|
Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
|
|
UK: Thinktank urges leniency for cannabis growers
The Guardian
Monday 14 Apr 2003 People who grow their own cannabis should escape with a police warning if they only cultivate the drug on a small scale, according to a social policy thinktank. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) said 243 people were jailed for growing cannabis in 2000, but there were wide variations in the way different police forces treated the crime. Some charged growers with production, carrying a mandatory seven-year sentence for a third conviction, while others used the lesser offence of cultivation. The JRF report said guidance on when to use this more lenient punishment could be based on the weight of cannabis or the number of confiscated plants. It added that such a change would not breach international conventions on drug controls. Another option would be to create new offences of "social supply" and "social cultivation" when people grow the drug non-commercially for friends, although the Home Office has previously rejected these types of offences. The JRF report, A Growing Market, said that up to half of all cannabis consumed in the UK may now be home grown and punishments for cultivation needed to be altered as the drug was reclassified. Its co-author, professor Mike Hough, said: "If small-scale home cultivation attracted an on-the-spot warning rather than a caution or a court conviction, it is likely that more users would switch to growing their own and stop buying from dealers. "Large minorities of young people use cannabis. It is essential to insulate them as much as possible from drug markets operated by dealers who sell not only cannabis but crack and heroin. "As their profits from cannabis sales diminished, criminal entrepreneurs could be forced to abandon the cannabis market altogether." The home secretary, David Blunkett, is to take the final steps towards reclassifying cannabis from class B to class C this summer - meaning that possession will only be an arrestable offence in extreme circumstances. According to the British Crime Survey just under half of 16 to 29-year-olds admit trying cannabis. The JRF's recommendations came as a British drug reform group urged the United Nations to rethink its hardline global policy on drugs. The thinktank Forward Thinking on Drugs (FTD) said the UN's promotion of strict prohibition policies was having little effect on the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs around the world. At a conference opening in Vienna tomorrow the UN commission on narcotic drugs will discuss the impact of targets set at the United Nations general assembly special session in 1998 to create a "drug-free world". But the FTD report said the chances of the UN meeting its targets by 2008 appear "remote". It found that five years into the UN's campaign, drug supply levels are stabilising at high levels, or increasing, rather than declining. The thinktank warns that policy makers need to either massively extend prohibition or acknowledge that a "certain level of illicit supply and use is inevitable" and concentrate instead on reducing the harm that drugs do.
After you have finished reading this article you can click here to go back.
|
This page was created by the Cannabis Campaigners' Guide.
Feel free to link to this page!