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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Letter: Drugs Made a Scapegoat Philip Walsh Evening News, Norwich Friday 20 Sep 2013 Like many sufferers from mental health problems, my brother now deceased, graduated towards drink and drugs, getting more and more lost to his illness. The failures of the mental health authorities, doctors and his family to see it as a health issue in the early years left him without any help. This was back in the late 1960s and 1970s when possession / use of drugs had only recently been made a criminal offence and treatments were not available. Prison was. Through the 1980s and 1990s, treatments involving being medicated with anti-psychotic drugs were offered to him, but having seen how his contemporaries had ended up lost in their own heads and unable to “come back down”, he refused. By 2000, he was given Diamorphine, not just because of his habit but to help with the pain from his artery blocked, kidney and liver failing body. If only the anti-drug laws of the UK had made it easier for him and others to obtain the help needed, instead of directing all the cash those laws generated into law enforcement, imprisonment and what they call the “justice system”. It is hard fro some people to see it this way. They have spent most of their lives being told lies by successive governments, whilst trusting every word of it. Drugs like cannabis are made a scapegoat and deemed a “gateway drug” (leading to the use of harder drugs), and the users of it and other drugs are criminalised. This has been the story for most of the drug addicts I've met, of which there have been many. And it was most often alcohol that proved to be their “gateway” drug, the effects of which are more akin to heroin than cannabis is. Philip Walsh, Oxford Road, Chiswick http://wwww.eveningnews24.co.uk
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