In introducing his latest Pajamas Media column, tackling the above question, Dalrymple shares this bit from one of his many adventurous stays abroad (covered in more detail in his colorful and entertaining second book, which we’ve already attempted on several occasions to cajole our visitors into reading):

When I was in my early thirties, I several times visited an island in the Pacific called Nauru. From the medical point of view, it was of the utmost interest because fifty per cent of the population has Type II Diabetes and it therefore represented the epidemiological shape of things to come.

The Nauruans had become diabetic only recently, when they suddenly (and briefly, as it turned out) became the richest people per capita in the world, thanks to the phosphate rock in which their tiny island was covered. From a life of subsistence on fish and coconuts they went straight to being millionaires. They abandoned their traditional diet and started to eat, on average, 7000 calories per day. Not surprisingly they were enormously fat. They liked sweet drinks and consumed Fanta by the case-load. For those who liked alcohol as well there was Château Yquem. They were unique in the world in being both rich and having a short life expectancy.

The book includes an anecdote about the Nauruan who bought an expensive sports car, drove it until it ran out of gas, then set it on fire – and bought another one.

Last year we posted this piece from Taki’s Magazine, wherein Dalrymple described his visit to a shop selling The Tyrant Collection of banknotes. New English Review has now posted a kind of sequel to it, in which he describes his own banknotes, which he has divided into a tyrant collection and a hyperinflation collection (between which there is some overlap, as you might guess):

But the star of the hyperinflation collection, if I may so put it, is undoubtedly the Zimbabwean note for fifty trillion Zimbabwean dollars. I could have had the hundred trillion note, but I preferred the fifty for its cerulean colour—appropriate, considering that inflation in Zimbabwe had long since gone through the roof.

There was a reason why I preferred the blue note: I also possess a Zimbabwean $2 note dated 1986, when two such dollars would actually have bought you something. What is interesting (to me, at any rate) is that the design is almost exactly the same, $2 and $50,000,000,000,000.

The third installment in Dalrymple’s series of anti-drug legalization columns at the Library of Law and Liberty has been posted here. He will write one final installment on this topic.

There is no pharmacological reason why people who take heroin should commit crimes; the case is rather the reverse. Heroin has both euphoriant and tranquillizing properties, neither of which one would expect to lead to the commission of crime. And yet many heroin addicts do commit crimes, often repeatedly and in large number. Why? The standard answer: to “feed their habit,” to use an expression I have heard hundreds of times. According to this view, taking the drug renders them incapable of normal, legitimate work; but such is their overwhelming and irresistible compulsion, their need, to take the drug once they have become addicted to it that they must obtain it somehow. Crime is their way of squaring this circle.

Among the flaws in this view is its implicit explanation of how and why people become addicts in the first place. In fact, most heroin addicts choose to become addicted and indeed have to work at it. Not only do heroin addicts on average take the drug intermittently for 18 months before becoming physically dependent on it, but they have a lot to learn—for example where and how to obtain supplies, how to prepare the drug, and (if they inject) how to inject it. Most people have a slight natural revulsion against injecting something into their veins, a revulsion that has to be overcome. This speaks, then, of determination, not of a condition fallen into by accident.

Cameron’s recent speech on Islam seems to represent an improvement, says Dalrymple in City Journal, but errors persist:

Listening to and reading Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent speech about Islamic extremism in Britain, I realized why I could never be a practicing politician. Its mixture of good sense, half-truths, evasions, political correctness, and electioneering was anathema to me. It was the stock-in-trade of a man obliged by his position to balance a hundred considerations at once, an obligation that precludes intellectual honesty, even if the latter is desired.

Dalrymple has long expressed a special respect and liking for Africans, and a recent visit to an African restaurant offers another occasion to express it, as described in this piece in The Salisbury Review:

My welcome was warm, however, and my praise of the food (which was sincere) pleased the owners no end. But I have no ambition or qualification to be a restaurant critic: what I really wanted to mention was the music played, not very loud, over the public address system in the restaurant. It was West African popular music that no doubt has a certain monotony after a time, but which nevertheless conveys a joie de vivre, an enjoyment of and tenderness towards life, that is so missing in our own popular music. It lifts the spirit, it does not depress: one does not want to stop one’s ears from it.

If a Martian were to descend to earth and were played West African and our own popular music and then asked which represented the higher civilisation, I have no doubt what answer he would return.