The Great Cannabis U-Turn

Here in the Dis-United Kingdom the availability of illegal drugs is, supposedly, so widespread that you only have to walk down a street in London or any major city to find vendors openly offering their products - if you know the signs to look for.
Not that Nosher or I claim to be experts on this - just interested observers of the media hype and political shenanigans.
The drugs culture, or so it seems, is now so deeply embedded in our society that it will take more than a change in the status of a drug to combat it.
So the news the our Home Secretary, Jacqui 'Wacky Baccy' Smith had decided to upgrade cannabis from Class C to Class B (making possession a more serious criminal offence) against the advice of the expert inquiry commissioned by the Government itself, provided us with some amusement.
What, if anything, was going through her mind, and would her decision actually achieve anything positive?
These were the thoughts we bandied back and forth as we relaxed on our old armchairs in the shade behind Nosher's shed on a hot sunny afternoon. Our refreshment was, fittingly, Nosher's excellent home-made parsnip wine, emphasising our commitment to legal methods of mind-altering drug.
Nosher's parsnip wine, it must be added, has an alcohol content close to zero, but tastes very nice.
'Wacky Baccy Jacqui claims that upgrading cannabis to Class B is designed to emphasis the greater potency of the new skunk variety' said Nosher 'thereby providing useful information to those who might be tempted to try it - and perhaps even deter them.'
He didn't sound convinced.
'Apparently there are research findings that claim to show that cannabis use amongst 11 to 15 year olds has actually significantly decreased in the last few years, since it was downgraded from B to C' I responded 'although I'm not sure there's a valid basis for inferring the downgrading was a causal factor in this.'
'Even so' Nosher replied 'the expert advice was that there were no health grounds for upgrading cannabis. So Wacky Baccy Jacqui needs to support her decision on non-health grounds. Which I didn't hear her do.'
'Well, she claims to be acting for the good of an entire generation' I said 'the greater good, if you like, so that the issue of the health of one or two who suffer bad consequences is not the issue, it's the number of lives blighted by the effects of the drug - but does she mean health effects or some other kinds of effects?'
We sat for a while silently observing our plants growing in their neat little rows.
It was Nosher who disturbed the peace.
'Even if she believes that ingesting cannabis has some other deleterious effects - such as rending the user temporarily morally incapacitated, for example (I'm not saying it does, just using this as a possibility) - then she needs to show how upgrading cannabis from C to B would actually change the social impact of the drug. But she hasn't done this. It sounds like the usual political posturing, with no sound reasoning behind it.'
'I'm entirely unconvinced that criminalising cannabis users achieves anything positive at all' I added 'it seems reasonable to that the manufacture and distribution for sale should be a criminal offence, but criminalising those who grow it for their own personal use alone seems faintly ridiculous, as does criminalising anyone for possession of a small amount. This is supposed to be a free country, or so we're told.'
Nosher nodded.
'What is actually needed' he said 'is a far more hard-hitting campaign on the dangers of illegal drug-use, and particularly the negative long-term effects upon a person's life. Then we should place responsibility for those consequences where they clearly belong: with the individual who chose to take the drug, and the person who supplied them. Otherwise we should leave well alone.'
'And then' I added 'all those otherwise law-abiding individuals who use cannabis for pain relief and other perfectly understandable reasons who pose no threat to public order or morality could be left in peace, and quite rightly so.'
'Well, I'm glad we cleared all that up' said Nosher.
More from http://www.overthegardenfence.blogspot.com/ soon.
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