Topic: War on Drugs
So the UK is as Messed Up as We Are Drug War insanity is not a local phenomenon...by RS Davis
(Libertarian)
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Did you hear about what Prime Minister Gordon Brown is doing in England? He's rolling back the 2004 measure that reduced pot from class B to class C - the most sensible measure they'd yet taken regarding marijuana. The Independent UK reports:
Defying the weight of medical and scientific opinion, Gordon Brown is to order tougher new laws today on cannabis possession. The Prime Minister has decided to overrule his own expert advisers and reverse the downgrading four years ago of Britain's favourite illegal drug from a class B to a class C substance, threatening cannabis smokers with five-year prison terms.
His announcement comes amid fears that Britain is in the grip of an epidemic of cannabis-induced psychosis. This is based on the conviction that the cannabis sold on the streets is stronger than it was a generation ago and is tipping increasing numbers of vulnerable people into metal illness, including schizophrenia.
Headlines proclaiming that skunk is 20 to 30 times as strong as the cannabis smoked in the 1970s have fuelled public alarm. The Prime Minister has spoken of the "lethal" effects of the new strains, as if they were comparable with the harm caused by heroin and crack cocaine.
Oh dear! You mean a drug that has never killed anyone and only leads to binge eating and naps will now lead to 20 to 30 times the amount of snack and sleep fiascos? Something must be done - for the children!!
Oh wait...
Yet there is no epidemic of psychosis rates have actually declined since the mid 1990s. Almost three million people a year use cannabis; very few develop psychosis. Despite this, parents are more worried today that their children will become schizophrenic if they smoke cannabis than they were five years ago.
Oops. This isn't the first time that this has come up in the world of prohibition, actually. FoxNews reported last year of this tenuous connection:
One compound, cannabidiol, or CBD, made people more relaxed. But even small doses of another component, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, produced temporary psychotic symptoms in people, including hallucinations and paranoid delusions, doctors said.
The results, to be presented at an international mental health conference in London on Tuesday and Wednesday, provides physical evidence of the drug's damaging influence on the human brain.
"We've long suspected that cannabis is linked to psychoses, but we have never before had scans to show how the mechanism works," said Dr. Philip McGuire, a professor of psychiatry at King's College, London.
Of course, the author of the study had something different entirely different to say:
Cannabis psychosis is a very vague term. If we ever use the phrase, it is only to describe very short-term effects immediately following smoking, and it certainly doesn't refer to users having a psychotic disorder. People may feel frightened or paranoid, but these feelings pass in a matter of hours or, more rarely, days, and practically never require treatment.
So, basically he is telling us something we all know already - sometimes when you smoke a phattie, you noid out and get all paranoid. Then you eat a ho-ho, take a nap, and everything is fine.
But there is a trend with prohibitionists to simply make things up about the drugs. The history in the US of stories told when banning substances would be funny if they weren't so ominous. Here's a sample:
Probably the best single statement was the statement of a proponent of Texas first marijuana law. He said on the floor of the Texas Senate, and I quote, "All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff (referring to marijuana) is what makes them crazy." Or, as the proponent of Montana's first marijuana law said, (and imagine this on the floor of the state legislature) and I quote, "Give one of these Mexican beet field workers a couple of puffs on a marijuana cigarette and he thinks he is in the bullring at Barcelona."
There were also stories of black men smoking the devil's weed and raping white women, which was reminiscent of the stories used against Opium, about how the Chinese would lure unsuspecting women into their opium dens, ply them with the drug, and then rape them.
The greatest weapon in the arsenal of the prohibitionist is the lie, and it's really counter-productive because it creates a situation where it is difficult enough to separate the good information from bad that a smart person would just ignore it all.
The first victim in the War on Drugs was reason.
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2008 RS Davis, all rights reserved.
Published: Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Last modified: Wednesday, May 7, 2008
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Thanks for the article. Drug prohibition reapelment is the final frontier in Libertarianism. There is too much pressure by the people to keep drugs illegal because people feel that things which can harm you should be banned. We need to educate the Conservative Authoritarians in an reasonable and incremental way so that Mary Jane will become legalized. This is a slow process. We will see how well this goes within the next 50 years.
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His announcement comes amid fears that Britain is in the grip of an epidemic of cannabis-induced psychosis. This is based on the conviction that the cannabis sold on the streets is stronger than it was a generation ago and is tipping increasing numbers of vulnerable people into metal illness, including schizophrenia. 
2008 RS Davis, all rights reserved.