Life's Pleasures Quote by Jeffrey Archer

Archer’s line is a neat piece of political judo: it takes a familiar moral panic (drugs) and flips it back onto the respectable majority (drink). The first sentence needles the national habit of “going on” about drug crime, a phrase that does two jobs at once. It signals impatience with sermonizing, and it implies that the country’s outrage is partly performative - a comfortable scandal aimed at someone else. Then comes the bait-and-switch: “The truth is” signals a corrective, but the correction isn’t just factual; it’s cultural. Alcohol, the socially sanctioned intoxicant, is quietly doing comparable damage, and everyone knows it. We just prefer not to build policy around that knowledge.

The subtext is about hypocrisy and political convenience. Drug offences are easy to externalize: they’re attached to criminality, youth, deprivation, “others.” Drink sits in the center of British social life, woven into celebration, coping, and identity. Calling it out challenges not only individuals but industries, tax revenues, and a whole architecture of toleration. Archer is pointing to a blind spot created by normalcy.

“And that should be taken into account” is deliberately mild, almost bureaucratic - a strategic soft landing after a sharp accusation. He’s not demanding prohibition or moral purity; he’s arguing for symmetry in how we assign blame and design responses. Read in context of late-20th-century law-and-order politics, it’s also a warning about policy theatre: if we’re serious about public safety, we can’t keep treating drug crime as the only intoxicant-shaped problem worth policing.