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For heaven sakes, it’s just a bit of (psychoactive) weed.
Peter Reynolds: the one politition who admits smoking pot every day.
CLEAR, Britain’s newest political party, is made up of cannabis activists, an oxymoron if ever there was one. Reynolds has left the sofa, though, and intends to lead Britain’s drug policy to something a little more sane. He’s a law breaker, should we lock him up or listen to him?
Portugal and Italy have decriminalised small amounts of cannabis, indeed in the case of Portugal no harm will come to you for 50mg of MDMA – enough to see you through a music festival – or any other banned substance for that matter. Furthermore the approach is working (Scientific American).
In Spain members of private cannabis clubs can supply upto 10grams a week to other members. Pricing drugs is something the media revel in getting ludicrously wrong, but at the latest British price for top line, high potency indoor grown bud this allowance would be worth £100.
You can buy cannabis ‘legally’ in 16 states of the USA, despite it still being illegal at a federal level. – Peter Reynolds, Leader CLEAR (UK) This week Seattle became the latest to regulate a ‘dispensary model’
British tourists have long flocked to Amsterdam to smoke in coffee houses only to return home to chat sheepishly with Aunt Maud about the Ann Frank musium and art galleries. Yes the canals are lovely, and such an advanced transport system…
If you spot some pattern with our neighbours across the pond and closer it’s that globally we don’t really know how to handle drugs. Take our Dutch friends, for example, I can walk into a coffee shop, leaving my cigarette at the door, and buy cannabis. No harm done, no law broken. However, if I grow cannabis I must sneak to the back door of said coffee shop and sell like a criminal, for under their system that is what I would be. The Dutch government, in their wisdom, have left this part of the trade to the black market. That’s a generous $3 billion tax-free illegal supply chain, much of which is destined for British consumption within the UK.
Maybe Peter and his CLEAR cannabis law reform party are the right people at the right time. Columbian officials want international drug policy reform, they’ve seen killings on both sides of the war and want an intelligent end to the violence and hypocracy. How, they rightly ask, is it OK to jail a Columbian for growing cannabis when in California you can grow it and smoke it legally?
Gordon Brown: Skunk is lethal
Let’s skip back to 2004. The UK downgraded cannabis to class C, success one might think for the war against the war-against-drugs. Indeed, as the pro-pot lobby predicted the use of cannabis actually declined. But the bongs were soon hidden behind the sofa again. On May 7 2008, against the advice of his own drug committee, then-prime minister Gordon Brown announced that cannabis would be reclassified back up to Class B, later sacking his chief drug adviser, David Nutt.
Reynolds contests that Brown made one special election pledge in private, to one man: Murdoch. Namely: I’ll reclassify cannabis, You give me positive press. Publicly this would be seen as a result of growing evidence of a cannabis/psychosis link and mental health charities jumped on board, even before the downgrading, warning of problems that never materialised.
Whilst newspapers account for just 1% of Murdoch’s business, his behaviour in this area does give us a flavour of a man who polititians dare not cross unless they wish only for a life on the backbenches.
In 26 minutes then, you’ll hear how street dealers are cheaper, by a factor of 10, than Sativex (Lisenced Cannabis Medicine), how mothers milk contains endo-cannibanoids and how anti-drug poster girl, Leah Betts, might still be alive today if someone had given her a bag of crisps.
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I’ve just done a search on the, non-Murdoch, Daily Mail website for ‘Cannabis Psychosis’ and harvested 105 results. On the Murdoch owned Sun website the same search yields nothing. You might like to sign the petition to get cannabis debated in Parliament and/or take this survey to help get your own thoughts in order about drug policy.
The interview can be downloaded by right clicking here.
