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Ferre
Cannabis Sacrament Minister.
Joined: 14 Apr 2003
Posts: 7295
Location: Amsterdam
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 Posted: Fri Jul 13, 2007 12:47 pm Post subject: UK: The very worst policy to combat drugs |
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The very worst policy to combat drugs
By Johann Hari
Duncan Smith believes that spliff-smoking is such a catastrophe that cannabis needs reclassifying
Published: 12 July 2007
The Quiet Man is turning up the volume once more - and this time, he wants to drown out the demon dealers of the demon weed. Iain Duncan Smith (remember him?) is back with a fat report into how to end poverty in Britain. The sections demanding the financial punishment of single mothers have already been pored over and torn up for their sociological illiteracy. But there is a yet-to-be-noticed section of the new Tory plans that would have an even more bracingly reactionary effect - and send your own odds of being a victim of crime sky-rocketing.
Let's look at skinning up first. IDS believes that spliff-smoking is such a catastrophe that cannabis needs to be reclassified as a Class B drug and the police need to spend thousands of hours tracking down the people who sell and smoke it (rather than, say, murderers and rapists). But he bases this view on three blatant errors.
Error One: Cannabis today is much stronger than the cannabis of the 1960s. It is now a different drug to the one our hippie parents smoked. This is asserted casually these days, even by cuddly liberals who once supported cannabis legalisation. But in reality, the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction has published a long-term study of cannabis potency - and found this is nonsense. "The effective strength of cannabis consumed in Britain has remained stable for the past 30 years," the report explains.
There is variety between different kinds of cannabis - super-skunk is obviously more powerful - but the report found that "this variety always existed... there have always been some samples that have had a high potency."
Error Two: Cannabis causes psychosis. A major study at Cologne University and King's College, London in May showed a much more complex picture, with different chemical constituents of cannabis having different effects. The researchers found that although tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the ingredient that produces a high, giggly feeling, can trigger psychosis in a very small number of users, another chemical component to cannabis, cannabidinol (CBD), actually inhibits and suppresses psychotic symptoms in people suffering from them. CBD is so good at suppressing psychotic symptoms that it proved to be more effective than any of the major anti-psychotics currently prescribed by doctors.
Professor Jim van Os suggests a solution: legal cannabis could be easily grown and marketed with high CBD levels, ending the psychotic effect. Indeed, such a drug would actually be helpful for psychotics to smoke. Obviously, it's impossible to do this while cannabis remains in the hands of organised crime syndicates - a certainty under prohibition. So it is actually more accurate to say cannabis prohibition causes cannabis psychosis, and legalisation would end it.
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