poledriver
Bluelighter
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When the first controls on cannabis were introduced in the UK, few people had ever heard of it. Occasionally a foreign visitor would be arrested with hashish – but only because it was mistaken for the much more notorious opium.
Apart from the odd tabloid scare, few saw cannabis as a serious threat. The Home Office resisted calls to ban it, while one government official dismissed it as a curiosity, “occasionally taken as an experiment by persons interested in oriental vices”.
Cannabis only appeared on the Dangerous Drugs Act 1925 as part of a deal with Egypt, which had reciprocally agreed to control coca leaves and opium. It was passed by the Commons after a five-minute debate that didn’t even mention the flowering annual.
However, on Monday, MPs will get the chance to have that debate after 221,000 people signed a petition calling for them to discuss the legalisation of the production, sale and use of cannabis. Doing so, the petition says, would save millions from police budgets and bring in millions more in taxes.
In the nine decades since it was banned, cannabis has gone from an “oriental curiosity” to Britain’s most widely used narcotic drug. About 2.2 million people in England and Wales have smoked it in the past year, down from a high of nearly 3.2 million in 2001.
In 2013, the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex estimated that legalising cannabis would save the UK between £500m and £1.25bn in costs, while raising a tax revenue of £400m-£900m. That far outweighed estimates of the net costs of the impact on physical and mental health, ranging from zero to around £85m.
With so many people using cannabis, the real harm was in the exercising of the ban, said Jason Reed, the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition UK.
“What the drug laws are trying to do is prevent harm by causing more of it, which doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Regulating cannabis would take the market out of the hands of criminals, Reed argued. It would also protect children by ensuring age checks were in place.
“[Cannabis] is controlled by the worst people, the hardest criminals,” he said. “It can only go up from this point if you want to reduce harms.”
But the government is against liberalisation, with ministers’ response to the petition being that cannabis can “unquestionably cause harm to individuals and society”.
Mary Brett, of the Cannabis Skunk Sense charity, supports that view. A biology teacher for about 30 years, she said the worst effects of cannabis were on the young.
Cont -
http://tophealthlogics.com/cannabis-healthy-benefit-or-deadly-threat/
