UK - 'Let's give every schoolboy lines for smoking cannabis'

[edgarshade]

The Times

31 May 2012
By Matthew Reisz

With reader comments

David Nutt, the drugs 'scientist who got sacked', tells Matthew Reisz that a less punitive approach is needed

"Queen Victoria wrote eulogies about cannabis," says David Nutt. "She used it for period pains and post-childbirth - and a hundred years on we lock up people with multiple sclerosis who use it."

A similar scepticism about government policy is a typically prominent feature of his new book, Drugs - Without the Hot Air: Minimizing the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs, published on 31 May.

Today, however, Professor Nutt notes the current prime minister's "very interesting drug-using career at school" and sees distinct possibilities in "the Cameron approach". Referring to an incident revealed in 2007 in a biography on the Tory leader, he says: "When Cameron was caught at Eton in possession of cannabis, he was given hundreds of lines of Latin to copy out. "Perfect. Let's give every schoolboy 500 lines for smoking cannabis rather than kick them into the street so they start selling the stuff or start selling heroin. That was a sensible approach which allowed his career to blossom."

More...
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420102&c=1

 

[Albion]

Him and David should meet up for a good ole fashioned sesh and work on some new policies.

 

[JD55]

Doubt anything will change anytime soon. It's good that the conversation has started atleast.

 

[Crankinit]

Doubt anything will change anytime soon. It's good that the conversation has started atleast.

Well there's a lot more discussion going on around the issue than there was even 2 or 3 years ago. I think we're fast reaching the breaking point where even a century of propaganda-induced ignorance and special interest money can't outweigh the obvious truth that our current approach to drugs is failing miserably.

 

[slimvictor]

The leaders of the free world have all used drugs.
Yet they continue to prosecute other people who do so - disproportionately targeting the poor and ethnic minorities.
This is not a "war on drugs", as if such a thing were possible.
It is a war on freedom.