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Letter: Crime and cannabis
Steve Barker Derry Journal
Friday 01 Feb 2008 The sole intent of the government’s public consultation on drugs seems to be to put cannabis back into class B. If the Government goes ahead with a recriminalisation of the cannabis community, they will discover why they put cannabis into class C originally. The report by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research into ‘Policing cannabis as a class C drug’ shows that not much has changed as a result of cannabis being in class C. The main difference is that the number of of arrests for small amounts of cannabis has dropped. The Legalise Cannabis Alliance (LCA) predicted that cannabis use would fall if it was downgraded into class C. According to the government’s own figures, use has dropped by 25%. We based our prediction on the fact that in Holland the use among the Dutch Nationals is half what it is in Britain where it is prohibited. Many people who have used class A drugs have found that cannabis is the most effective way to break a Class A addiction. LCA predicts that if cannabis is returned to class B with the attendant criminalisation of cannabis users, then there will be the following results: Increase in alcoholism; Increase in street violence; Increase in Class A drug use, particularly cocaine Increase in the prison population (at any one time there are 1000 ‘cannabis only’ offenders in British prisons); Increase in gun crime; Increased addiction to pharmaceutical drugs; More distrust of the police. The views of self-confessed cannabis users are once again being ignored by the government despite the fact that figures suggest as many as 25% of people have used the plant and so few have suffered from that use. Steve Barker Legalise Cannabis Alliance SteveBarker@lca-uk.org http://www.lca-uk.org
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