France: 1 million more cannabis users in the last 5 years... yet more proof that prohibition does not limit cannabis use...

In France this week we have a new parliamentary report that recommends the full legalization of cannabis, with state control of the sale.

The report presents yet more proof, if any was needed, that prohibition does not limit cannabis use:

"there are 13.4 million people in this nation of 62 million who are either regular or occasional cannabis users - one million more than when statistics were gathered five years ago. This makes France's level of consumption among the highest in Europe alongside Spain, the UK and Germany."

Wonderful news from Italy where the supreme court has just decriminalised personal cultivation of cannabis.

Italian damsels, long accustomed to being serenaded on their balconies, may now do so as the perfumed scent of potted cannabis plants drifts around them on the evening breeze... legally...

Italians can breathe a collective sigh of relief, but over in the USA the tokers of New Jersey are still holding their breath as plans to decriminalise possession of small amounts of cannabis go before the state legislature.

Unlike Italy, the proposed New Jersey laws will not make the essential step of cutting the link between the cannabis market and organised crime. Citizens would still be forced to purchase their cannabis from the black market. As it is, the bill has little chance of passing, so cannabis users in NJ will likely be harassed and imprisoned for some time to come.

Italy need not worry about an explosion in cannabis use due to the new laws as there is no evidence that prohibition limits consumption, nor that "liberal" laws encourage use. Portugal and the Netherlands, for example, are well known for having substantially lower rates of cannabis use than countries such as the UK, France and Denmark. And the rewards of decriminalising personal production can benefit users and non-users alike. Less money going to organised crime, less of the violence associated with gang competition over control of the illegal cannabis market, and an end to the harassment of cannabis users by law enforcement.  Congratulations to the Italian Supreme Court. Let's hope the hacks and politicians of the UK are paying attention...

"splendidly apposite" comments on cannabis, from Paul Flynn MP's blog

Reefer madness
http://paulflynnmp.typepad.com/

...from the blog of Paul Flynn MP:

An otherwise respected MP Charles Walker disgracefully added to the hysteria of unscientific claims on links between cannabis and mental ill health.

A clutch of splendid comments has been made on ‘They work for you’ site to the answer I had when I asked the Government for their view.  Minister Ann Milton was guarded:

“In some people, however, intoxication leads to attacks of paranoia and confused feelings...the prevalence of these acute psychological reactions to cannabis is uncertain’.

In relation to long-term psychotic illness, the report states that:

‘On balance the council considers that the evidence points to a probable but weak causal link between psychotic illness and cannabis use. Whether such a casual link will become stronger with the wider use of higher potency cannabis products remain uncertain’.

Angus N had added his comments to the site, which are splendidly apposite.

"Glyn Lewis, Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at the University of Bristol, one of the world's leading experts on this subject, went on record recently to say that "...there is no certainty of a causal relationship between cannabis use and psychosis".

It is very welcome to see that this is also the line Anne Milton is taking, in keeping with the findings of the ACMD.

As regards the recent increases in the potency of UK cannabis and the fear of a consequent increase in long-term psychotic illness, there are accurate figures available that show from around 1995 - 2005 the strength of typical UK cannabis roughly doubled, and the typical levels of CBD, an anti-psychotic, dramatically declined.

"Potency of D9-THC and Other Cannabinoids in Cannabis in England in 2005: Implications for Psychoactivity and Pharmacology" by Potter, Clark and Brown shows that from 1995 to 2005 typical cannabis potency in the UK roughly doubled to around 13.9%THC.

Potter's team then voiced the widespread concern that a possible psychosis epidemic may be on the cards in the UK due to the rise of the new intensively bred "skunk" strains of cannabis, which were eclipsing traditional imported Moroccan hashish.

A similar rationale was made by Robin Murray to back a change of editorial stance at The Independent in March 2007, as championed with famously inaccurate statistics on potency by Rosie "30 times" Boycott and John "25 times" Rentoul. Ironically, this development of the cannabis market appears to have been driven by the very prohibition-based drug control policy that The Independent changed its editorial stance to back.

Fortunately the same period of 1996 - 2005 was also covered in a study the ACMD commissioned: "Assessing the impact of cannabis use on trends in diagnosed schizophrenia in the United Kingdom from 1996 to 2005" by the Department of Medicines Management, Keele University.
The Keel University study "did not find any evidence of increasing schizophrenia or psychoses in the general population from 1996 to 2005."

The Keele team examined the "trends in the annual prevalence and incidence of schizophrenia and psychoses, as measured by diagnosed cases from 1996 to 2005. Retrospective analysis of the General Practice Research Database (GPRD) was conducted for 183 practices in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The study cohort comprised almost 600,000 patients each year, representing approximately 2.3% of the UK population aged 16 to 44. Between 1996 and 2005 the incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia and psychoses were either stable or declining. Explanations other than a genuine stability or decline were considered, but appeared less plausible. In conclusion, this study did not find any evidence of increasing schizophrenia or psychoses in the general population from 1996 to 2005."

In the same decade that the typical THC levels of UK cannabis roughly doubled, and CBD content near vanished, the incidence of psychosis and schizophrenia in the UK either stabilised or declined.

The "skunk psychosis" fears being voiced by The Independent, Robin Murray, Charles Walker MP and Mary Brett of Cannabis Skunk Sense appear, however well-intentioned, to be without sound scientific foundation. Moreover, the drug control policies they champion are a source of the very evils they deplore. The prohibition approach appears to have stimulated a doubling of cannabis potency in the last decade or so.

Clarity from Anne Milton on the facts about cannabis and mental health is a welcome step towards a rational and compassionate drug policy for the UK."

Neo Reefer Madness: Sativex, CanSS and John Rentoul of The Independent

John Rentoul: I admit I was wrong
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/06/05/i-admit-i-was-wrong/

Cannabis Skunk Sense
www.cannabisskunksense.co.uk

Connecticut Decriminalises Cannabis
http://blog.norml.org/2011/06/07/connecticut-lawmakers-vote-to-decriminalize-adult-marijuana-possession/

Sativex Launches in Denmark
http://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/29148/gw-pharma-launches-sativex-in-denmark-after-law-change-29148.html

First there was Marinol, now there's Sativex a "whole plant medicine" with a 1:1 formula of THC and CBD that continues to be approved for medical use in country after country. This week it was Denmark's turn to realise that yes, cannabis and cannabinoids are safe medicine - very safe medicine. Woohoo! And over in the US Connecticut became the fourteenth state to end criminalisation of cannabis users. Even better!

Meanwhile, in spite of the fact that a THC based medicine is becoming an approved medicine in Europe, Canada and elsewhere, Britain is in the grip of "Reefer Madness."

Murder, Insanity, Death!

Back in the bad old days of Anslinger and the racist "Reefer Madness" scares of '30s America it used to be "negroes" and Mexicans would go on a deranged killing and raping spree after smoking the deadly "marijuana." Anslinger, who had just lost the battle for alcohol prohibition had turned his attention to cannabis... lock up your daughter, the immigrants are coming and they are smoking the Devil's Weed!

Now in 21st century Britain we have  "skunk psychosis" - one puff and you're a suicidal vegetable instantly relegated to status underclass... Cannabis ruins promising young lives. There is  "skunk suicide". A sneaky toke and Martin's educational career was over. Kevin threw up the rope. Overnight Tarquin became a sullen young chav, started muttering obscenities and was later sectioned for his own good... all because of smoking "skunk"! Think of the children!

Yes, the Daily Mail Brigade are upping the anti... again...

..this time Reefer Madness has taken the form of Mary Brett of Cannabis Skunk Sense (aka CanSS - at least they are frank in acknowledging their sources of inspiration mein fuhrer), John Rentoul a poisonous little Blairite from The Independent, and Charles the Tory MP for Hertfordshire.

The cry has gone out "Save us CanSS! Save us from the scourge of skunk!" 

Milton Friedman, the eminent economist, once told Bill Bennett, Bush Snr's drug tsar,  "You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. Your mistake is failing to realise the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore."

It's a lesson the Daily Mail Brigade refuse to learn.

"Cannabis is harmful and may cause psychosis, so I will continue to support prohibition." is the new mantra they want the House of Commons to be chanting... a variation on the basic theme of "I don't like drugs so they should be banned"

The problem for John Rentoul and the idiots at Cannabis Skunk Sense is that this position is incoherent.

Even the skunk smokers can see that, and that is why 6 million of them in the UK are ignoring CanSS's bullshit and lighting up...

British pot smokers need only cast their fuddled minds back over the last ten to fifteen years to realise that prohibition has given them stronger cannabis... so the cruel stupidity of Rentoul's position (if they cared to read it) is readily apparent to them... few people in the UK today would be able to buy mild imported grass or hashish even if they wanted to, such has been the suddenness of the prohibiton powered rise of "skunk"...

Typical cannabis potency in the UK has pretty well doubled just in the last decade or so as imported hashish and grass have been replaced by new indoor grown strains of intensively bred cannabis. Cannabis is 30 times stronger since the '60s was the claim made by Rosie Boycott in 2007, while John Rentoul gave a more modest 25 times in the very same edition. Their co-conspirator Charles the Tory has just claimed "six times" in the House of Commons. Perhaps they should consult on statistics. Better still they could wake up to the fact that they are demonising skunk while singing the praises of the very policies that have led to its prevalence.

But neither Boycott, Rentoul nor Brett have the sense to twig that prohibition is pro potency --- nor do they realise that to make things worse, it also has no clear limiting effect on cannabis use. Indeed, countries with strong laws and strong enforcement seem to often have more pot smokers.

The UK and Denmark have significantly higher levels of cannabis use than nations where possession is no longer criminalised, such as Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands.

And cannabis use grew by 8.5% worldwide from 1998 - 2008 (the UN's own figure).

Really ...if  prohibition is an intelligent compassionate response to the dangers of cannabis, then God saves us from a stupid cruel one!

Rentoul's article on his blog at The Independent concludes with this gem:  "It is a bad thing that the drugs business is in the hands of criminals. My view is that it would be a worse thing if it were legalised, and regulated or administered by the government."

...a position that can be very fairly paraphrased as "drugs are harmful, so it is best that they be produced and marketed by the mafia."

Labelling for % of THC and CBD? Consumers allowed to make an informed decision as to what they put into their own bodies? Forget it!

CanSS and the Daily Mail Brigade are here to save us from ourselves, and they are going to do it through the magical power of banning things - a fantasy in which, as Charles the Tory proclaimed on June 6th before the House of Commons, they have a resolutely unshakeable faith...

Extend the "ban it" logic to alcohol, a drug which (much as most of us love it) unlike cannabis actually has been proven to cause psychosis, namely Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, and the implication here seems to be that we should reinstate alcohol prohibition and bring back Capone.

More deluded still is Rentoul's staggering claim that the “war on drugs” is a war "that no one is actually fighting"...

There are in excess of 300,000 people behind bars in the USA alone for breaking drug laws.

I quote Jeffrey Miron, a Professor of Economics at Harvard University:

"The U.S. government spends more than $33 billion and arrests 1.5 million
people annually to enforce drug prohibition—a federal policy that has
been in effect for almost eighty years. More than 318,000 people are
currently behind bars for breaking U.S. drug laws—more than the total
number of people incarcerated for all crimes in the United Kingdom,
France, Germany, Italy, and Spain combined."

In Jan 2011, President Felipe Calderon revealed that 34,612 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico over the past four years. The vast majority of those killed are suspected gang members, killed in turf wars between rival gangs. Around two thirds of the Mexican cartels' income comes from cannabis (see Jeffrey Miron's work).

That these deaths are an indirect consequence of prohibitionist policy is not contested by a single commentator, economist or politician.

So this is the type of drug market Rentoul, CanSS and The Daily Mail Brigade support: no lawyers - dispute resolution and market competition are best conducted with the barrel a gun.

Mass incarceration and tens of thousands dead... it's a price worth paying.

After all we have to weigh all those deaths and prisoners against weightier things... among them, Rentoul's  "belief" that cannabis, I quote, "seems" to cause psychosis.

Of course, this may seem a trifle unfair --- shouldn't we respect Rentoul's and Charles the Tory's faith in the ideal of eradicating the cannabis scourge and settling for nothing less? Shouldn't we think of the children?

Prohibition is pro drugs and pro potency. It is an utterly cruel and counter-productive drugs control policy. Why? Because economic forces cannot be banned, any more than the ocean tides can... the last 80 years have proved this - again, and again, and again...

One wonders if there is a Patron Saint of Prohibition....

King Canute, perhaps?

Charles Walker MP Votes Against Smoking Ban

A few choice titbits from the voting records of Tory MP Charles Walker, champion of the new "reefer madness" prohibition hysteria that is "skunk psychosis". 


Voted against removing hereditary peers from the House of Lords.

Voted strongly against a wholly elected House of Lords.

Voted very strongly for replacing Trident.

Voted moderately against equal gay rights.

Voted for a stricter asylum system.

And last but not least:


Voted very strongly against a smoking ban.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/charles_walker/broxbourne

Cannabis and Psychosis (Young People) - House of Commons debates, 9 June 2011, 6:00 pm

More "Reefer Madness" from the Daily Mail Brigade
http://www.bearsdenherald.co.uk/news/cannabis_russian_roulette_warning_1_1672386
Hansard June 9th 2011
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110609/debtext/110609-0004.htm

Charles Walker MP may (as he says himself) not be an expert clinician or scientist, but he has done a rather expert job of making cannabis psychosis appear to be fact, when the evidence to support a causal link between cannabis use and psychosis, even as a contributory cause, remains entirely equivocal and open to interpretation.

Just last month, Glyn Lewis Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at the University of Bristol, one of the world's leading experts on the subject, said "...there is no certainty of a causal relationship between cannabis use and psychosis".

The "six times higher" figure Mr. Walker uses does his case no favours, and such abuse of science and statistics has been summarily dealt with by Ben Goldacre in his Bad Science series. I refer you to "Cherry picking data to prove a point about cannabis" in The Guardian, Saturday 24 March 2007 and to his other piece "Blah blah cannabis blah blah blah" in The Guardian Saturday, July 28 2007.

Ironically, there are accurate figures available that do show a very real increase in cannabis potency in the UK from around 1995 - 2005, when the strength of typical UK cannabis roughly doubled.

"Potency of D9-THC and Other Cannabinoids in Cannabis in England in 2005: Implications for Psychoactivity and Pharmacology" by Potter, Clark and Brown shows that from 1995 to 2005 typical cannabis potency roughly doubled to just over 13%THC.

On the basis of this, Potter et al speculated that there may be worrying implications, a possible psychosis epidemic may be on the cards due to the rise of the new "skunk" cannabis.

Fortunately the period of 1996 - 2005 was also covered in a study commissioned by the ACMD: "Assessing the impact of cannabis use on trends in diagnosed schizophrenia in the United Kingdom from 1996 to 2005" by the Department of Medicines Management, Keele University.

The study found looked at the General Practice Research Database (GPRD) "for 183 practices in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The study cohort comprised almost 600,000 patients each year, representing approximately 2.3% of the UK population aged 16 to 44."

The study concluded that:

"Between 1996 and 2005 the incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia and psychoses were either stable or declining... ...this study did not find any evidence of increasing schizophrenia or psychoses in the general population from 1996 to 2005."

In the same decade that cannabis strength doubled, psychosis levels either stabilised or declined.

But we could be charitable, we could allow Mr. Walker the possibility that cannabis may cause psychosis. Does this constitute a sound reason for continuing with current prohibitionist policy - under which cannabis potency has doubled in ten years? Alcohol prohibition in the USA saw the rise of distilled alcohol, and cannabis prohibition in the UK has seen the rise of double potency skunk cannabis.

The UN's own figures show that the cannabis use grew by 8.5% worldwide from 1998 - 2008.

Prohibition is not a rational drug control policy. If anything, prohibition appears to be "pro drugs" and "pro cannabis", stimulating cannabis potency and stimulating drug use.

Prohibition doesn't result in the ever-decreasing market in cannabis that its advocates think and claim it does. In fact, it does the opposite. Crop eradication programmes in Afghanistan and South America saw world opium use rise by 35% and cocaine use by 27% over the same ten year period up to 2008, according to the UN.

The consequences of cannabis prohibition, indirect and direct, are tragic - mass incarceration and tens of thousands dead each year.

60% of the Mexican cartels' income comes from cannabis. 34, 612 deaths occurred in the Mexican drug wars in the four years up to Jan 2011, mostly murders in gang competition over supply routes to the US. There are around 350,000 people in prison in the US for breaking drugs laws. Another 10,000 or more US citizens are estimated by the eminent economist Milton Friedman to die each year due to prohibition.

It's time to stop painting this discussion as People Who Like Drugs vs. People Who Don't Like Drugs.

Prohibition's days are numbered because prohibition has been shown unequivocally to be a failure. Enough of the panic-mongering and hysteria, we need a rational and compassionate drug policy.

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debate/?id=2011-06-09a.393.2