it_girl_rag_doll
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2008
- Messages
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Hippie Dream, Modern Nightmare
The Observer
Sunday, May 4th
The Observer
Sunday, May 4th
Last edited:
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DPMC Moderators: tryptakid
UK cannabis use and possible reclassification
- Thread starter it_girl_rag_doll
- Start date
it_girl_rag_doll
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2008
- Messages
- 164
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,2277790,00.html
They are not hard to find. Every few days brings a fresh tale of feral youths meting out random acts of violence with unfathomable intensity. Apart from the shocking brutality, the speed with which a seemingly trivial argument or confrontation can assume murderous proportions, the stories have a common theme: the perpetrators of the violence, often in their very young teens, were high on 'skunk' at the time.
The teenagers who killed Garry Newlove, the 47-year-old father of three in Cheshire? The attack came after they had binged on alcohol and skunk.
Article continues
Last month three youths were found guilty of kicking to death Mark Witherall, 47, after he found them burgling his house in Whitstable, Kent. The three were intoxicated by a ferocious cocktail of alcopops and cannabis. The judge said the three had 'acted as hyenas'.
And last week the mother of Sophie Lancaster, the 20-year-old goth murdered by two binge-drinking teenagers, claimed the rise of skunk was now one of the biggest causes of problems among young people. 'It's so much stronger now than normal cannabis and young people are smoking it from 9am and thinking it's OK,' said Sylvia Lancaster. 'I have worked with young people over a number of years and I believe that one of the biggest issues facing us is skunk.'
Suddenly, skunk - a high-strength herbal strain of cannabis - is showing the darker side of a drug that was once considered to be relatively benign. Concerns about its links with mental illness and its ability to act as a 'gateway drug', leading users into addiction, have prompted a sea change in popular opinion about cannabis.
It's a far cry from the Sixties, when cannabis - chiefly marijuana, or 'grass' - promised to open an entire generation's mind to new possibilities. As Paul McCartney observed to one of his biographers: 'We'd met people like Dylan and we got into pot, like a lot of people from our generation. And I suppose in our way we thought this was a little more grown-up than perhaps the Scotch and Coke we'd been into before then... so once pot was established as part of the curriculum you started to get a bit more surreal material coming from us, a bit more abstract stuff.'
The Beatles followed earlier converts such as America's beat poets - people like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who extolled the virtues of cannabis and helped consolidate the drug's image as a magic door through which users could access a world of new experiences. During the Vietnam war, dope-smoking assumed a political dimension, a sign that its users were at odds with a US government fighting an unpopular war. Cannabis soon became a major component of the West Coast counter-culture, a facilitator of free love and a return to an almost sybaritic era.
But now the hippie dream of peace and love has turned into the nightmare of A Clockwork Orange, in which drug-fuelled youths go on a violent rampage.
'The caricature of cannabis has for years equated it with herbal tea and hippies,' says Ben Lynam, of the UK Drug Policy Commission. 'Some people still believe that, but they are now very much among the minority.'
Prime Minister Gordon Brown is not one of that minority. This week he is expected to reject the opinion of the government's own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), and signal that cannabis should be reclassified from a class C to a class B drug, a spectacular U-turn from just two years ago and the first time ministers have ignored their experts since 1971.
It means those caught in possession of cannabis could face prison sentences of up to five years, compared with two now. But the change, for the majority of users, is likely to be cosmetic. The police have signalled that they will still continue a policy of 'confiscate and warn', although persistent offenders will face tougher penalties which experts believe will see more ending up in prison. Last year police warnings on cannabis rose 20 per cent to 120,000, suggesting the new approach is proving popular with officers on the streets, as it frees them from the bureaucracy associated with making arrests.
Brown's supporters insist the reclassification will send a signal to society and in particular to young people. 'We need to send a message out that drug-taking is wrong,' says Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister. 'It's an illegal substance, so it's about ensuring that we keep that message strong and powerful.'
But the shift by some is seen as Brown exerting his authority as a conviction politician, obeying his own puritanical code rather than listening to the experts. Few in the field believe the move is justified or indeed will have any effect. In 2006, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee found 'no solid evidence' that classification had a deterrent effect on consumption. Only 3 per cent of people polled by the mental health charity Rethink said a change in classification would deter them from smoking cannabis.
'The cost of reclassification will be more than £1m,' says Paul Corry, director of public affairs at Rethink. 'Redrafting legislation, telling the public about it and retraining police is an expensive business. But we know reclassification won't reduce the numbers using cannabis, so it will be a waste of money.'
Something strange is happening on Britain's streets: drugs have become cheaper. A survey by the charity DrugScope, based on interviews with street dealers, reveals the price of a gram of heroin dropped from £46 in 2006 to £43 last year. An ecstasy pill cost £2.40 last year compared with £3 the year before. Ketamine and and crystal powder also saw price falls while the price of cocaine remained stable. The price of cannabis, however, rose over the same period. While an ounce of 'normal' herbal cannabis would set you back £70 in 2006, last year it would cost you £87. And the price of an ounce of the stronger strains has risen to £134, up from £121.
Cannabis is now a big black-market business in Britain. While heroin is imported from the east, cocaine from South America and ecstasy from the Netherlands, much of the cannabis crop is homegrown. Sir Stephen Lander, the head of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency warned earlier this year that large-scale cannabis factories - producing high-strength strains of the drug and run by Vietnamese and Chinese criminals - are appearing across the country.
Charities working with immigrant communities claim that in many cases the factories rely on smuggled child labour to maintain the plants. What was a cottage industry has become an industrialised cultivation. Growers now use state-of-the art hydroponic systems to ensure bumper crops.
'There are wide areas of the country where this is being grown commercially,' Lander said. 'It's not as though people are growing it in a couple of pots on their window sills.'
Soaring demand for the stronger strains of cannabis is reflected by police seizures. The Home Office has been quietly studying the results of a survey conducted among police forces across the UK. Early findings suggest sinsemilla - the potent herbal leafy variety of cannabis made from dried seedless female plants, of which skunk is just one of about 100 strains - accounts for 80 per cent of all cannabis seizures. Meanwhile, seizures of cannabis resin - which back at the turn of the millennium far exceeded the number of seizures of sinsemilla - have dropped by more than a third.
This is the trend that has alarmed many health experts. Sinsemilla contains far higher amounts of the psychoactive substance tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the magic ingredient that brings euphoria. Unpublished studies suggest the THC content of the strongest varieties of herbal cannabis has doubled over the past 10 years, from seven to 14 per cent. Some strains of herbal cannabis - so-called 'super skunk' - now contain as much as 46 per cent THC. At the same time, THC levels in resin have been falling, down to an average 3.3 per cent last year.
The crucial issue dividing politicians and mental-health experts, though, is whether this polarisation of cannabis is having a deleterious effect on the nation's mental health. Studies suggest the new hybrid strains of cannabis such as skunk, which are believed to have originated in the West Coast of the US in the Seventies, contain extremely low levels of the anti-psychotic agent, cannabidiol, leading to claims they may be more harmful.
A study published in the British Medical Journal found those using cannabis before the age of 15 are four times as likely to develop psychotic illness by 26. A Lancet study in 2007 estimated that 14 per cent of 15- to 34-year-olds affected by schizophrenia are ill because of heavy cannabis use. And recent analysis of 35 major studies concluded that cannabis use increased the risk of psychotic illness later in life by approximately 40 per cent and by up to 200 per cent among heavy users.
Many experts in mental health say they now have more than enough evidence to understand that cannabis is not the safe drug of popular myth.
'We have been campaigning for many years about the links between cannabis and psychiatric illness, and highlighting evidence that the drug may not only precipitate psychotic breakdown but cause long-term mental damage,' says Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity Sane.
'The front-line experience of organisations such as ours is that use of the drug can cause harm, not only to young people but to their families, making the outcomes worse for those with mental illness and robbing young people of their motivation and future.'
Wallace accepts some of the research appears to be conflicting, but says we ignore the worst-case scenario at our peril. 'We consider that until we conduct more studies to establish the effects of the drug on developing brains and minds, the strongest signals must be given that it can be disproportionately dangerous to those who may be at most risk,' Wallace says.
The problem for the anti-cannabis camp, however, is that cases of psychosis have actually been falling. Research presented to the ACMD - and considered instrumental in persuading it that there is no need to reclassify cannabis - have shown incidents of schizophrenia have declined between 1996 and 2005.
And claims that Britain is in the grip of a cannabis epidemic also look flawed. According to government surveys, reported use of cannabis among 11- to 15-year-olds dropped from 13.4 per cent in 2001 to 10.1 per cent last year. Over the same period, reported use of cannabis among 16- to 24-year-olds slid from 27.3 per cent to 20.9 per cent.
Significantly, the decline in reported cannabis use continued to fall after the drug was reclassified from class B to class C. 'The gentle decline is something we have seen in other countries, too,' said Ben Lynam, of the UKDPC. 'It's difficult to say what is driving this. It may be that people are switching to something else, like binge-drinking.'
Likewise, the number of children who believe it is 'OK' to do cannabis has dropped dramatically - from 17 per cent in 2003 to 9 per cent in 2006, according to the Department of Health.
And yet you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the lurid headlines about a skunk-induced orgy of violence. 'There is a media generalisation about cannabis,' Lynam said. 'You read about people going on an all-night bender on cider but the focus in the reports is on the fact they had a spliff. That's not to say some people don't achieve psychosis through a spliff - in some isolated cases that will be the case. But it all helps to create some ridiculous image of cannabis as the evil weed.'
Talk to practically any expert in the field and though they may disagree on the relative dangers of cannabis use, they will agree on one thing: the debate about reclassification has dangerously stymied the wider debate about drugs. Instead, experts complain the focus on whether cannabis should be class B or C has blinded the politicians to the real issue - whether classification works at all.
'It is important that policy is grounded in evidence,' says Martin Barnes, chief executive of DrugScope and a member of the ACMD. 'But the concern is now that policy is being driven by political considerations and headlines.'
The UKDPC will issue a briefing paper to politicians next week that quotes Professor Colin Blakemore of the Science and Technology Committee. 'If it took so much effort to consider one particular drug and whether it should be placed on one side or other of a boundary, does it not imply that the entire mechanism for classifying requires a new look?'
A small but increasingly vocal band of experts would go further and see all drugs legalised. They say the experience of the Netherlands, where people are allowed to smoke cannabis in licensed bars, suggests legalisation does not increase usage.
And they claim it would break the links between organised crime and drugs. As a 2004 unpublished Home Office briefing to Tony Blair suggested: 'There is a strong argument that prohibition has caused or created many of the problems associated with the use or misuse of drugs. One option for the future would be to regulate drugs differently, through either over-the-counter sales, licensed sales or doctor's prescription.'
But instead of the wider debate many had hoped for, the government seems to be retrenching. In addition to getting tougher on cannabis, its long-awaited 10-year drugs strategy is, according to experts, simply a replica of the previous strategy.
'This is all smoke and mirrors,' said Danny Kushlick, director of Transform Drug Policy Foundation, the drugs think-tank that advocates legalisation. 'It is time for Brown and Cameron to stop the Dutch auction on who can be toughest on cannabis and begin a genuine exploration of alternatives to prohibition which costs UK taxpayers £2 billion to enforce and has created a drugs market worth £5bn.'
That it has come to this, a furious debate about the merits of reclassification of a single drug, is a singular failure of the government, Kushlick believes. He points out that five years ago, the Home Office select committee went as far as to debate openly the merits of opening up a comprehensive discussion on alternatives to prohibition. A then relatively obscure Tory MP, David Cameron, backed the move while a shadow minister, Alan Duncan, supported the idea of full legalisation.
But instead, experts believe the renewed focus on cannabis has now turned the clock back, with worrying implications. 'Resources could be put to much better use educating young people and the public about the physical and mental health risks associated with cannabis - we know education, and health warnings are a cost-effective way to get results,' said Paul Corry of Rethink. 'We urge Gordon Brown to consider the facts and do the right thing with tax payers' money - don't waste time tinkering around with classification - invest in drugs education.'
A decision to reclassify cannabis this week will also have repercussions across the criminal justice system and end up hitting a disproportionate number of young people, according to those working at the frontline of the drugs war.
'If you reclassify cannabis, that will put pressure on the police to bring more charges,' said Harry Fletcher, of the probation officers' union, Napo. 'That will put more pressure on the Crown Prosecution Service and more pressure on the courts. You will have more people going down. You will have more people receiving sentences because they are addicted, not because they are core criminals.'
Instead of tougher penalties, most experts would prefer the government to spend its money trying to understand the more potent forms of cannabis that are emerging on Britain's streets. Although the government will this week bolster its argument for the reclassification of cannabis by publishing evidence that skunk is now the strain of choice among cannabis smokers and that the average spliff contains 16 per cent THC, the jury is still out on what this means.
There is evidence that users are moderating their consumption, aware of the drug's increased potency. Equally there is evidence cannabis can have some positive health effects for cancer sufferers. But despite the fact that cannabis consumption can be traced back to the Neolithic age, it is still a little understood drug.
Britain's increasingly hardline approach seems at odds with many other countries. There is a worldwide trend towards decriminalisation of cannabis. Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, western Australia, the Russian federation, and some Canadian and US states have moved to civil penalties for drug possession. Barack Obama - who said of his youthful cannabis use, 'I inhaled. That was the point' - has pledged to decriminalise cannabis if he becomes US president.
But in Britain experts fear the cannabis debate is simply the start of a series of skirmishes between Gordon Brown's government and its advisers. The Observer understands that the ACMD is soon to start looking at whether ecstasy should be reclassified from a class A drug to a class B drug. The evidence base seems to support the move, but it seems incomprehensible, given the current febrile climate, that the government will sanction the move. Instead it will once again defy the experts, a move that will trigger further accusations that the issue is simply a political football.
The great irony is that the debate around cannabis - the drug of choice of the flower-power generation, the narcotic which in the Sixties and Seventies promised to open people's minds and spark a cultural revolution - is now restricting understanding. It is not just Britain's youth that may have been damaged by skunk.
They are not hard to find. Every few days brings a fresh tale of feral youths meting out random acts of violence with unfathomable intensity. Apart from the shocking brutality, the speed with which a seemingly trivial argument or confrontation can assume murderous proportions, the stories have a common theme: the perpetrators of the violence, often in their very young teens, were high on 'skunk' at the time.
The teenagers who killed Garry Newlove, the 47-year-old father of three in Cheshire? The attack came after they had binged on alcohol and skunk.
Article continues
Last month three youths were found guilty of kicking to death Mark Witherall, 47, after he found them burgling his house in Whitstable, Kent. The three were intoxicated by a ferocious cocktail of alcopops and cannabis. The judge said the three had 'acted as hyenas'.
And last week the mother of Sophie Lancaster, the 20-year-old goth murdered by two binge-drinking teenagers, claimed the rise of skunk was now one of the biggest causes of problems among young people. 'It's so much stronger now than normal cannabis and young people are smoking it from 9am and thinking it's OK,' said Sylvia Lancaster. 'I have worked with young people over a number of years and I believe that one of the biggest issues facing us is skunk.'
Suddenly, skunk - a high-strength herbal strain of cannabis - is showing the darker side of a drug that was once considered to be relatively benign. Concerns about its links with mental illness and its ability to act as a 'gateway drug', leading users into addiction, have prompted a sea change in popular opinion about cannabis.
It's a far cry from the Sixties, when cannabis - chiefly marijuana, or 'grass' - promised to open an entire generation's mind to new possibilities. As Paul McCartney observed to one of his biographers: 'We'd met people like Dylan and we got into pot, like a lot of people from our generation. And I suppose in our way we thought this was a little more grown-up than perhaps the Scotch and Coke we'd been into before then... so once pot was established as part of the curriculum you started to get a bit more surreal material coming from us, a bit more abstract stuff.'
The Beatles followed earlier converts such as America's beat poets - people like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who extolled the virtues of cannabis and helped consolidate the drug's image as a magic door through which users could access a world of new experiences. During the Vietnam war, dope-smoking assumed a political dimension, a sign that its users were at odds with a US government fighting an unpopular war. Cannabis soon became a major component of the West Coast counter-culture, a facilitator of free love and a return to an almost sybaritic era.
But now the hippie dream of peace and love has turned into the nightmare of A Clockwork Orange, in which drug-fuelled youths go on a violent rampage.
'The caricature of cannabis has for years equated it with herbal tea and hippies,' says Ben Lynam, of the UK Drug Policy Commission. 'Some people still believe that, but they are now very much among the minority.'
Prime Minister Gordon Brown is not one of that minority. This week he is expected to reject the opinion of the government's own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), and signal that cannabis should be reclassified from a class C to a class B drug, a spectacular U-turn from just two years ago and the first time ministers have ignored their experts since 1971.
It means those caught in possession of cannabis could face prison sentences of up to five years, compared with two now. But the change, for the majority of users, is likely to be cosmetic. The police have signalled that they will still continue a policy of 'confiscate and warn', although persistent offenders will face tougher penalties which experts believe will see more ending up in prison. Last year police warnings on cannabis rose 20 per cent to 120,000, suggesting the new approach is proving popular with officers on the streets, as it frees them from the bureaucracy associated with making arrests.
Brown's supporters insist the reclassification will send a signal to society and in particular to young people. 'We need to send a message out that drug-taking is wrong,' says Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister. 'It's an illegal substance, so it's about ensuring that we keep that message strong and powerful.'
But the shift by some is seen as Brown exerting his authority as a conviction politician, obeying his own puritanical code rather than listening to the experts. Few in the field believe the move is justified or indeed will have any effect. In 2006, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee found 'no solid evidence' that classification had a deterrent effect on consumption. Only 3 per cent of people polled by the mental health charity Rethink said a change in classification would deter them from smoking cannabis.
'The cost of reclassification will be more than £1m,' says Paul Corry, director of public affairs at Rethink. 'Redrafting legislation, telling the public about it and retraining police is an expensive business. But we know reclassification won't reduce the numbers using cannabis, so it will be a waste of money.'
Something strange is happening on Britain's streets: drugs have become cheaper. A survey by the charity DrugScope, based on interviews with street dealers, reveals the price of a gram of heroin dropped from £46 in 2006 to £43 last year. An ecstasy pill cost £2.40 last year compared with £3 the year before. Ketamine and and crystal powder also saw price falls while the price of cocaine remained stable. The price of cannabis, however, rose over the same period. While an ounce of 'normal' herbal cannabis would set you back £70 in 2006, last year it would cost you £87. And the price of an ounce of the stronger strains has risen to £134, up from £121.
Cannabis is now a big black-market business in Britain. While heroin is imported from the east, cocaine from South America and ecstasy from the Netherlands, much of the cannabis crop is homegrown. Sir Stephen Lander, the head of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency warned earlier this year that large-scale cannabis factories - producing high-strength strains of the drug and run by Vietnamese and Chinese criminals - are appearing across the country.
Charities working with immigrant communities claim that in many cases the factories rely on smuggled child labour to maintain the plants. What was a cottage industry has become an industrialised cultivation. Growers now use state-of-the art hydroponic systems to ensure bumper crops.
'There are wide areas of the country where this is being grown commercially,' Lander said. 'It's not as though people are growing it in a couple of pots on their window sills.'
Soaring demand for the stronger strains of cannabis is reflected by police seizures. The Home Office has been quietly studying the results of a survey conducted among police forces across the UK. Early findings suggest sinsemilla - the potent herbal leafy variety of cannabis made from dried seedless female plants, of which skunk is just one of about 100 strains - accounts for 80 per cent of all cannabis seizures. Meanwhile, seizures of cannabis resin - which back at the turn of the millennium far exceeded the number of seizures of sinsemilla - have dropped by more than a third.
This is the trend that has alarmed many health experts. Sinsemilla contains far higher amounts of the psychoactive substance tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the magic ingredient that brings euphoria. Unpublished studies suggest the THC content of the strongest varieties of herbal cannabis has doubled over the past 10 years, from seven to 14 per cent. Some strains of herbal cannabis - so-called 'super skunk' - now contain as much as 46 per cent THC. At the same time, THC levels in resin have been falling, down to an average 3.3 per cent last year.
The crucial issue dividing politicians and mental-health experts, though, is whether this polarisation of cannabis is having a deleterious effect on the nation's mental health. Studies suggest the new hybrid strains of cannabis such as skunk, which are believed to have originated in the West Coast of the US in the Seventies, contain extremely low levels of the anti-psychotic agent, cannabidiol, leading to claims they may be more harmful.
A study published in the British Medical Journal found those using cannabis before the age of 15 are four times as likely to develop psychotic illness by 26. A Lancet study in 2007 estimated that 14 per cent of 15- to 34-year-olds affected by schizophrenia are ill because of heavy cannabis use. And recent analysis of 35 major studies concluded that cannabis use increased the risk of psychotic illness later in life by approximately 40 per cent and by up to 200 per cent among heavy users.
Many experts in mental health say they now have more than enough evidence to understand that cannabis is not the safe drug of popular myth.
'We have been campaigning for many years about the links between cannabis and psychiatric illness, and highlighting evidence that the drug may not only precipitate psychotic breakdown but cause long-term mental damage,' says Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity Sane.
'The front-line experience of organisations such as ours is that use of the drug can cause harm, not only to young people but to their families, making the outcomes worse for those with mental illness and robbing young people of their motivation and future.'
Wallace accepts some of the research appears to be conflicting, but says we ignore the worst-case scenario at our peril. 'We consider that until we conduct more studies to establish the effects of the drug on developing brains and minds, the strongest signals must be given that it can be disproportionately dangerous to those who may be at most risk,' Wallace says.
The problem for the anti-cannabis camp, however, is that cases of psychosis have actually been falling. Research presented to the ACMD - and considered instrumental in persuading it that there is no need to reclassify cannabis - have shown incidents of schizophrenia have declined between 1996 and 2005.
And claims that Britain is in the grip of a cannabis epidemic also look flawed. According to government surveys, reported use of cannabis among 11- to 15-year-olds dropped from 13.4 per cent in 2001 to 10.1 per cent last year. Over the same period, reported use of cannabis among 16- to 24-year-olds slid from 27.3 per cent to 20.9 per cent.
Significantly, the decline in reported cannabis use continued to fall after the drug was reclassified from class B to class C. 'The gentle decline is something we have seen in other countries, too,' said Ben Lynam, of the UKDPC. 'It's difficult to say what is driving this. It may be that people are switching to something else, like binge-drinking.'
Likewise, the number of children who believe it is 'OK' to do cannabis has dropped dramatically - from 17 per cent in 2003 to 9 per cent in 2006, according to the Department of Health.
And yet you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the lurid headlines about a skunk-induced orgy of violence. 'There is a media generalisation about cannabis,' Lynam said. 'You read about people going on an all-night bender on cider but the focus in the reports is on the fact they had a spliff. That's not to say some people don't achieve psychosis through a spliff - in some isolated cases that will be the case. But it all helps to create some ridiculous image of cannabis as the evil weed.'
Talk to practically any expert in the field and though they may disagree on the relative dangers of cannabis use, they will agree on one thing: the debate about reclassification has dangerously stymied the wider debate about drugs. Instead, experts complain the focus on whether cannabis should be class B or C has blinded the politicians to the real issue - whether classification works at all.
'It is important that policy is grounded in evidence,' says Martin Barnes, chief executive of DrugScope and a member of the ACMD. 'But the concern is now that policy is being driven by political considerations and headlines.'
The UKDPC will issue a briefing paper to politicians next week that quotes Professor Colin Blakemore of the Science and Technology Committee. 'If it took so much effort to consider one particular drug and whether it should be placed on one side or other of a boundary, does it not imply that the entire mechanism for classifying requires a new look?'
A small but increasingly vocal band of experts would go further and see all drugs legalised. They say the experience of the Netherlands, where people are allowed to smoke cannabis in licensed bars, suggests legalisation does not increase usage.
And they claim it would break the links between organised crime and drugs. As a 2004 unpublished Home Office briefing to Tony Blair suggested: 'There is a strong argument that prohibition has caused or created many of the problems associated with the use or misuse of drugs. One option for the future would be to regulate drugs differently, through either over-the-counter sales, licensed sales or doctor's prescription.'
But instead of the wider debate many had hoped for, the government seems to be retrenching. In addition to getting tougher on cannabis, its long-awaited 10-year drugs strategy is, according to experts, simply a replica of the previous strategy.
'This is all smoke and mirrors,' said Danny Kushlick, director of Transform Drug Policy Foundation, the drugs think-tank that advocates legalisation. 'It is time for Brown and Cameron to stop the Dutch auction on who can be toughest on cannabis and begin a genuine exploration of alternatives to prohibition which costs UK taxpayers £2 billion to enforce and has created a drugs market worth £5bn.'
That it has come to this, a furious debate about the merits of reclassification of a single drug, is a singular failure of the government, Kushlick believes. He points out that five years ago, the Home Office select committee went as far as to debate openly the merits of opening up a comprehensive discussion on alternatives to prohibition. A then relatively obscure Tory MP, David Cameron, backed the move while a shadow minister, Alan Duncan, supported the idea of full legalisation.
But instead, experts believe the renewed focus on cannabis has now turned the clock back, with worrying implications. 'Resources could be put to much better use educating young people and the public about the physical and mental health risks associated with cannabis - we know education, and health warnings are a cost-effective way to get results,' said Paul Corry of Rethink. 'We urge Gordon Brown to consider the facts and do the right thing with tax payers' money - don't waste time tinkering around with classification - invest in drugs education.'
A decision to reclassify cannabis this week will also have repercussions across the criminal justice system and end up hitting a disproportionate number of young people, according to those working at the frontline of the drugs war.
'If you reclassify cannabis, that will put pressure on the police to bring more charges,' said Harry Fletcher, of the probation officers' union, Napo. 'That will put more pressure on the Crown Prosecution Service and more pressure on the courts. You will have more people going down. You will have more people receiving sentences because they are addicted, not because they are core criminals.'
Instead of tougher penalties, most experts would prefer the government to spend its money trying to understand the more potent forms of cannabis that are emerging on Britain's streets. Although the government will this week bolster its argument for the reclassification of cannabis by publishing evidence that skunk is now the strain of choice among cannabis smokers and that the average spliff contains 16 per cent THC, the jury is still out on what this means.
There is evidence that users are moderating their consumption, aware of the drug's increased potency. Equally there is evidence cannabis can have some positive health effects for cancer sufferers. But despite the fact that cannabis consumption can be traced back to the Neolithic age, it is still a little understood drug.
Britain's increasingly hardline approach seems at odds with many other countries. There is a worldwide trend towards decriminalisation of cannabis. Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, western Australia, the Russian federation, and some Canadian and US states have moved to civil penalties for drug possession. Barack Obama - who said of his youthful cannabis use, 'I inhaled. That was the point' - has pledged to decriminalise cannabis if he becomes US president.
But in Britain experts fear the cannabis debate is simply the start of a series of skirmishes between Gordon Brown's government and its advisers. The Observer understands that the ACMD is soon to start looking at whether ecstasy should be reclassified from a class A drug to a class B drug. The evidence base seems to support the move, but it seems incomprehensible, given the current febrile climate, that the government will sanction the move. Instead it will once again defy the experts, a move that will trigger further accusations that the issue is simply a political football.
The great irony is that the debate around cannabis - the drug of choice of the flower-power generation, the narcotic which in the Sixties and Seventies promised to open people's minds and spark a cultural revolution - is now restricting understanding. It is not just Britain's youth that may have been damaged by skunk.
it_girl_rag_doll
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2008
- Messages
- 164
Awesome. Guess I'll stick with ket, that's still a class C. 8)
discopupils
Bluelighter
I like how alcohol is involved in every case of violence in that article but thats just glossed right over every single time.
bloody typical. 8)
bloody typical. 8)
Cannabis laws to be strengthened
Cannabis is to be reclassified as a class B drug, Jacqui Smith has said.
The home secretary said she wanted to reverse Tony Blair's 2004 downgrading of the drug because of "uncertainty" over its impact on mental health.
The move from class C means the maximum prison sentence for possessing cannabis rises from two years to five years.
Her statement to MPs came despite the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs' review - commissioned by Gordon Brown - saying it should stay class C.
Since cannabis was downgraded there has been widespread concern about the increased prevalence of stronger "skunk" varieties.
Ms Smith said this now accounted for 80% of the cannabis seized on the streets and the drug was nearly three times stronger than in 1995.
She added that the government's change of heart - which is subject to parliamentary approval - was part of a "relentless drive".
Ms Smith, who has admitted smoking cannabis while she was a student, told MPs: "There is a compelling case for us to act now, rather than risk the future health of young people.
"Where there is a clear and serious problem, but doubt about the potential harm that will be caused, we must err on the side of caution and protect the public.
"I make no apology for that - I am not prepared to 'wait and see'."
In its report, Cannabis: Classification And Public Health, the advisory council described cannabis as a "significant public health issue".
But it said it should still remain a class C drug, as the risks were not as serious as those of class B substances, such as amphetamines and barbiturates.
The report said the evidence suggested a "probable, but weak, causal link between psychotic illness, including schizophrenia, and cannabis use".
However, in the population as a whole, it played only a "modest role" in the development of these conditions.
Council chairman Sir Michael Rawlings told BBC Radio 4's World at One: "The strength of things like skunk hasn't really changed very much over the last few years but it's now more widely used... The question of potency is a very complex area."
The advisory council did not look at the message conveyed to the public or the impact on policing, which it is not legally obliged to do.
Sir Michael added: "The government may want to take other matters into account. That's their right. They are the government."
In its report the council called for a campaign to reduce the use of cannabis, particularly focusing on young people.
It also voiced concern over the prevalence of domestic cannabis farms supplying the market and the involvement of organised criminal networks.
Ms Smith said she accepted the vast majority of the council's recommendations, but not the classification of the drug.
And Gordon Brown said at prime minister's questions that he believed making cannabis a class B drug was supported by the public and the police.
Last month he said he wanted to "send a message" to young people that using the substance was "unacceptable".
Class C includes substances such as tranquilisers, some painkillers, GHB (so-called "liquid ecstasy") and ketamine. Possession of class C drugs is treated largely as a non-arrestable offence.
Chief Constable Tim Hollis, a leader on drugs for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said he and his colleagues from other police forces would not want to take an uniform approach on the issue.
He said: "Our forces will want to retain discretion on how we deal with the problem because they will want to relate it to local circumstances."
Shadow home secretary David Davis said that the government's reversal of its earlier decision showed the downgrading of cannabis had been a mistake and accused ministers of "dithering".
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said that, as its advice had been disregarded, ministers should disband the advisory council of experts and replace it with an advisory council of "tabloid newspaper editors".
Labour MP Chris Mullin, who was chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee when it recommended that cannabis was downgraded to class C, said: "The government should follow the advice of the experts rather than that of the tabloids."
But Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity SANE, welcomed Ms Smith's decision, adding: "We believe there are too many casualties to await the results of further education and research."
However, Martin Barnes, chief executive of DrugScope, said: "There is no evidence that reclassifying cannabis to Class B will reduce levels of use, levels of harm or the availability of the drug."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/7386889.stm
Published: 2008/05/07 19:55:01 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
Cannabis is to be reclassified as a class B drug, Jacqui Smith has said.
The home secretary said she wanted to reverse Tony Blair's 2004 downgrading of the drug because of "uncertainty" over its impact on mental health.
The move from class C means the maximum prison sentence for possessing cannabis rises from two years to five years.
Her statement to MPs came despite the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs' review - commissioned by Gordon Brown - saying it should stay class C.
Since cannabis was downgraded there has been widespread concern about the increased prevalence of stronger "skunk" varieties.
Ms Smith said this now accounted for 80% of the cannabis seized on the streets and the drug was nearly three times stronger than in 1995.
She added that the government's change of heart - which is subject to parliamentary approval - was part of a "relentless drive".
Ms Smith, who has admitted smoking cannabis while she was a student, told MPs: "There is a compelling case for us to act now, rather than risk the future health of young people.
"Where there is a clear and serious problem, but doubt about the potential harm that will be caused, we must err on the side of caution and protect the public.
"I make no apology for that - I am not prepared to 'wait and see'."
In its report, Cannabis: Classification And Public Health, the advisory council described cannabis as a "significant public health issue".
But it said it should still remain a class C drug, as the risks were not as serious as those of class B substances, such as amphetamines and barbiturates.
The report said the evidence suggested a "probable, but weak, causal link between psychotic illness, including schizophrenia, and cannabis use".
However, in the population as a whole, it played only a "modest role" in the development of these conditions.
Council chairman Sir Michael Rawlings told BBC Radio 4's World at One: "The strength of things like skunk hasn't really changed very much over the last few years but it's now more widely used... The question of potency is a very complex area."
The advisory council did not look at the message conveyed to the public or the impact on policing, which it is not legally obliged to do.
Sir Michael added: "The government may want to take other matters into account. That's their right. They are the government."
In its report the council called for a campaign to reduce the use of cannabis, particularly focusing on young people.
It also voiced concern over the prevalence of domestic cannabis farms supplying the market and the involvement of organised criminal networks.
Ms Smith said she accepted the vast majority of the council's recommendations, but not the classification of the drug.
And Gordon Brown said at prime minister's questions that he believed making cannabis a class B drug was supported by the public and the police.
Last month he said he wanted to "send a message" to young people that using the substance was "unacceptable".
Class C includes substances such as tranquilisers, some painkillers, GHB (so-called "liquid ecstasy") and ketamine. Possession of class C drugs is treated largely as a non-arrestable offence.
Chief Constable Tim Hollis, a leader on drugs for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said he and his colleagues from other police forces would not want to take an uniform approach on the issue.
He said: "Our forces will want to retain discretion on how we deal with the problem because they will want to relate it to local circumstances."
Shadow home secretary David Davis said that the government's reversal of its earlier decision showed the downgrading of cannabis had been a mistake and accused ministers of "dithering".
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said that, as its advice had been disregarded, ministers should disband the advisory council of experts and replace it with an advisory council of "tabloid newspaper editors".
Labour MP Chris Mullin, who was chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee when it recommended that cannabis was downgraded to class C, said: "The government should follow the advice of the experts rather than that of the tabloids."
But Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity SANE, welcomed Ms Smith's decision, adding: "We believe there are too many casualties to await the results of further education and research."
However, Martin Barnes, chief executive of DrugScope, said: "There is no evidence that reclassifying cannabis to Class B will reduce levels of use, levels of harm or the availability of the drug."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/7386889.stm
Published: 2008/05/07 19:55:01 GMT
© BBC MMVIII