I just read a cracking article by my good friend Lauren Fraser in her Youth Editor column on the subject of cannabis. And I really agreed with it. You can read her article here but I just want to quickly touch on a few points in her article and other things that come to mind when you think about this sort of thing.
Basically, I think it should be bumped up to Class B. It was a foolish decision really to lower the grade, it just put in peoples minds that even the government didnt think much of it, and failed to see the risks of the drug. In my view, a drug is a drug, and you should not be using these substances if they are banned.
Someone today said it should be legalised to make money for the Government through taxation and to "protect the public". How exactly? Giving people a licence to be dopeheads and airbrains is not good and not in the public interest! Government needs to take more interest in public health then finance. Yeah, we could make shedloads, maybe balance the budget, but at the cost of the public's mental health? I think no government would possibly pass that law.
We definitely have to find the balance between a balanced budget and a population that is aware of the health risks and is adequately protected. Yeah, reclassifying will rule out possible medicinal uses. But we have better analgesics then cannabis! And if we made the penalties for Class B higher and better enforced then young people, who usually make up the bulk of users will be deterred, as I am sure they would rather keep cruising the streets in their hoodies, not doped up and high on whatever, then end up in Feltham. Attitudes need to change.
What I think we should do with drugs such as cannabis is the same as David Cameron proposed to do with first-time knife carriers: lock them all up. Sure, it will be expensive to build a whole load of prisons and police, but surely public interest is worth it?
We also need to back up this with solid education in schools that this is illegal, this is not cool and isn't going to be tolerated and those who choose to go against the law do so at their peril. People need to learn (or be taught, whether they like it or not) to respect authority again.
I know some people will say "what about tobacco and alcohol?" and "You're being hypocritical". Sure. There's no easy solution, they are both harmful substances. But let us consider, we may have "missed the boat" there, but does that give us a right to let every other toxin, drug, pill and puff be legal? No, at best I can conclude, and there is no easy answer, that we need to stem the tide of ways people can become p***ed.
Anyway, this is not a definitive idea or assessment of Lauren's article or my view towards it, but simply myself making clear what I feel about this. Lauren's done a very good job with her article, I think she will do well in the future and read it! Good on you, Lauren, keep it up!
I will continue working on the Prom blog. I have been unwell lately so have had limited computer use as it's painful to sit with a laptop at the moment. Keep waiting, I promise you will like it!
"Someone today said it should be legalised to make money for the Government through taxation and to "protect the public". How exactly? Giving people a licence to be dopeheads and airbrains is not good and not in the public interest!"
ReplyDeleteBy preventing the sale of increasingly strong strains (skunk) and instead selling controlled amounts of the original, vastly less dangerous strains.
"What I think we should do with drugs such as cannabis is the same as David Cameron proposed to do with first-time knife carriers: lock them all up. Sure, it will be expensive to build a whole load of prisons and police, but surely public interest is worth it?"
Are you completely mad!? You want to imprison anyone caught with cannabis? The prison system is stretched to breaking point anyway, sentence lengths are falling, parole is granted earlier, and you want to put the millions of cannabis users in the country in prison!? Throw in everyone who carries a knife too and we'd need to build thousands of prisons. The UK's current prison population is about 80,000! Have some perspective.
Prison is not a particularly effective punishment, is extremely expensive, puts small-time criminals in touch with big-time ones - it's useful mostly for keeping people who are a genuine, imminent danger to society off the streets. A casual knife-carrier is not that, much less an occasional cannabis user. Give them rehab or community service if you want to be draconian about drugs, but prison is not the way to go.
(for my own views, I agree with legalising it as mentioned above. But I am a flaming liberal.)
Oh, and on the subject of knife crime: again, have some perspective. It's the media's latest OH MY GODS THE COUNTRY IS DOOMED BY [panic of the day] story, nothing more. Learn to see past the media hype to the real issues and real problems and you'll go far.
ReplyDeletePeople will continue to use cannabis regardless of the law, which is the key argument as to why it should be legalised.
ReplyDeleteThe drug trade as it stands is highly dangerous and outside the arm of the law, because of the penalties for being involved in it. This means people are often not aware of what they are smoking and/or eating, especially in the case of the younger generation.
Because it is not legal, young people are not educated as to how to keep themselves safe and experiment with drugs responsibly, as they could be. The point in this being that teenagers who are going to experiment with drugs are going to do it regardless of the law, they may in fact be more motivated towards if it is seen as an act of 'rebellion'.
As for the dangers of cannabis, these are myths. As you mentioned, cannabis is widely renowned to be no more dangerous than cigarettes or alcohol. In fact, cannabis is not a physically addictive substance, unlike both of these. All negative effects of cannabis, such as paranoia, are only noted by heavy smokers. Admittedly, cannabis can cause vomiting and nausea for first-time smokers, but this is only prevalent in teenagers who had not been given sufficient guidance as to how to protect themselves from the drug.
As for linking cannabis with knife carriers, you have no evidence to back that up, and the two issues are in no way related, except in the mind of a stereotypist.
I forgot to put my name. There it is. I hope you will take my points into consideration, Mr. Holliday.
ReplyDelete"[F]ailed to see the risks of the drug"... You seemed to have skipped a bit here Richard... Do you actually know the risks of cannabis, because I can't find them in this article.
ReplyDelete"[A]ware of the health risks"? In the entire world there has never been a single death caused by cannabis, where as in the UK alone, smoking tobacco kills over 100 000 and that's just each year. Alcohol related deaths total over 9000, and that's direct death by alcohol, not taking into account death by alcohol caused diseases.
I personally think that given the right education people should be free to enjoy whatever substances they wish, given two important conditions: 1) They are not endangering those around them. 2) They pay financially for any pressure on public services (including healthcare) their lifestyle choice causes.
People should have the right to a private life, but we also need to learn the facts about cannabis rather than using public ignorance as an excuse to scapecoat it for the cause of all the problems in our society (just like the knife crime 'problem').
I know you weren't aiming to do this, but putting knife crime and cannabis in the same topic makes you look very ignorant.
ReplyDeleteSaying lock them all up is not just impractical, but also overkill. The amount of people that want Cannabis legalized also shows that Cannabis is on nowhere near the same level as knife crime in terms of the way it is perceived by the general public.
This may sound harsh, but making blank statements like this would seriously damage you from a political perspective so you should take a softer-worded approach with topics like this.