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UK NI: Mature debate on cannabis use is long overdue

Eamonn McCann

Belfast Telegraph

Wednesday 08 Apr 2015

Actuaries are not normally considered cool. The image is more of desiccated calculating machines - analysing risks, estimating losses, setting the levels of insurance payments. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the latest edition of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries, carries an accurate and insightful article on cannabis.

The magazine is concerned to correct a misunderstanding. It seems that many US actuaries dealing with life insurance have been assuming that the risk factors associated with tobacco and cannabis are broadly similar.

Not so, says the official magazine of their profession, definitively.

“Recreational marijuana users enjoy better physical fitness and get more exercise than non-users” and “have even been shown to have higher IQs... The tide is turning. Life underwriters would be wise to be at the front end of this curve, and not stubbornly digging in their heels to the detriment of their products.”

These basic facts are reasonably well-known, if rarely acknowledged by anyone in a position to effect change.

There is no evidence from any art or part of the world that cannabis is as dangerous as alcohol or cigarettes, products which the authorities are patting themselves on the back for discouraging but which are widely, legally available. Anybody out there who imbibes the occasional glass of wine or swallows a pint on a regular basis or smokes a rollie now and again is taking a bigger risk with their health than a regular cannabis user. Fact.

Alcohol or tobacco will make your life miserable and then kill you.

Criminalising cannabis while allowing booze and fags to be sold in shopping centres is the equivalent of making it legal to use residential streets as car-racing tracks while cracking down on people who park in the wrong place.

Last year the number of deaths attributed to cannabis by medical practitioners or in coroners’ courts in either jurisdiction in Ireland was nil. Same as last year, same as the year before, same as ever.

The most egregious inaccuracy peddled about cannabis is that it’s a “gateway” drug leading on to harder stuff. Evidence for this?

Again, none.

It is true, of course, that some hard-drug users start on cannabis. But the connection does not arise from the content or qualities of cannabis but precisely from the fact that cannabis is illegal. To obtain cannabis, it is necessary to venture into murky territory where all manner of dangerous substances are likely to be available.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/eamonn-mccann/mature-debate-on-cannabis-use-is-long-overdue-31125139.html

 

 

 

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