The cannabis conundrum

Plenty of people have tried it yet still it remains illegal. Time for a change I think.

The new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has admitted to having smoked marijuana when at university. Some quarters claim she has compromised her role and should quit/be sacked. Compromised because of a minor illegal act 25 years ago? Give her a few months and gross incompetence will have undone her position more than a joint ever could.

This has all come as a result of the debate about whether cannabis should be reclassified from class C to class B. In all my encounters with drug users, I have never heard anyone talk about the class of drug influencing their behaviour. But still the debate continues. Much of the reason for its resurrection is that cannabis these days is much stronger than when many people encountered it in the 1960s. The THC content (the chemical that gives the "high") is so pervasive in the plant that you can now smoke pretty much any part, not just the bud.

Yet for all this difference, much of the debate seems to have missed a key point: modern skunk isn't bush weed, you have to mix it with tobacco to keep it burning, i.e. you have to dilute it. Rather like orange squash, it's as strong as you want it. So it really isn't dangerously different from that of the past.

What is startling is that we have politicians, like Jacqui Smith, arguing that because weed is dangerous for people - and she should know having tried it and risen to one of the highest offices in the land - that the best course of action is for those endangered people to go to jail. At a guess, I'd say that prison induces more physical and psychological damage than weed does. Don't believe me, then consider that, as Tim Worstall points out about cannabis-related psychiatric admissions:

In 1996-7, there were 510 admissions, rising to 946 in 2005-6, data obtained by shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley revealed. Over the last five years alone there was a 65% rise.

With occasional/regular user numbers estimated at between 8million and 500,000, this puts the risk of mental illness at somewhere between 0.01 and 0.2%. In other words, vanishingly small. With the risks of alcohol and cigarettes much higher, one must question why we render the entire marijuana industry illegal and yet allow those more perfidious vices.

I see no reason why recreational drug use is prohibited. By all means, crack down on other potential behaviours of drug users, such as violence. Just as we should with anyone, just as we should be doing that with those who get rough after binging on booze. But don't deny them the right to get drunk until they've shown an inability to control themselves whilst so. I've no sympathy for addicts who commit crimes but to treat the addiction itself as a crime is absurd. A crime is what we visit on others, not on ourselves. The notion that consenting adults on private property should be denied the right to take what they wish into their own bodies is quite simply fascist. It underlies the smoking ban and it underlies this. It surrenders a fundamental principle of individuals in free society for some government officer's idea of a happier, healthier world.

Drugs are a difficult topic for traditional conservatives, as opposed to libertarians such as myself. If you haven't done them, odds are you don't know what you are talking about. If you have done them, you tend to prove it's possible to try them and not die in some dank rat-infested slum gutter. I'm waiting for a politician to say: I tried it, I don't feel guilty about it, and on that basis, I can support no law that passes judgement on people because of it.