Cannabis Culture

[poliphilo]

Gordon Brown wants to regrade cannabis from a Class "C" to a Class "B" drug. In response members of his cabinet have been falling over themselves to confess their own past drug use. I don't know if they're doing this to pre-empt future revelations or in an attempt to head him off at the pass, but the effect is to highlight just how mainstream cannabis now is .

If you're under seventy (and not Gordon Brown) you'll have been around the stuff and probably used it.  I don't smoke tobacco, so I don't smoke grass- simple as that- but I did try it once (it made me cough) and I've been in houses where the fug hung so heavy I was getting the full benefit. By the way, does that make me an accessory?

The criminalisation of cannabis criminalises us all. I think it's daft. 

Upping the penalties for cannabis use isn't going to squash the cannabis culture.  We should decriminalise it for the same reason we haven't criminalised alcohol- a far more dangerous drug- because it's entrenched, it's here to stay- and a law that isn't going to work- that can't be properly enforced, that goes against the grain of what's socially accepted- is unjust and brings all law into disrepute.

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I have never taken an illegal substance (too scared). But I have to say that I don't think the stuff is harmless. I know regular users who used to be bright, extrovert and ambitious and are now bitter, incoherent and going nowhere. I wonder if that is a coincidence. If I see a real incoherent, angy, paranoid LJ rant e.g. on politics_forum, I can be pretty sure that if I go to the user's LJ and scroll down a bit, there will be references to heavy pot use.

It is hard to know whether people get like that because they smoke pot, or whether people who feel like that use pot to self medicate. Which is cause, and which is effect?

Anyway, I work in the pharma industry and know the hoops we have to jump through to get a beneficial drug classed as "safe". So I don't think it is a very good argument to say that because thre are more harmful drugs around, that slightly harmful ones should therefore be permitted. If it were up to me, I would ban tobacco. It never did a moment of good to anyone. Alcohol, most people can use without lasting harm, so that seems ok to me!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The hardcore potheads I knew at university were mostly idiots and embarassing to be around. I suspect most of them were fools before they started to inhale.