Judge Richard Hone QC made the comments as he sentenced a Vietnamese drug gang who ran the biggest cannabis farm in Europe.
An Old Bailey judge has sparked controversy after claiming there was little difference between powerful 'skunk' weed and hard drugs like heroin and crack cocaine. Judge Richard Hone QC made the comments as he sentenced a Vietnamese drug gang who ran the biggest cannabis farm in Europe. He said: "In my judgement, the distinction between cultivated skunk and class A drugs is not a large one".
Railing against the 'high THC content' of skunk, the judge said offences involving powerful strains of cannabis "can, and in my view should be, punished more severely".
The controversy emerged at the Court of Appeal, as members of the feared 'Dang Dynasty', a gang who made an estimated £120m from the enterprise, challenged the safety of their convictions and sentences. The Vietnamese criminals used shell companies as fronts for the farms and sold on the equipment and plants to DIY skunk growers, all the while ploughing their profits into ventures in their native country. The appeals failed, save for a referral to the Supreme Court to determine a question of law. Judge Hone escaped censure for his comments, although Lord Justice Pitchford, sitting with Mr Justice Burton and Mrs Justice Patterson, noted his remarks might "give the impression" of unfairness. But they added there "can hardly be any dispute" that skunk was "potentially highly dangerous to those who are vulnerable to narcotic effect. It has been urged upon us forcefully that the judge was signalling an intention to adopt a starting point which reflected his opinion that there was little to choose between the harm done by skunk and the harm done by a class A drug", their judgment said.
"If the judge took account of that opinion in assessing the appropriate starting point, he departed from the guideline without justifying that course as being in the interests of justice. We accept the submission that the judge was not permitted to sentence according to a personal opinion that the starting points and ranges for category 1 cannabis offences were in general too low for 'skunk' cannabis offences.
"The guideline embraces all forms of cannabis. However, it is conceded on behalf of the appellants that the judge was entitled to take account of the somewhat increased potency of the cannabis in whose production the appellants were concerned when selecting his starting point within the advised range. We do not accept that Judge Hone QC erred in his approach. We agree that the juxtaposition of the judge's observations as to the potency of the cannabis product and the selection of the starting point gives the impression that he was intending to sentence outside the guideline, but in our judgment, the judge was applying the guideline to the unusual facts of the case before him."
Speaking after the trial, Jenny Hopkins, CPS London Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor, said: "This case was described in court as seminal and the largest of its type in Europe.
"This conspiracy by a family-centred criminal organisation concerned the production of 'skunk' cannabis on a truly industrial and unprecedented scale".
