Beings I'll be preaching to the converted here, I won't go into the historical details of the war on marijuana started in the 20s in the states, but I'll discuss peoples opinions on the matter at the moment.
The general public, for the most part, are rather indifferent to the cannabis situation as it doesn't affect their lives at all, or so they think. They get told it makes people go crazy, may have used cannabis or at least tried it at some point and found it made them feel a little strange, possibly paranoid and it seems logical to them that continued use could lead them to go bananas, just like the Daily Mail said. So, keeping the drug illegal seems to make sense as they have no emotional drive to legalise it and are slightly concerned that increased use would lead to higher incidents of schizophrenia and psychosis. Better to be safe than sorry. One point worth bringing up here is that the psychological debate only arose relatively recently, in comparison to the 70+ years since the drug was made illegal. The obvious question being "well, what reason did they give in the first place then?". Suffice to say, the reasons given were completely fictitious and the movement for prohibition was fueled by money and racism. This is already very well documented, so I won't go into it here. Most politicians will fall into the description above.
With regard to the psychosis/schizophrenia debate, a very simple point needs to be made: In the last 30years, cannabis use has increased dramatically, as has the strength and availability of the plant. Over the same period of time, incidences of psychotic illness have remained static. If there was a causal link between the two, then surely as cannabis use dramatically increases, we'd see an noticeable increase in incidences of psychotic illness. According to the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs report, 1 in 15,000 cannabis users could develop a psychotic illness (although already having being predisposed) triggered by cannabis use. This basically means that if the entire population smoked cannabis, then during a lifetime there would possibly be 4,000 more people in the UK suffering from a psychotic illness. Based on current usage, it implies that cannabis may trigger the onset of psychotic illness in less than 400 people in the UK in a lifetime or 5 people each year. And it is very important to note that we've had to use the terms "may", "possibly" and "could". We also need to bear in mind that we are talking about triggering these conditions in those already predisposed, so even if cannabis can trigger these conditions, when removed it is likely that something else will trigger the condition during a lifetime.
I have only chosen to address the alleged mental health issues of cannabis here because, quite frankly, it is the only anti-cannabis argument that holds the even the slightest weight. Effects on fertility are acute and short term, in that a person is only affected whilst cannabis is in their blood stream. Essentially it's as if sperm are stoned and they don't do their job properly. As far as cancer is concerned, cannabis is one of the few substances known to man that can cause a tumor to regress. All studies which compare non-smokers, tobacco + cannabis smokers and cannabis alone smokers, show that smokers of tobacco have 20x the chance of developing lung cancer than non-smokers. Smokers of only cannabis have a very slightly, but non statistically reliable, less chance of developing lung cancer. Studies where THC is injected into animal tumors have had a very positive effect on either reversing, halting or slowing the reproduction of cancerous cells. I'm not even going to address the point that cannabis users often smoke with tobacco because if you don't see the irony in that statement, you truly are a lost cause.
Now to alcohol. The public are generally aware of the risks involved with alcohol use. Not the risks that are unproven and still debated, but the very real, understood risk of harm caused by chemical addiction, sclerosis, heart & liver problems etc. 5,000 to 10,000 people die in this country each year directly due to alcohol consumption. That's not to mention the impact it has on casual and domestic violence, accidents, depression, suicide attempts etc.
So, to conclude, the known and very real deaths caused from the use of alcohol each year, by far outweigh the number of predisposed schizophrenics or psychotics whose condition could be triggered early by cannabis use even if EVERY MEMBER OF THE POPULATION SMOKED CANNABIS. Baring in mind, it hasn't been firmly proven that cannabis will trigger either condition - there just appears to be a casual, currently considered non-causal link. There is no comparison between 5,000 deaths and 5 incidences of an onset of psychotic illness. So we're left in a position where the advocate for cannabis prohibition needs to justify why the entire population above the age of 18 should be allowed to use alcohol but no one should be allowed to use cannabis, even though the former is much more dangerous on a case by case basis and also appeals to a wider audience. My basis for the statement on higher demand for alcohol is simply that everyone I know who doesn't smoke marijuana does so because they don't enjoy the feeling, not because of it's legal status. I can think of very few people I know that doen't drink, other than for religious reasons. Also, if you look at the use of cannabis in countries such as the Netherlands where it is declassified for personal use and widely available, the prevalence of use is dramatically lower than that of alcohol. This seems like a logical place to point out that alcohol use was already massively higher than cannabis use when the legalisation "debate" began. It's not as if we started prohibiting the use of certain drugs and suddenly there was a boom in usage of the remaining legal ones. More to the point, tobacco and alcohol were in wide use already, presumably also amongst politicians, so prohibiting them was a non-starter.
So how does the prohibitionist justify the current state of affairs? As far as I can tell it goes back to the same point - that they simply don't enjoy the use of cannabis. Cannabis users are in a minority of around 5-15% of the UK population, depending on where you get your stats from. I haven't looked up alcohol use but I'm going to assume it's somewhere in the 80-90% bracket of the adult population. I can't really work out how the internal thought process would go, possibly something like this:
"Cannabis is bad, make it illegal."
"What about alcohol?"
"um, I like alcohol, keep it legal."
"but it's really dangerous, people are going to die!"
"yeah, but I like it and it's my right to take it."
"but other people like cannabis, don't they have rights?"
"fuck 'em!"
This is why in every public statement from the government, when asked will you discuss or debate the legaslation surrounding cannabis use, usually given with a huge list of reasons for legalisation and comparisons drawn between alcohol use and cannabis use, they can't even respond with a structured point or answer questions directly. The answer is always the same. "Cannabis is a harmful drug and we have no intention of legalising it". No mention of why continued alcohol use is fine, nor any reference to solid evidence showing the harms of cannabis. Gordon Brown springs to mind with his ludicrous statement about "this lethal version of it [cannabis], skunk". From other politicians we sometimes get one of the most ironic statements of all time, which usually goes something like this "We already have enough of a problem with alcohol and tobacco, we don't want to legalise another harmful drug and add to the problem".
Bottom line is, we're left with a bunch of lawmakers who don't enjoy the effects of cannabis, yet know absolutely nothing about it and when given the chance completely discard any evidence, making the decision that the minority of the population who do enjoy the effects of cannabis should not be allowed to use it, because they don't happen to like it. That, my friends, is known as discrimination and would not be tolerated against any other minority.
alcohol information: http://www.avon.nhs.uk/alcohol/the_facts.htm
ACMD report: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/drugs/acmd1/acmd-cannabis-report-2008?view=Binary
One example of a study on the link between cannabis use and cancer: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html
*Incidently, this is the first link that comes up if you google "cannabis cancer study"
The general public, for the most part, are rather indifferent to the cannabis situation as it doesn't affect their lives at all, or so they think. They get told it makes people go crazy, may have used cannabis or at least tried it at some point and found it made them feel a little strange, possibly paranoid and it seems logical to them that continued use could lead them to go bananas, just like the Daily Mail said. So, keeping the drug illegal seems to make sense as they have no emotional drive to legalise it and are slightly concerned that increased use would lead to higher incidents of schizophrenia and psychosis. Better to be safe than sorry. One point worth bringing up here is that the psychological debate only arose relatively recently, in comparison to the 70+ years since the drug was made illegal. The obvious question being "well, what reason did they give in the first place then?". Suffice to say, the reasons given were completely fictitious and the movement for prohibition was fueled by money and racism. This is already very well documented, so I won't go into it here. Most politicians will fall into the description above.With regard to the psychosis/schizophrenia debate, a very simple point needs to be made: In the last 30years, cannabis use has increased dramatically, as has the strength and availability of the plant. Over the same period of time, incidences of psychotic illness have remained static. If there was a causal link between the two, then surely as cannabis use dramatically increases, we'd see an noticeable increase in incidences of psychotic illness. According to the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs report, 1 in 15,000 cannabis users could develop a psychotic illness (although already having being predisposed) triggered by cannabis use. This basically means that if the entire population smoked cannabis, then during a lifetime there would possibly be 4,000 more people in the UK suffering from a psychotic illness. Based on current usage, it implies that cannabis may trigger the onset of psychotic illness in less than 400 people in the UK in a lifetime or 5 people each year. And it is very important to note that we've had to use the terms "may", "possibly" and "could". We also need to bear in mind that we are talking about triggering these conditions in those already predisposed, so even if cannabis can trigger these conditions, when removed it is likely that something else will trigger the condition during a lifetime.
I have only chosen to address the alleged mental health issues of cannabis here because, quite frankly, it is the only anti-cannabis argument that holds the even the slightest weight. Effects on fertility are acute and short term, in that a person is only affected whilst cannabis is in their blood stream. Essentially it's as if sperm are stoned and they don't do their job properly. As far as cancer is concerned, cannabis is one of the few substances known to man that can cause a tumor to regress. All studies which compare non-smokers, tobacco + cannabis smokers and cannabis alone smokers, show that smokers of tobacco have 20x the chance of developing lung cancer than non-smokers. Smokers of only cannabis have a very slightly, but non statistically reliable, less chance of developing lung cancer. Studies where THC is injected into animal tumors have had a very positive effect on either reversing, halting or slowing the reproduction of cancerous cells. I'm not even going to address the point that cannabis users often smoke with tobacco because if you don't see the irony in that statement, you truly are a lost cause.
Now to alcohol. The public are generally aware of the risks involved with alcohol use. Not the risks that are unproven and still debated, but the very real, understood risk of harm caused by chemical addiction, sclerosis, heart & liver problems etc. 5,000 to 10,000 people die in this country each year directly due to alcohol consumption. That's not to mention the impact it has on casual and domestic violence, accidents, depression, suicide attempts etc.
So, to conclude, the known and very real deaths caused from the use of alcohol each year, by far outweigh the number of predisposed schizophrenics or psychotics whose condition could be triggered early by cannabis use even if EVERY MEMBER OF THE POPULATION SMOKED CANNABIS. Baring in mind, it hasn't been firmly proven that cannabis will trigger either condition - there just appears to be a casual, currently considered non-causal link. There is no comparison between 5,000 deaths and 5 incidences of an onset of psychotic illness. So we're left in a position where the advocate for cannabis prohibition needs to justify why the entire population above the age of 18 should be allowed to use alcohol but no one should be allowed to use cannabis, even though the former is much more dangerous on a case by case basis and also appeals to a wider audience. My basis for the statement on higher demand for alcohol is simply that everyone I know who doesn't smoke marijuana does so because they don't enjoy the feeling, not because of it's legal status. I can think of very few people I know that doen't drink, other than for religious reasons. Also, if you look at the use of cannabis in countries such as the Netherlands where it is declassified for personal use and widely available, the prevalence of use is dramatically lower than that of alcohol. This seems like a logical place to point out that alcohol use was already massively higher than cannabis use when the legalisation "debate" began. It's not as if we started prohibiting the use of certain drugs and suddenly there was a boom in usage of the remaining legal ones. More to the point, tobacco and alcohol were in wide use already, presumably also amongst politicians, so prohibiting them was a non-starter.
So how does the prohibitionist justify the current state of affairs? As far as I can tell it goes back to the same point - that they simply don't enjoy the use of cannabis. Cannabis users are in a minority of around 5-15% of the UK population, depending on where you get your stats from. I haven't looked up alcohol use but I'm going to assume it's somewhere in the 80-90% bracket of the adult population. I can't really work out how the internal thought process would go, possibly something like this:
"Cannabis is bad, make it illegal."
"What about alcohol?"
"um, I like alcohol, keep it legal."
"but it's really dangerous, people are going to die!"
"yeah, but I like it and it's my right to take it."
"but other people like cannabis, don't they have rights?"
"fuck 'em!"
This is why in every public statement from the government, when asked will you discuss or debate the legaslation surrounding cannabis use, usually given with a huge list of reasons for legalisation and comparisons drawn between alcohol use and cannabis use, they can't even respond with a structured point or answer questions directly. The answer is always the same. "Cannabis is a harmful drug and we have no intention of legalising it". No mention of why continued alcohol use is fine, nor any reference to solid evidence showing the harms of cannabis. Gordon Brown springs to mind with his ludicrous statement about "this lethal version of it [cannabis], skunk". From other politicians we sometimes get one of the most ironic statements of all time, which usually goes something like this "We already have enough of a problem with alcohol and tobacco, we don't want to legalise another harmful drug and add to the problem".
Bottom line is, we're left with a bunch of lawmakers who don't enjoy the effects of cannabis, yet know absolutely nothing about it and when given the chance completely discard any evidence, making the decision that the minority of the population who do enjoy the effects of cannabis should not be allowed to use it, because they don't happen to like it. That, my friends, is known as discrimination and would not be tolerated against any other minority.
alcohol information: http://www.avon.nhs.uk/alcohol/the_facts.htm
ACMD report: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/drugs/acmd1/acmd-cannabis-report-2008?view=Binary
One example of a study on the link between cannabis use and cancer: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html
*Incidently, this is the first link that comes up if you google "cannabis cancer study"
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