The home secretary, Charles Clarke, today ruled out another reclassification of cannabis despite recent warnings that the drug can cause serious mental illness.
Mr Clarke said cannabis would not be changed back to a class B drug, instead announcing a public health campaign to warn people of the health risks associated with its use.
He told MPs that his decision to keep cannabis as a class C drug had followed advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, and was supported by police and most drug and mental health charities.
The council's unpublished report is said to have concluded that the risk of someone developing schizophrenia as a result of using cannabis was "very small".
It is believed to have said it was a "substantially less" harmful drug than those currently classified as class B, including amphetamines such as speed and barbiturates.
Celebrate, blokes!
2 comments:
what are you saying??? with all due respect, three points:
1. this post is about the UK, where cannabis possession was recently downgraded from a usually-arrestable to usually-finable offense. isn't that decriminalization?
2. also, why are you semantically dismissing education as propaganda when you yourself so frequently tout your 'original drug manual,' itself a drug education project?
3. in november, nevada voters will vote on state-level decriminalization of cannabis. i'll grant that that doesn't gaurantee success, but doesn't it suggest that success shouldn't be relegated to the distant future?
I recently sent some "choice" comments to the rethink.org folks about repeating the line on how cannabis causes mental disorders and pointed to their own factual evidence that cannabis can exacerbate existing illness, but has never been shown to cause.
Good blog, I'll be reading regularly.
Son of Liberty
www.freetheplant.com
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