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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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Letter: Cannabis and Health
Carl Wagner, Legalise Cannabis Alliance Hull Daily Mail
Monday 07 Feb 2005 I Sympathise with the anonymous writer who says his daughter took her own life at the age of 24 after smoking cannabis for 10 years. But the symptoms described - anxiety attacks, asthma and personality disorder - could be linked to many substances, legal or otherwise. People suffer mental problems for all sorts of reasons and, although several studies looking at this have generally found little or no evidence of a causal link, there is certainly evidence that cannabis makes the symptoms of schizophrenia worse in some people. The question is, how does prohibiting cannabis and criminalising its users reduce this risk? Legalising cannabis - bringing it within the law - would make it harder for young people to get access to the substance. It would allow the laws on quality, weights, etc, that already exist for alcohol and tobacco to be applied to cannabis. It would allow taxation on profits, would divorce supplies from hard drugs, allow home cultivation and allow public consumption premises. It would protect the consumer from the type of dealer who sells dubious substances. Calling for cannabis legalisation is not "condoning". It is accepting that the use of cannabis, whether advisable or not, is far too widespread to pretend any kind of prohibition can control it, and that it is a victimless act that does not deserve punishment by law. The law as it stands does not protect children, it endangers them. I shall continue to call for cannabis legalisation, not because it is safe but because it provides an infinitely improved way of reducing the harm it can occasionally cause. Carl Wagner, Legalise Cannabis Alliance, Hull.
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