not realy news but a great article on cannibis

[Rev.Holden Greene]

Cannabis is now an everyday
After a decade of denial, risk awareness is slowly rising within the political community and society

04. Februar 2005 By Daniel Deckers
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung


In November 1971 the World Health Organization (WHO) published a study on the risks of cannabis. Eleven scientists rejected the idea that hashish or marihuana could lead to physical addiction or trigger violence and aggression just like alcohol. Neither did the drug tempt its users to flee from reality or cause physical or psychological harm, the study said. The authors also rejected the assumption that cannabis was a gateway drug.
The scientists could not rule out, however, that partaking of cannabis frequently and in high dosages could cause psychological addiction and psychoses. The drug could make users less perceptive and affect psycho-motorical reactions, the report said.
Today, doctors, psychologists and pharmacologists don't know much more about cannabis. But that is, as paradoxical as it may sound, progress. While the health risks of cannabis were exaggerated in the 1980s, the tide turned in the 1990s. A decision by a Lübeck court to ask the Federal Constitutional Court to review the ”repressive” regulations on cannabis consumption mirrored the new lenient attitude. The federal judges had the backing of a large part of the population when they determined that the health risks were much lower than the WHO had thought in 1971. The constitutional court also decided not to prosecute cases of occasional cannabis consumption as long as no harm was done to others. This was celebrated as the de-facto legalization of hashish.
During the era of Christian Democratic Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the Social Democrats and the Greens called on the government to completely rework its drug policy. A motion, signed among others by today's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in spring of 1996, called for putting cannabis in one category with other legal drugs such as alcohol. The recommendation played down the addictive potential of cannabis, comparing it to that of licorice.
Even today, most people believe that users only smoke cannabis once in a while and stop doing so after a few years without suffering any long-term harm or turning to other drugs. But it is also clear that the cannabis scene has changed tremendously since the 1970s: Cannabis has turned into a sort of drug of the people from a drug for a small group of outcasts and students.
Roland Simon from the Munich Institute for Therapy Research estimates that around 3.4 million people have smoked cannabis in Germany during the last 12 months, 400,000 of them are ”abusive” or ”addicted” users. The dynamics behind those figures become clear in comparison: The share of 18- to 39-year-olds who have smoked cannabis during the past year has risen to 12 percent from 5 percent since 1990. According to a government study, more than one-third of them take the drug frequently, sometimes daily, and often in combination with other psychoactive substances such as alcohol or synthetic drugs. The study also revealed that the consequences range from concentration problems over slower reaction times and faulty judgment to depression, phobia and addiction. More people turn to drug treatment centers for cannabis problems than for heroin addiction.
What's most discomforting is that all facets of cannabis consumption, from experimenting to addiction, have become popular among teenagers. ”Cannabis is the only illegal drug for which the average age at the first consumption has decreased,” warned the government's drug commissioner Marion Caspers-Merk. It is now 16.4, meaning that many teenagers have their first experiences at 14 or 15, sometimes even as children.
The government is reacting to this development with programs that offer counseling to teenagers who have been caught with cannabis by the police and information campaigns, such as ”quit the shit” at www.drugcom.de. But even though these initiatives make sense and have proved successful, they're only necessary because cannabis has become an everyday drug among teenagers. Whether this trend can be reversed is not an issue at the moment. But hopefully it will be possible to reverse the trend toward younger and younger cannabis users. But for that to happen, it would be necessary to extend the discussion beyond illegal drugs. It would be hard to find a teenager who turned to cannabis without having tried nicotine or alcohol first.

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