PETER HITCHENS: My TV drugs bust-up with Matthew Perry that drove him to denounce me in book 

Should you ever be invited to go mud wrestling with a Hollywood superstar, accept. I have had more fun and pleasure out of the few minutes I spent grappling with Matthew Perry nine years ago than I could possibly have imagined.

It is a gift that goes on giving. The brawl still matters so much to Mr Perry that he has returned to it in his newly published 272-page memoir Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing.

There, he denounces me with his normal eloquence as a ‘complete tool’, perhaps a sort of combination of spanner, screwdriver and Allen key. I have not read the book, so I do not know if I am also the ‘Big Terrible Thing’. More of this later. Mr Perry is a man of many jibes.

I didn’t really know who he was, as he is one of the stars of Friends and I have never in my life watched that programme, though I have a vague idea of who Jennifer Aniston is. I don’t know what happens in it, though I am aware that Mr Perry plays a man called Chandler Bing.

PETER HITCHENS: I have had more fun and pleasure out of the few minutes I spent grappling with Matthew Perry nine years ago than I could possibly have imagined

And I don’t care. I mean, I knew in theory that he was famous, and I was sure he was very rich, but the fame of many major celebrities passes me by, because I do not care about what they do.

The event took place on a bleak winter’s night in 2013 at the BBC’s Portland Place studios, deep underground, with Jeremy Paxman — sort of — refereeing.

As usual in drug debates in those times, it was two drug softies against one — me — who believed in enforcing the law.

This arrangement now seems enlightened and generous. It has been ages since the BBC has bothered to give serious airtime to any opponents of drug legalisation, and it has been known to have panels wholly made up of liberalisers, in which the presenter more or less agrees with them.

Also invited was Baroness Meacher. She is a dogged and devoted campaigner for the weakening of laws against dangerous drugs and you have to watch out for her, because she looks and sounds like a kindly grandmother who would rather be at home knitting a jumper than undermining the marijuana laws.

The brawl still matters so much to Mr Perry that he has returned to it in his newly published 272-page memoir Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing

But she is not. I have seldom met anyone more dedicated to their own nasty cause. It was Lady Meacher who I feared.

Then I caught sight of Matthew Perry’s entourage and knew I was in a whole new battle. I never counted them, but I noticed at one point that they filled an entire lift. It was the sort of assembly that you might have expected to follow Henry Kissinger around, or maybe Mick Jagger.

I was reminded of P. G. Wodehouse’s story about his time as a Hollywood scriptwriter, when he described the hangers-on who were necessary for Hollywood royalty to function.

Such people did not merely need teams of yes-men, who were allowed to speak as long as they agreed with them. They also required platoons of nodders too, to agree silently with the yes-men (Wodehouse had once worked briefly as a nodder himself). At last, I thought, I have met a man with his own actual nodders.

And so it seemed. I was supposed to be debating drug courts with Mr Perry and had come prepared. I knew that these odd tribunals sometimes tried to get down with the kids and mentioned that one judge had liked to dress up in tracksuit bottoms to give the proceedings an informal feel.

Also invited was Baroness Meacher. She is a dogged and devoted campaigner for the weakening of laws against dangerous drugs and you have to watch out for her

Mr Perry became oddly obsessed with this fact, as if I was recommending it, and began going on and on about the ‘man with the pants’ and suggesting that I, too, might wear them. But I thought it pretty clear that he had not in fact listened to anything I had said and didn’t much care.

Also, he was not used to being disagreed with. Both my opponents had depended very heavily on the idea of ‘addiction’. They had claimed quite wrongly that the British legal system punishes people for taking drugs. This, they insisted, was the cause of the dismal drug crisis we have here.

The opposite is the case. There is no such offence as ‘taking drugs’ or ‘being addicted’. The nearest to it is the offence of drug possession. And the police have more or less given up pursuing it and the courts barely prosecute it. Britain, even nine years ago, was suffering because the law is too weakly enforced, not because it is harsh.

And then I thought ‘What the Hell’ and said on air what I had believed for years, that ‘addiction’ is a fantasy, that there is no objective proof of its existence and that it is used as an excuse, both by drug takers who will not stop, and by campaigners who want drugs to be legal.

It was at this point that Mr Perry began to snap and snarl at me (you can watch it attached below), weirdly accusing me of believing Peter Pan and Santa Claus were real.

Actually, it was I who’d challenged him to produce any proof of what he was claiming, and he couldn’t because there isn’t any.

He maintained that his own life was evidence of ‘addiction’ when in fact it is only evidence that he has taken a lot of drugs and had a lot to drink. The question of why he did so, how and when and why he stopped or started again, is a far harder one to answer, but in the end I put it down to free will. No wonder he didn’t like that.

Addiction, he said, was ‘an allergy of the body’, a phrase so ludicrous that I smiled when he said it, setting off another wave of star rage. The poor man, like some French aristocrat of the old regime, had not had his beliefs challenged or contradicted since he joined the Sunset Boulevard Nobility.

He didn’t know that any other opinion existed. It passed the limits of his imagination to think that any other opinion might be right, or even worth considering. He had yes-men, and yes-women for all I know, and nodders and nodderesses, and so all he could do, when he was challenged, was call me names and be sarcastic.

He is still doing it nine years later. He thinks he won the debate. But my experience has been that many people who see it grasp, sometimes for the first time, that we do have free will in such matters. And they grasp my other point that, if that is so then we should do all we can to deter anybody from ever taking drugs at all.

So, thank you Mr Perry. Thank you to his yes-men and his nodders, too, for giving me a much bigger platform from which to make this point.