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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Cannabis smokers need to be locked up
Simon Heffer The Telegraph
Saturday 28 Jul 2007 After I wrote a small item here last week about the drug habits of the Cabinet I had a correspondence with a reader who thought I had got it all wrong. He couldn't understand why I, as a drinker, was so cross about people smoking dope when thousands of people die each year from alcohol-related problems, and thousands of others beat their wives and children while drunk. I tried to explain the difference but failed. Perhaps a story we published yesterday, reporting that a reputable scientific survey showed how people were twice as likely to develop psychosis if they smoked cannabis than if they didn't, might help convince a few more sceptics. As part of the mood-music that the Brown terror is piping out to soothe the mass of conservative Britain, the Government has said it is reviewing the downgrading of cannabis from a class B to a class C drug. Studies such as this one, by doctors in Copenhagen, only make it more likely that it will be reclassified. The point of that, though, is not simply so that people might be warned that cannabis is actually rather bad for them: it is that the range of penalties available to the courts when someone is found to possess cannabis or to traffic in it becomes that much more stringent. Stringent, that is, if the penalties are enforced. How many people did you ever hear of going to prison for possession when cannabis was a class B drug, as was the case until the Labour government stupidly downgraded it three years ago? It was even quite hard to get sent down for any length of time for pushing the stuff. Since the 1960s, successive governments simply haven't wanted to enforce the law against users and pushers of "soft" drugs. And it is because they haven't that this problem, once confined to big cities, has now put out its repulsive tentacles to almost every town in the land. Those who make the glib point that alcohol is worse than cannabis, and that pot should therefore have the same legal status as booze, do not just ignore this new medical evidence. They also ignore the fact that people do not get bopped on the head in the street and robbed because a mugger desperately needs money to buy his fix of dry sherry: but they do get bopped because someone wants to get the cash to buy some drugs. They ignore, too, the link between using cannabis and going on to use something harder. Many of us have drunk alcohol for years without feeling the slightest urge to use illegal drugs as a result. The spread of cannabis has led to the spread of heroin and crack cocaine. Around Britain whole housing estates are economically immobilised because of the prevalence of drugs. I was told that on the sink estates in the suburbs of Edinburgh it is far cheaper to get out of your mind on heroin than it is on whisky. In his thoughtful and intelligent policy proposals a fortnight ago, Iain Duncan Smith highlighted the devastation caused by drugs and made the case for rehabilitating those who were addicted to them. There does of course need to be a strong element of that: but the Government, for all its rhetoric, shows no sign of pursuing policies that might stop drug use in the first place. I have mentioned here before that the Chinese way, of taking out convicted drug dealers and shooting them, has something to commend it. Sadly, that won't happen: instead we shall have drugs gangs going around shooting each other, as happens now in our cities all the time. But if we are serious about fighting drugs we do need to lock up pushers and throw the key away; and lock up users too, even if it means future cabinet ministers going to jail. Otherwise this poison will never be countered - and it won't matter a jot what class of iniquity cannabis falls into. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/07/28/do2801.xml
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