drink is human will. That was why I took a deep breath and risked years of loathing and derision.

Here's a mild and stately example of the attacks I face. The remnant of the once-mighty Independent newspaper last week proclaimed that my opinions on drugs 'are maddeningly, cruelly wrong'.

Well, that's interesting. But wrong in what way? Nice, fashionable views on 'addiction' indulge drug-taking. They seem to me to mean more misery and death.

We have had nearly 60 years of liberal treatment of drugs and drink. The numbers of drug abusers have grown hugely. The mass abuse of painkillers has become an especial problem, which engulfed Mr Perry.

Peter Hitchens faced widespread criticism after telling Perry during a BBC appearance that he could stop taking drugs if he wanted to

Matthew Perry reportedly spent $7 million on rehabilitation but ultimately died

Yet the dedicated buffoons responsible for this mistake continue to claim that drug abusers get a hard time from society and the police. No, they don't. It's all rehab, 'diversion', 'treatment' and sympathy.

That's what Mr Perry got from his friends - he also spent $7million on rehab. And now he has gone. I am sorry for the loss suffered by his family and friends.

Though he was rude and dismissive to me (I am used to that), I rather liked him. He had a sense of humour and a quick wit. He could take it as well as dish it out. If I could have spoken to him away from his Presidential-sized entourage, I think we might have got somewhere.

But let me note these things about 'addiction', the all-purpose excuse for drug abuse of all kinds. I have known many people who have given up cigarettes, which I suspect are among the hardest drugs to abandon.

I also recall, in the Fleet Street of 40 years ago, several colleagues who, warned by their doctors that they must act or die, gave up alcohol. Those who ignored these warnings died soon afterwards.

During the Vietnam war, 60 years ago, more than 60,000 US soldiers became 'addicted' to heroin. When they got home, all but about 3,000 gave up without difficulty.

I'll say it again. Telling people they are powerless to stop poisoning themselves is not a good, kind or generous act. Now you can yell abuse at me again.

This royal howler takes the crispbread

Keen eaters of the crispbread Ryvita may have noticed a wonderful mistake on its latest packets. It proclaims, beneath the Royal Arms: ‘By appointment to His Majesty King Charles II, Manufacturers of Crispbreads.’ King Charles II? Perhaps not.

In my mind a picture forms of the Merry Monarch on his throne, playfully feeding Dark Rye biscuits to Nell Gwynne, the beautiful orange girl who beguiled his later years.

Updating such things is fraught with dangerous possibilities. During preparation of the Church of England’s new prayer books for Charles’s reign, a computer programme removed all references to Elizabeth and replaced them with ‘Charles’.

Alas, one of those references was to the first Queen Elizabeth. Her name is on a 1571 declaration in the prayer book, affirming her Tudor-era claim to the French throne and to Ireland. The offending books were recalled, lest the French got wind of it. Not to mention the Irish.

Ryvita crispbread packets have featured an amusing royal blunder, incorrectly claiming the company holds a Royal Warrant from King Charles II rather than King Charles III

Beans? Wind-up radios? We’re stockpiling debt!

Everyone thinks that mad hyper-inflation only ever happened once, in 1920s Germany, and will never happen again. This isn’t true. If governments are irresponsible enough, it can happen anywhere.

And stockpiling baked beans, wind-up radios or gherkins won’t help. Most people will just face a painful deep drop in their standards of living. Their savings, if they have any, will evaporate. They will have to find some other way to pay.

In Argentina, which recently had such problems, the US dollar became a second currency. If you wanted anything important, you had to find and buy dollars, often at very harsh exchange rates.

Back in 2001, when the government limited the cash Argentines could withdraw from their accounts, some banks just collapsed, destroying life savings for good.

 These things happen in modern orderly countries. Argentina may now be getting over its crisis, but we are heading towards one of our own.

As I pointed out, again and again, during the Covid panic, we were spending mountain ranges of money we did not have. Nothing serious has been done to set this right. 

We are wildly in debt with no plan to pay it off. The ludicrous ‘Budget’ last Wednesday did nothing to address the fact that we spend far more than we earn, and that debt interest repayments are also so huge that they are eating up our taxes as we pay them, like an enormous eyeless worm that feasts on money. 

It is far worse than the last debt crisis, of which the old Queen rightly asked: ‘Why didn’t anyone see it coming?’

Instead we plan for a war against a distant country that doesn’t care about us, using money we haven’t got and ships which cannot leave port. And the population seems quite content to let things go on as they are.