Matthew Taylor, the Chief Executive of the RSA, writes about the reclassification debate:
As the father of teenage sons I sometimes hear them talk about their peers smoking ‘weed’. For them it seems to be an aspect of identity, with smokers seen as a subset of what used to be called grungers; teens who wear baggie jeans, have long hair and spend a lot of time in their bedrooms listening to bands like Nirvana and their various imitators. My sons have different lifestyles and reference points so they tend to be disparaging about this particular subset of teen culture.
The point is that in all these discussions I have not once heard the idea that young people’s choices about cannabis are based on the law.
Indeed it is almost the reverse, as cannabis (the majority of which is now grown in the UK) has become easier and easier to get hold of it has lost some of its connotations of rebellion leaving young people to take a dispassionate view of its effects and its effects on those people who take a lot of it.
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6 May, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Whatever its ‘connotations’,its anything but a ’soft’ drug, so lets stop pretending it is. forget the hysteria and look at the facts. Cannabis and Mental Health: british medical Journal 23 november 2002 Pages 1195, 1919,1212. It becomes apparent that it should never have been downgraded.
As for the rubbish about criminilising users, forget it. It never happened nor is it likely to. all that hype together with a shoal of other red herrings comes from the pro drug lobby.
The lies about how the legalising of it would solve the problems and reduce crime has also been exposed for what they are, from the country, that the pro drug lobby is so fond of quoting, Amsterdam, where the government enjoys windfall taxes of up to 300 million pounds a year from some 700 plus registered cannabis cafes, but that pales into petty cash, compared with the huge profits made by the Netherlands illegal cannabis trade which remain hidden, going to organised crime.
As Max Daniel, the Dutch police commissioner points out, depite the fact that growing cannabis in the Nethelands is illegal, as an export product, it comes third after tomatoes and cucumbers, and all the profits go to organised crime. Legalise and cut crime, forget it, its a fairy tale.
7 May, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I think you are missing the point here Peter. The majority of young people I have worked with who are using cannabis have little concern for the political horseplay over what classification cannabis should hold - whether it is B or C is beside the point as the ‘message’ sent out by classification holds little or no sway with young people over whether they use or not. All this does is take the issue away from the disparate levels of drug ed in this country and more importantly the poor choices young people are making. Also, while I dont want to fall either side of the legalisation debate (nor simplify it), isn’t the export levels and illegal trade profit of Dutch cannabis influenced more by drug policy in this country than that of Holland?
7 May, 2008 at 8:25 pm
No that was my point Ian, the reclassification simply brought confusion, if it had been left alone as it should have, people would still use it.
The use of drugs has little or nothing to do with classification, people use drugs to change the way they feel. what is needed is unbiased factual information about the total harms psycho active drugs cause, and which is lacking in the UK.
No, I don’t think the export of cannabis from Holland tells us anything other then decriminilising drugs does not mean the end of crime which was my point and which is the lie.