I’m sure you are weary of all the arguments on both sides of the on and on and ongoing debate about cannabis legislation. Lord knows, I am! Nevertheless I feel compelled to at least attempt to add my views to the immeasurable volume of material already written about it. Perhaps if, each time we encounter an impassable river, we toss in a pebble, eventually we will be able to walk across. This is my pebble. OK?
I find it rather obscene that a government that habitually takes such pains to evade issues that challenge its commitment to the Health of The Nation in connection to the NHS, rail safety, pollution, GM crops etc. etc., should have the audacity to claim that our welfare is the reason for its continued legislation against a particular plant that brings immense pleasure to those who enjoy it, pain releif for those suffering from conditions such as MS, and to which no known fatalities can be directly attributed. Alcohol, on the other hand (Yes....that old chestnut!), not only enjoys immunity from the long arm of the law but also provides the treasury with a nice little income by way of taxes. If one so much as mentions the fact that alcohol is frequently directly attributable to countless fatal cases of alcoholic poisoning and is also inclined to stimulate violent and antisocial behaviour (one tends to see soccer hooligans sucking tinnies rather than spliffs) or even hints at its traditional role of destroying The Family, one is immediately accused of being pedantic. Compare the road deaths attributed to cannabis to those attributed to alcohol and one is being confrontationally emotive.
Every Saturday night one can hear (or even see, should one recklessly venture out) the consequences of alcohol consumption. At best, this is rowdy behaviour between midnight to around 2:00am. At worst, it’s unprovoked violence and vandalism in the streets and often worse brutalities in the home. I am constantly being effected by alcohol despite the fact that I rarely touch the stuff. I am kept awake at night by drunken revellers, my garden is regularly strewn with take-away cartons and lager cans. A friend of mine lost her legs to a drunk driver and I don’t know anyone who hasn’t, at some time, been the victim of an unprovoked attack by someone who has been drinking. I am occasionally effected by cannabis only because I occasionally smoke it; an activity that would only effect the people in the next room if I knocked on the wall to ask if they’d like to join me.
Apparently, there are a lot of cannabis users in my neighbourhood and to be fair, the take-away cartons could be attributable to them, but not the violence or the vandalism. One hears about cannabis use in one’s neighbourhood. One hears and sees alcohol use first hand. One has only to pass a house in which alcohol is being consumed to know precisely what is taking place. If the same were true with cannabis consumption, the police would hardly need to rely on tip-offs.
Yet it would appear that alcohol presents no threat to the Health of The Nation that the government can put its finger on. They are quite happy to endorse its manufacture, distribution and consumption and has even passed new laws extending the opening hours of pubs–––– in some instances to 24 hours a day–––– whilst, of course, taking a sizable cut in the proceeds. I would like to know why such a destructive drug is endorsed when a comparitively harmless one is outlawed. However, when asked, ministers seem to prefer to answer an entirely different question or quote the percentage of heroin addicts that began with a few joints (whilst, of course, totally ignoring identical figures representing the percentage of alcoholics that began with a few lagers). The reality is that alcoholics and drug addicts are born not made. It might be helpful to balance these statistics with the percentage of both alcoholics and other drug addicts that displayed signs of personality problems before drugs or alcohol were entered into the equasion. Quoting statistics takes the debate nowhere. We need to stop all this faffing about and look at the realities: The incidents of negative consequences directly and solely attributable to cannabis use compared to that of any other drug (including paracetamol) is negligible. Why, then, is Cannabis Sativa, C. Indica and whatever other variants are currently being created in Amsterdam the only genus of plants ever to have been outlawed in this country? Papaver Somniferum, better known as the opium poppy is widely grown in gardens. It is legally sold by Hurrans and other leading seed suppliers. Peyote cactus is quite legally sold among other cacti and succulents and psilocybin mushrooms grow wild all over the place. As far as I know, it is not illegal to grow coca (although processing it into cocaine is), so why is poor old Bob Hope (the plant that dare not speak its name) the only plant that actually gets arrested like a sort of botanical Franz Kafka character? Does anyone have a rational answer to this question, preferably based on fact rather than opinions?
Well, OK, perhaps the use of cannabis can make one pedantic and emotive. To what do politicians attribute their total inability to give a direct answer to a simple question?
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