cannabis

...and one kills, so why not ban it, just like this:

A 15-year-old boy may have battered a man to death because his personality was changed by an antidepressant drug, a specialist doctor has told a court. The boy killed Gary Belben, 59, with a hammer and attempted to kill his wife, Tanya, in Essex after being prescribed Prozac, Chelmsford Crown Court heard. [From BBC NEWS | England | Essex | Drug 'could have led boy to kill']

Horizon last night did a reasonably balanced program looking at the various claims for and against cannabis, the world's most popular illicit drug. You can watch it again on iPlayer if you missed it.

They looked into its history - that it is likely that it has been used by humans for around 3,000 years at least. Into claims that it is a "gateway drug" that encouraged users to move onto harder drugs which showed in trials with rats that this was unlikely. And into claims that it damaged young brains which in trials with mice seemed to suggest that it did indeed create long term memory degradation when given to/used by young adolescents (defined as below around 15 years of age).

They also seemed to be confirming that, assuming one's brain was properly developed before using cannabis regularly, the potential longer term side effects are nonetheless relatively rare.

They looked into some of the claims made for its medicinal properties, talking to a doctor in California who, under their medical marijuana rules seems to prescribe it for all sorts of things from chronic pain to slight anxiety or even, as the presenter suggested, "writers block". And in the one UK licensed pharmaceutical grade production facility was astonished to find that many strains also contain an anti-psychotic substance (which to me reinforced the idea that somehow people in danger of developing mental illnesses may actively seek it out as self-medication).

So, what does it all suggest about the predominant public policy of prohibition? The presenter, "addiction specialist Dr John Marsden" (he looks after patients with addictions to "harder" drugs like cocaine and heroin), concluded the program by saying that the real "problem" with cannabis was the waste of potential it causes - presumably he felt, as an addiction specialist, that all the other [possible problems are relatively low risk enough to make a blanket policy unwarranted.

But even here I think he's quite wrong to infer that such a "waste" of potential is good enough reason for legal prohibition - after all, one user's "waste" of life "sitting around smoking dope all day and doing nothing useful" as Marsden put it I think, is another user's occasional recreation. Set aside any debate as to whether George Washington managed to found the greatest nation on earth whilst toking on the stuff! Exactly the same claims could be made of alcohol, and the evidence is available in far greater numbers - that it can cause psychoses, all sorts of physical and mental illnesses, sitting around drinking all day is a waste of potential, it can also have medicinal benefits. Yet Churchill won the war on the stuff!

Yet we license one for sale and prohibit the other with criminal sanctions that themselves do as much to destroy lives as the substance itself (witness in the USA the scheme where anyone convicted of a possession charge would be denied university funding for example). We know that prohibition drives the supply into the hands of criminal gangs who have no compunction about selling it to those even proponents of legalization would want to protect - the youngsters whose developmental processes can be damaged by access to it too young - and further whose business model tends to encourage them to try to sell other, potentially more dangerous drugs, to their existing customers to maximize profits. We have seen how, after downgrading, the consumption in this country actually dropped. It will be interesting to see whether the uprating to category B will increase consumption again and thus prove utterly counter productive.

As with alcohol, a legalized weed, as shown in the images of medical marijuana dispensaries in California, and also the cafe culture in the Netherlands and the more free attitude in Switzerland, would give people more choice about methods of taking the drug - reducing, probably, the predominance of smoking it (it is at its most potentially harmful when smoked with tobacco). And it would increase awareness of the different strengths and their effects as decent shops would sell a range, rather than, at present, having to take what you can get wherever you can get it.

The law, as usual with drugs laws, is counter-productive. The resultant criminal culture surrounding it makes society less safe not more. It is not based on the evidence. It is not consistent with attitudes to other drugs such as alcohol where even the drunk is more capable it seems of exercising their own judgement most of the time and is also freer to get help because it is legal and not so much of a taboo subject. The recent reclassification defies belief frankly and is simply another reason to oppose all government interference in our lives as ill informed and nannying.

Our legislators should be ashamed of themselves.

Now that Bloggers for Burma Day is past, my attention has been drawn to an article written thirty five years ago by Milton Friedman as then President Nixon was preparing to step up the "war on drugs". I think it appropriate today as President Brown prepares also to step up the "war on drugs" here at home (at the same time as the Czech Republic apparently starts the process of decriminalizing). You'll find it, which I reproduce in full below, along with lots of other useful documents and research hosted at the Schaffer Library of Drugs Policy:

Prohibition and Drugs

by Milton Friedman

From Newsweek, May 1, 1972

Stop Cannabis Prohibition
Originally uploaded by Professional Recreationalist

"The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and com-cribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."

That is how Billy Sunday, the noted evangelist and leading crusader against Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in early 1920. We know now how tragically his hopes were doomed. New prisons and jails had to be built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against the state. Prohibition undermined respect for the law, corrupted the minions of the law, created a decadent moral climate-but did not stop the consumption of alcohol.

Despite this tragic object lesson, we seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in the handling of drugs.

ETHICS AND EXPEDIENCY

On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, Would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs.

I readily grant that the ethical issue is difficult and that men of goodwill may well disagree. Fortunately, we need not resolve the ethical issue to agree on policy. Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse-for both the addict and the rest of us. Hence, even if you regard present policy toward drugs as ethically justified, considerations of expediency make that policy most unwise.

Consider first the addict. Legalizing drugs might increase the number of addicts, but it is not clear that it would. Forbidden fruit is attractive, particularly to the young. More important, many drug addicts are deliberately made by pushers, who give likely prospects their first few doses free. It pays the pusher to do so because, once hooked, the addict is a captive customer. If drugs were legally available, any possible profit from such inhumane activity would disappear, since the addict could buy from the cheapest source.

Whatever happens to the number of addicts, the individual addict would clearly be far better off if drugs were legal. Today, drugs are both incredibly expensive and highly uncertain in quality. Addicts are driven to associate with criminals to get the drugs, become criminals themselves to finance the habit, and risk constant danger of death and disease.

Consider next the rest of us. Here the situation is crystal clear. The harm to us from the addiction of others arises almost wholly from the fact that drugs are illegal. A recent committee of the American Bar Association estimated that addicts commit one-third to one-half of all street crime in the U.S. Legalize drugs, and street crime would drop dramatically. Moreover, addicts and pushers are not the only ones corrupted. Immense sums are at stake. It is inevitable that some relatively low-paid police and other government officials-and some high-paid ones as well-will succumb to the temptation to pick up easy money.

LAW AND ORDER

Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?

But, you may say, must we accept defeat? Why not simply end the drug traffic? That is where experience under Prohibition is most relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic. We may be able to cut off opium from Turkey but there are innumerable other places where the opium poppy grows. With French cooperation, we may be able to make Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin but there are innumerable other places where the simple manufacturing operations involved can be carried out. So long as large sums of money are involved-and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal-it is literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic or even to reduce seriously its scope. In drugs, as in other areas, persuasion and example are likely to be far more effective than the use of force to shape others in our image.

As a side observation, the self same predictions as Milton makes here, 35 years ago, have been repeated just this week as Trading Standards officials fear the recent increase in the age at which youngsters can buy tobacco products will lead, as it will inevitably, to rogue traders flogging them fake fags over the school fence to get round the law. As the Schaffer library presents in a different article, the banning of something that is itself addictive is fraught with so many dangers as to make it nigh on impossible and certainly counter-productive. For those of us who already understand this, it's like watching a horrific train crash happening in slow motion knowing you are unable to prevent it.

...but having one to quote does no harm (and why are the Lib Dems remaining silent?):

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." Albert Einstein,1921 'My First Impression of the U.S.A.' (quoted in Transform's Report "After the War on Drugs")

If you click on the link to that report you'll see some of the contemporary influential people, even if not quite of the order of Einstein all of them, who have endorsed the report and its ideas, amongst them Simon Jenkins, who, for the second time in two weeks I find myself agreeing with his Sunday Times column on a subject close to my heart. Jenkins points out, as I did earlier in the week, that far from merely demonstrating they are real people who have done things they wished they hadn't but now can we please get on with our jobs, the confessions of now a round dozen I believe cabinet members to having indulged in a little drug taking in their youth...

"have a deeper significance. They indicate hypocrisy on a subject of urgent concern to all parents. Why should their children go to jail when half the cabinet was admitting the same crime. Yet on Friday the reaction at Westminster was one of humour. Drug taking is apparently okay if you can get away with it. Drug taking is okay if you pretend you did not enjoy it, or “experimented”, or affirm it to be “wrong” without quite saying why. Lots of things are wrong without being crimes, which is perhaps why nobody last week mentioned the word crime."

And actually, I am not so sure it is right even to believe what they all say about their past. If Cameron took drugs at Bullingdon Club bashes and similar, it was surely an expression of the disdain for the law that those "born to rule" felt they were untouchable...a deliberate political statement. It doesn't matter that he didn't know he wanted to become politically involved at the time, or so he says (having four generations of ancestors as MPs for nearby Newbury might have at least bumped it up his career options though); the circles in which he moved and the situations in which any such drug use might have occurred were political statements, of a sort.

Cannabis use at Oxford in the sixties, the scale of which was to form a significant element in the debates on law reform such as the Wootton Report, was also something of a political statement in itself. And more recently, it hasn't been drugs interest groups enticing people at Freshers Fairs with drugs, but our own Lib Dem Youth and Students cannabis law reform campaign and its well known and very popular "tear off roach" postcards.

The message has been that if you want to get interested in politics, these little rebellions against "the olds" running our lives are part and parcel of your political career, perhaps even a part of your initiation! Politically minded students in fact, if they indulge at all, probably do so in order to convince themselves and others just how "not wrong" such drugs are and how precisely they can be trusted to make up their own minds about such things without the nannying that Brown and Smith are now putting back on the agenda.

But aside from ascribing motives to the current rash of confessions the thing that really irks me about this whole saga, as a Liberal Democrat, is that we as a party have not said anything about it. The chaterati - Jenkins himself, Janet Street-Porter and Mary Riddell today in three of the four Sunday heavyweights, and at least Deborah Orr on Saturday - have all basically come out against prohibition, presumably much to the chagrin of the neo-puritans in the Tory and Labour camps. And yet our press releases have ranged from half a dozen about by-elections, through concern at new alcohol crime and drink driving figures, to the Olympics, House of Lords reform and diplomatic relations with Russia, but have not once mentioned the fact that we have progressive policy on drugs that chimes with these peddlars of popular opinion and which offers a real alternative to these mealy mouthed po-faced prohibitionist parties.

I have to say, it is part of a weasel-worded approach to liberal issues that we seem to have taken of late. The drugs issue, despite having a briefing paper prepared before the 2005 election, was, if memory serves, one of those subjects, like votes for prisoners and revoking automatic life sentences for murder, that our spokespeople, when challenged, did not robustly defend as liberal policies, relegating some of them to the status of "something our weird way of deciding policy (democratically, at conference) foisted on us but not really manifesto material".

So, as a public service, here are some clips from our policies on drugs, and cannabis in particular (from "Liberal Democrats Policy Briefing 10: Honesty, Realism, Responsibility", January 2005).

On the principles behind the policy:

Liberal Democrats believe the current emphasis on criminal sanctions for users actually makes the problem worse: it exacerbates the adverse consequences of drug use; it brings many young people, who would otherwise be law-abiding, into contact with both the criminal world and the criminal justice system; it undermines more promising strategies for minimising harmful drug use; and it diverts large public resources which could be better employed.

Liberal Democrats believe the time has come to reform the approach to drugs policy, so that there is an intelligent range of responses, with the emphasis on education, treatment for addiction and harm reduction strategies rather than blanket prohibition, but retaining criminal sanctions where justified.

On cannabis specifically:

Liberal Democrats would break the link between cannabis use and organised crime by:

• Maintaining the classification of cannabis as a Class C drug in the short term, but issuing policy guidance that it is not in the public interest to prosecute individuals for possession of cannabis for their own use, cultivation of small numbers of cannabis plants for their own use, or social supply of cannabis.
• Permitting medical use of cannabis derivatives, subject to appropriate pharmaceutical controls and the successful conclusion of clinical trials.
• In the longer term, seeking to put the supply of cannabis on a legal, regulated basis, subject to securing necessary renegotiation of the UN Conventions.

and, more generally:

Liberal Democrats would reform unnecessary and counter productive criminal penalties by:

• Ending the use of imprisonment as a punishment for possession for own use of illegal drugs of any class. Drug addicts should wherever possible be in treatment not in prison – unless they have committed other serious crimes (e.g. robbery to feed a crack cocaine habit) in which case prison must remain an option.
• Re-classifying ecstasy from Class A to Class B to reflect the fact that it is less harmful than heroin and cocaine, but not re-classifying it further unless recommended by the Drugs Commission subject to evidence on long-term health effects.

Hat tip to Tim Worstall for the fun animation!

Now come on, let's get everyone off their post by-election beta-blockers and mogadon and get them engaged in this debate!

Technorati Tags: cannabis, drugs laws, lib dems, liberty, Simon Jenkins

In all the talk about cannabis and the oft repeated but rarely quantified assertions that today's drug is a different thing to that which our national leaders will have encountered in their heady youthful days when they clearly had a disregard for the law ill-befitting people who now want to tell us how to live our lives Matthew Norman in the Independent today relates his experience of having hallucinations on modern "skunk". Well don't believe it, or at least don't take it as definitive proof of the aforementioned unquantified assertion.

In the general spirit of confession that seems to be pervading this issue at the moment, I just want to say that the one and only time I have experienced any kind of hallucinogenic effect off cannabis was 22 years ago when I first tried the drug. After my first joint a friend came to take us to the pub. He was of a pale complexion and very white-blond hair. And in the car, in the dark, with street lights flashing overhead and listening to mid-eighties electro-dance music I became convinced that I was being kidnapped by a silvery skinned robotic alien! I didn't particularly enjoy that night, even once we got to the pub, but like any eighteen year old getting blind drunk I worked my way through it and tried again!

I've only really got back into the occasional spliff over the past couple of years - sometimes, for periods taking it quite a lot (though not, thanks to Thames Valley Police's zealous enforcement actions against local suppliers, at all this year). Yes, some of it feels stronger than others, but what it amounts to is similar to the difference between small beer and spirits in alcohol terms. You "feel" the "buzz" sooner. But I also find that the body has a self-regulating mechanism with cannabis. When the THC receptors are sated, or some such scientific explanation, you literally cannot smoke any more and I have had occasions when I have put out a half smoked reefer when that happens.

It seems to me a false differentiation to make, as Matthew Norman suggests, to attempt to categorize different strains as virtually different drugs. It would be far safer, and far better, to know the strength of what you are buying or taking before you do so, for sure. But just as with alcohol, there are times when you would like to have a quick snifter to take the edge off the stresses of the day, and other times when you would like to share a few lighter spliffs in company as with a few pints in the pub.

But in my experience, the most psycho-active cannabis I ever tried was twenty two years ago. Yes, as David Cameron related his experiences the other day, today's stuff sometimes smells stronger. But I have also noticed that that appears to be when the weed is fresh and slightly damp and as it dries properly that seems to diminish. Of far greater importance in terms of the harm it can do to you is the fact that more recently unscrupulous growers and dealers have been treating their cannabis with other substances, including, most dangerously, some kind of silicon spray to make it heavier and make more money out of a smaller quantity. This is an inevitable function of prohibition, and reclassification can only make this worse, and the effects on everyone involved more unpredictable and dangerous.

Transform has shown that despite reclassification to class C, use of the drug has continued a long term pattern of decline, not the unfettered growth the moral panic brigade would have you believe. Do not fall for it all. This is a politically motivated panic and one that does great discredit to the supposed intelligence of our "leaders".

Technorati Tags: cannabis, drugs laws, liberty

Spliff -> Psychosis -> Delusions

QED. I sincerely apologize for ever doubting it. Clearly there are some in whom cannabis creates delusions that they can sort the world out.

The ability to talk bollocks late into the night is important for politicians too though.

UPDATE: The BBC has been mulling over whether such revelations actually matter. They (and others ) seem to be implying that so long as people got up to such hijinx before they became "respectable politicians" what they got up to is probably of no issue now.

But actually, on an issue like this it does indeed matter. They are, if you like, living proof that one can indulge a little and not screw up your life entirely (unless one takes the line, as I am increasingly wont to do, that being a politician by definition is screwing up at least others' lives and probably not doing justice to the politician's own talents other than for meddling).

The moral panic crowd want us to believe that getting involved with drugs of any kind is going to outlaw you forever, probably harm you physically and mentally, and leave you on the scrapheap of life. Clearly this is not the case. And the stench of hypocrisy hangs around such people who now tell us that what did no harm to them is something we cannot possibly make up our own mind about.

Technorati Tags: cannabis, drugs laws, Jacqui Smith

I know some of our distant Liberal Party forebears were so imbued with Welsh Methodism and non-Conformism that they viewed alcohol as the work of the devil herself and each town's brewing family as an instrument of the industrial masters' subjugation of the working man, but I cannot square Norfolk Blogger's paean of praise for Gordo's strong hints that the government will once again increase the prohibition on cannabis with any of the schools of thought of modern liberalism...

I wonder if Nich is one of that strange breed who still believes that alcohol should be banned, or one of that rather more populous breed who believes that their own poison is okay but anyone else's must be ruthlessly repressed. I've harped on about cannabis enough lately, so won't say much more except that I just cannot see how a liberal can want to criminalize such relatively harmless personal habits or fail to appreciate how that very illegality is the thing that causes the most harm about drugs. Regret perhaps that some want to indulge (or damage whichever way you see it) themselves in such a way. Desire to help the worst cases who clearly cannot cope transform their lives, indeed. But criminalize? Please.

Technorati Tags: cannabis, drugs laws, lib dems, liberty

...their knee at the same time, do you think it might catapult them all off to Poland or similar where they'd no doubt find their authoritarian meddling in other peoples' lives more acceptable and satisfying?

Haroon Siddique and Matthew Tempest
Wednesday July 18, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Gordon Brown today announced the second review in two years into whether cannabis should be reclassified, in response to concerns that its current status does not reflect the drug's dangers.

Mr Brown announced the review, which will look at whether cannabis should be reclassified as class B again - rather than its present class C - at prime minister's questions.

Of course a "review" is also an opportunity to persuade of the opposite case, though anyone who received the government's reply to a pro-legalization petition the other day will know just how prejudiced they are heading into this latest review.

In 2005, 10,000 11- to 17-year-olds were treated for cannabis use - 10 times the number a decade ago.

Yeah - you know what - reclassifying will not make any difference in a black market where pushers don't really care about the age of their customers. Decriminalizing and penalizing people extremely harshly who sell to minors would.

But I'd love to know where this 10,000 figure comes from - before it becomes a matter of popular "fact" created by a political spin doctor. Officially there were just 946 mental health admissions related to cannabis in total in the UK in all age groups in 2005-6. So it seems extraordinary that, given the most common juxtaposition is between mental health and cannabis, that ten times the total number of mental health admissions can be attributed to youngsters suffering other problems as a result of the drug. By contrast, there were 5700+ hospital admissions of under 16 year olds due to alcohol abuse in the same year.

Plants are increasingly cultivated to include high levels of the active ingredient of cannabis, THC, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, which encourages addiction and can cause a range of symptoms, from short-term memory loss, anxiety and panic attacks to triggering schizophrenia.

They are so cultivated because of the illegal market in which they operate. Where pushers and growers want to get the maximum value they can out of as little as possible to minimize their chances of being caught. It's not that difficult to measure the THC in any one strain or plant. So decriminalizing and forcing people to sell only with a statement of how strong it was would solve that one too. You don't expect people to be drinking pints of full strength Whisky when they go out for small beer do you? That's what the criminal nature of the market is forcing on cannabis consumers.

Prohibition has not worked and never will work. However unlikely, every review of the situation is an opportunity to persuade of the better course. Jacqui - read this first. On the other hand, given that most of us are criminals anyway, maybe if you stick to the paper clips and I'll stick to unwinding after work with a joint we'll all get along fine.

Technorati Tags: drugs laws, gordon brown, liberty, prohibition