Into this debate the Transform campaign has launched it’s latest publication “After the war on drugs - A blueprint for regulation” (download here) - more about that later, but most of this blog is dedicated to a critique of one well known prohibitionist’s claims.

One of the few articles published in favour of continued cannabis prohibition over the past week or so came from the ever dependable if somewhat rabid Peter Hutchins in the Mail on Sunday. Peter has an interesting take on life, in most respects he opposes repressive laws and champions the right of the individual to make their own way in the world. In most respects, but not when it comes to drugs. Where drugs are concerned - and cannabis in particular - Peter is a staunch supporter of the authoritarian approach embodied in prohibition.

Last week he dedicated his blog to the thoughts of that well known prohibition campaigner Mary Brett and the bulk of this blog will examine her “Arguments against legalising drugs“.

Before we look at her claims however a little background is in order; Mary Brett was a school teacher and her science background is as a teacher in a secondary school.  She has been a highly vocal and very influential prohibition supporter for some years now, firstly with her organisation “Europe Against Drugs” (EurAD) which had close links to The National Drug Prevention Alliance (NDPA). More recently Mary Brett was involved with Debra Bell’s “Talking about cannabis”, where she was promoted to the role of an “expert” all all things cannabis. Not so long back however there was a falling out within TAC and she is now a prime mover in “CannSS”, an unfortunate acronym derived from “Cannabis Skunk Support”.

It’s probably fair to say that Mary Brett is the source of much of the misinformation about cannabis being put about at present and Peter Hutchins was kind enough to reproduce it all in his blog. So what of Mary Brett’s “expert” knowledge of cannabis and her reasons for supporting prohibition?

The illegality of drugs deters over 60% of children from using them (2005 survey)

So on her figures, 40% of children are not deterred. Put like this of course shows the reason prohibition is causing so much of a problem because it fails to moderate the behaviour of getting on half of children. The problems is of course, having failed in it’s main goal of deterrence, prohibition has nothing else to offer. Prohibition of course isn’t a policy aimed or originally intended to protect children, it’s supposed to influence the behaviour of adults.

Drugs are illegal because they are dangerous, not dangerous because they are illegal.

We don’t make dangerous activities illegal though, we do allow harm reduction measures and often make such measures compulsory,  but we don’t ban dangerous pastimes simply because they are dangerous. However, in making drugs illegal they are undoubtedly made far more dangerous that they would otherwise be through disruption of the trade, indeed that is a prime objective of the law and is used as an indicator of “success” by the government. Prohibition is unique as  a policy in that it actually sets out to increase the dangers or the dangerous activity it supposedly aims to protect society from.

At what age would they be legally available if legalised? Surely not under 18 as many are intoxicants like alcohol. Young children (with their undeveloped brains) will still be the targets of dealers. They will also be able to get them easier from older siblings and friends. We have not been very successful in keeping them away from alcohol. The message will come through loud and clear that drugs can’t be too bad or they wouldn’t do this, or at least they must be able to take them ‘safely’. There is no guaranteed safe way to take any drug, including those on prescription.

Lots of unrelated points here. Firstly cannabis is easily available to children under Mary’s preferred regime and an age limit of 18 or so would be integral to any legalised regime.  There can be no age limits enforced on an illegal market where the only limit to buying is governed by the ownership of a £10 note. The explosion of use amongst kids was indeed due to them getting hold of their siblings stash and prohibition doesn’t seem very good at stopping that.

Is Mary seriously arguing that alcohol would become less available to children under a regime of prohibition? If so she is very badly informed and should reflect on the campaign to end American Alcohol prohibition which used the slogan “protect our youth, save our children”

This inability - or perhaps it’s a refusal - to learn from history  is sadly typical of prohibition campaigners.

Do we teach kids how to respect fire by preventing them learning how to treat it with respect? Of course not. The claim that here is no safe way to use drugs ignores a very basic aspect of the way people learn. It is only through learning what the hazards of something are that we learn the true dangers and encouraging an ethos of safer use amongst users would educate people as to the dangers of that drug. Selling the drugs in packets with clear health warnings is hardly going to encourage reckless behaviour either.

It is irresponsible and stupid to make other harmful drugs freely available to add to the misery and tragic consequences caused by the 2 we already have, alcohol and tobacco (nicotine).

Nothing new is being added, these substances are all here now and easily available due to the uncontrolled nature of the illegal supply side. Do people really only take drugs because the dealers “push” them? Of course not, but they are often tempted by being offered them when their dealer hasn’t got any hash.

All of them would have to be legalised and to all ages, otherwise dealers would simply push the others.

A clear and groundless assumption stated as hard fact. The drugs trade is built on the profits to be made form the illegal trade, which at present are huge. The profits are huge, not because of the market in the school playground but because of the adult market. as Mary Brett acknowledged earlier kids get their drugs in the main from siblings, not directly from dealers.

It would be difficult to justify keeping prescription drugs restricted if all the others were available.

No, it just accepts the reality of recreational use and the need to treat that as an aspect of real life. Indeed it’s very easy to argue that prohibition is creating the trend in the misuse of prescription drugs and the whole emerging concept of the “pharm party”.

In every country where the laws have been relaxed, drug use has increased, Sweden, Holland, America (especially Alaska), South Australia. In countries like Japan and Singapore drug use has been virtually eliminated by tough drug laws and aggressive enforcement.

Actually Holland with its cannabis coffeeshops has done rather well and has low levels of drug use, as does Portugal where drugs of all types were decriminalised in 2001. America on the other hand is perhaps the prime example of a country with both a repressive drugs regime and a spiralling drugs problem.

Of course, Mary Brett is equating drug law reform with a “relaxing” of the drug laws. In fact real drug law reform is all about introducing laws which are effective and, above all, workable. Prohibition is based on tough rhetoric, but has proven to be simply unworkable.

Young people are not being criminalised. Youngsters know the law, they are aware of breaking it, they are criminalising themselves.

There is something very wrong with that logic which probably has its roots in the fact that, to repeat,  prohibition is a law aimed at adults, not children. It was never intended to be a deterrent for children. In any case, the end result is indeed that young people are being criminalised because of prohibition and they are being given criminal records.

Anyway very few have ever been jailed for simple possession of cannabis. The law is there for a reason. Is the same thinking applied to other law-breaking activities? E.g. petty pilfering, graffiti spraying or speeding.

No, the same thinking isn’t applied to those other activities because they are not comparable. Again to make the point - the criminal law is not designed to moderate the behaviour of children and to try to use it in such a way is bound to fail. Drug use is seen as a personal thing by many people and thus prohibition is simply not a law which is respected at a very fundamental level by the people it seeks to influence.

Just because everyone who speeds cannot be caught there are no strident calls for removal of the speed limits.

Speeding motorists kill people, Adults getting a bit stoned don’t. That comparison is frankly ludicrous. However, it is a reasonable argument to increase speed limits on some roads and such campaigns do indeed exist.

The laws against drugs haven’t failed. Regular drug use is around 10% of the population. Prohibition has helped to deter the other 90%.

So it’s all a success then? I’d hate to see real failure.

The incidence of smoking is falling. Around 20% of the population now smoke, down from 30% a few years ago, due in no short measure to smoking prohibition in public places. Are we to accept the smoking of cannabis in public places? Cannabis plants contain more of some of the carcinogens that are present in tobacco, and passive smoking does occur.

Tobacco use has indeed fallen, but without the imposition of prohibition, limits to the use of drugs is not even remotely the same as prohibition. What has worked and is working with tobacco is education, restrictions on places where one can smoke and better enforcement of age limits for sales. These are all measures which could be applied to legal drugs. A word of caution though, if the tobacco trade is clamped down to much a black market will emerge and may already be doing so, there are limits to the restrictions.

A huge amount of violence is connected with drug taking especially stimulants like cocaine and crack. About 17% of violent crimes are committed by people under the influence of drugs.

To some extent this is true and it’s always a good idea to remember that the word “drugs” covers a wide range of substances and therefore it’s highly unlikely that one regime will work for everything. However, there is very little evidence that prohibition does much to reduce the crime levels associated with drug use and very much to suggest that it increases it. It doesn’t really make sense to prohibit cannabis use because crack make people violent in any case.

Even if legal, drugs won’t be free. Addicts are often unemployable so will still have to get money to fund their habit, mugging and thefts will continue.

“Addicts are often unemployable”, actually addicts are employable, “Junkies” - a sad concept born of the chaotic nature of addictive drug use created by prohibition - may not be. Many tobacco addicts work of course as do people addicted to medical drugs, so addiction in and of itself clearly doesn’t prevent employment. Indeed, many heroin addicts on maintenance programmes get work and hold jobs down.

Young people will no longer be brought before the courts. They will no longer be steered into treatment and rehabilitation. Who will they turn to for help?

The courts are providing the only form of support for drug users, is that really the only option?

Dealers will not simply become upright citizens overnight. They are criminals. The Mafia didn’t disband after prohibition in the USA.

Alcohol prohibition virtually created the mob and the Mafia moved into drug running as it became the source of easy money, they didn’t stay in alcohol bootlegging. The local off-licence or pub isn’t controlled by organised crime as it would have been during alcohol prohibition. Organised crime will go wherever there is easy money to be made.

Incidentally prohibition saw a 50% reduction in consumption of alcohol resulting in fewer alcohol-related diseases and psychosis.

How interesting Mary Brett claims that alcohol is such a major cause of psychosis, this isn’t a claim she is well known for making.

Sure the overall level of alcohol consumption dropped, but the level of alcohol abuse didn’t and over the years grew to frightening proportions. The resulting physical and mental harm from bath tub gin and moonshine is well known; the legend of the blind blues player comes from this period for example. The simplistic level of drug use is not the issue, of far more importance is the nature of the drug use: 1000 men drinking beer in a pub is far less destructive than 10 kids swigging vodka from a bottle in a derelict building, to continue the analogy prohibition reduced the number of alcohol users by stopping the men in the pub, it did nothing to stop the kids swigging the vodka, only the vodka had become moonshine.

The incidence of child neglect and delinquency halved.

And then increased massively. Children became ensnared in the illegal trade, hence to “Protect our youth” slogan

Dealers will turn to theft, people trafficking etc.

Criminals will be attracted to anything that makes money, if society provides the opportunity, the gangs will move in. Actually, any such opportunity is being exploited now.

Also they will always be able to undercut the official price especially if drugs are taxed.

There is a limit to how much tax can be imposed on any drug. A good example of this happened a few years ago with wine which could be bought for far less money in France which caused am explosion in “grey market” tax evasion. But people will pay for quality and the existing alcohol trade demonstrates that. Fighting illegal markets is an economic battle as much as anything though.

Alternatively they may turn to smuggling drugs, around 20% of the tobacco used in the UK is smuggled. The Times 25/04/08 reported about £2.5 billion annually in unpaid tax lost to the treasury (10 billion cigarettes).

And this will increase if taxes are raised too high. It is, in reality, the job of government to ensure the trading conditions do not encourage black markets to develop,

Libertarians say that people have the right to do what they like with their own bodies. Fine! If it doesn’t interfere with others, but it always does. Drugs cause car accidents, crimes are committed, families are destroyed, some become violent and attack people, addicts need treatment at public expense, passive smoking occurs. With liberty must come responsibility, too often liberty is confused with licence.

Of course there have to be limits, but limits that have the support of the consumer and of society are both possible and easy to enforce. Also, to return to Mary Brett’s point about safer use - would cannabis be a drug which is smoked if it were to be legalised? It could well become something which is eaten or drunk, or perhaps vaporised. In any case, it would almost certainly become the norm not to smoke it in tobacco, which generate far less smoke.

Cannabis users who are drivers are still affected up to at least 24 hours after a joint. Anyone with a job as a driver should not be allowed to smoke the drug at all. Even more important with airline pilots!

The claim that smoking one joint makes someone unfit to drive for 24 hours is over egging the situation to a great extent and the claims of cannabis producing mayhem on the motorways have not really stood up to examination. However, greater restrictions on the use of cars might not be such a bad thing in general.

Drug-taking is not a victimless crime: parents, siblings and friends are all affected: children of users can be neglected when parents are under the influence, even killed, cocaine and crack using parents have killed young children: where are the rights of the unborn children of drug users? Employers will suffer lost production, poor workmanship and unreliability.

It’s interesting how Mary Brett equates work performance with child neglect. Again, she is using the specific fears surrounding crack to argue against law reform.

In the case of cannabis: Will people be allowed to grow it? Will they be restricted to a specified number of plants? Will they be allowed to grow skunk? Will children have access to these plants and seeds? How will it be monitored and policed?

How is home brewing regulated? What problems does it produce? It isn’t and it doesn’t are the answers. Of course, if a commercial supply of cannabis is allowed, why would anyone other than an enthusiast grow their own?

Once the ‘genie is out of the bottle’ it would be extremely difficult to put it back.

Ah yes, the real fear of the prohibition campaigners - the “Berlin wall” effect. Open the checkpoint just a little and you get a flood. Actually, they’re right and a crack in the prohibition wall will probably see the whole foul regime come crashing down. That’s generally the fate of hard line authoritarian regimes.

Alcohol can be consumed safely with no harm to the person or others (except in the case of driving). There are well-known safe limits. In fact a small amount daily may even be good for you. Most of the population drink and do not drink to get drunk.

Interesting how prohibition supporters are usually so defensive of the drug they use, alcohol.

Drugs are taken to alter the mind, to get stoned or get high. But we are ‘stuck’ with alcohol. It has been around commonly in the population for centuries, and is socially accepted.

Cannabis has been around human society for 5000 or so years of recorded history.

The consumption of drugs in large quantities is a relatively recent phenomenon and the majority of people do not want to see them legalised.

Actually people have got off their heads for rather a long time, especially with the drug alcohol - Gin lane for example

William Hogarth, 1751 - “Gin Lane” and “beer Street” - two pictures designed to be seen together comparing the moderate use of alcohol through beer drinking with the destructive result of gin. A classic example of how regulation and control was promoted 300 years ago when there was widespread unmoderated drug (alcohol) use. Such issues are far from new.

Currently there are very many strong voices being raised to curb the consumption of alcohol while a very vocal minority clamours for the legalisation of drugs! It defies belief!

Mary Brett’s use of exclamation marks as an expression of outrage is perhaps a sign of desperation. Acutally the debate now, following Professor Nutt’s sacking is for a consistent approach for all drugs, rather than trying to achieve the same end result via two polar opposite methods.

Mary Brett’s main concern however is about cannabis and she has no time for the medical argument:

Cannabis (consisting of 400 chemicals) cannot be licensed as a medicine. Medicines have to be pure single chemicals so their actions are predictable and controllable and have to undergo rigorous clinical tests. Pure THC (or a synthetic variety) is already available as Nabilone in the UK and Marinol in the USA but is not at all popular with doctors due to its side-effects. Purified extracts of other cannabinoids (substances unique to cannabis) are currently being tested. Telling someone to take cannabis for a condition is like saying ‘Go and smoke tobacco to get your weight down’, nicotine suppresses the appetite. Or eat mouldy bread to get your penicillin.

Sativex, the cannabis medicine about to be licenced and which has been available on prescription for some time now is indeed made from whole cannabis. It is precisely because cannabis is a cocktail of active substances that makes it what it is, it is not simply THC - nor is it simply even a THC-CBD mix. The medical use of cannabis has always been denied by prohibitionists of course.

We must ask, ‘Is the chemical relatively safe? Is the chemical beneficial?’ If the answer to both is NO, then there are no reasonable grounds for legalising.

Must we? Actually, one of the strongest arguments for proper controls over drugs is because they can be dangerous, less so with cannabis but it still applies: The reason to legalise drugs is not because they are safe, but because they are dangerous. Illegal drugs are not controlled drugs.

———————————

So to Transform and its far more “real world” approach to the problem. If or when we do scrap prohibition, what should replace it. Transform look at the various options in their latest report “After the war on drugs, blue print for regulation”( download the report here) which they distil down to:

Prescription

* Pharmacy model
* Licensed sales
* Licensed premises
* Unlicensed sales

As is perhaps to be expected, cannabis is placed within the licensed trade bracket.

Despite the obvious differences, the nature and extent of cannabis use means that, more than any other currently illicit drug, it lends itself to the lessons learnt from alcohol and tobacco control. As such, the WHO Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (which could almost be adapted for cannabis merely by switching the words, see: page 106), and the WHO guidance on alcohol regulation, provide a sound basis for cannabis regulation models.

The Transform report reads like a breath of fresh air compared with the stifling ignorance underpinning prohibition.

It’s party time in Berlin; twenty years ago on Monday night perhaps the world’s most obvious symbol of intolerance and repression, the Berlin wall, fell. Within hours of the announcement that travel restrictions were eased, thousands upon thousands of East Berliners had pushed open the barriers  in that hated wall. Within days new crossings were opened, within months the whole thing was abandoned and within a year the DDR as East Germany was known had ceased to exist.

The plan may well have been to simply allow a more relaxed regime at the border, but that never stood a chance of being realised. The Berlin wall had existed for as long as it did only because huge sums of money were spent on policing not just it, but also the population. People in the DDR knew only too well that they were being watched, that the knock on the door could come at any moment.

Those of us who were  lucky enough - if that’s the right thing to say - to see the Berlin wall in all it’s foul ugliness will be familiar with the guard dogs, the death strip of carefully raked sand and the bright searchlights  and will understand not only the extent of this repression, but also the strength of belief those who enforced it had in what they were doing.

The whole policy on which  Berlin wall was founded was a one way street; the border was forever being strengthened with more search lights, more trip wires, more surveillance and even more walls. The death strip was made ever more deadlier, right up to the end, indeed even as the gates were forced open on the Bornholmer Strasse check point the East German government was investing in its “anti fascist protection barrier” and all the associated instruments of repression.

Yet the wall and everything that went with it was swept away almost overnight as soon as those at the top who were underwriting the  whole project - in the Kremlin of course - pulled the plug.

It isn’t pulling at the credibility strings too much to compare the mindset of the regime that maintained the Berlin wall with that which continues the prohibition of drugs. Sure, the principle on which both were founded is entirely different, but the way both actually go about their business is not so dissimilar.

Both are regimes imposed on the population without their consent and are designed to restrict what adults can say or do, hence both treat the public as the potential enemy. The drug war  can only exist as the Berlin wall could only exist by virtue of continued and ever stronger repression and open criticism simply cannot be tolerated. True we don’t have a physical barrier to compare with the wall, or quite the infrastructure of the Stasi (yet) but just about everything else is there to some extent or another, especially in in some parts of the country, such as police stop-searches, mass surveillance, “grass up” phone lines, plain clothes “secret” police, the knock (or battering ram) on the door and so on. The UK is fast heading toward a police state and the drug war is one of the - if not the- prime drivers providing all the excuses politicians need to put the infrastructure of repression in place. We have further to go maybe, but we are certainly on the road.

This is why Alan Johnson saw what Prof David Nutt was doing as being so dangerous and why there has been so much fuss made about the categorisation of cannabis by drug war supporters, even though it means nothing to most ordinary people.

If the war on drugs were  to be relaxed even a little it would encourage a public debate. It wouldn’t just be a debate about the relative harms of different drugs, it would also open the floodgates to a range of debates about the effectiveness of different regimes in achieving their stated goals, the type of policing we have and more, much more, besides.

In any case the whole foundation that prohibition is based on - the belief that the way to “control” drugs is to repress their use and hence the restrict what the population is allowed to do - would be placed under the glare of public scrutiny and it could never withstand such scrutiny. Alan Johnson knows this so he did his best to close down the debate before it got out of hand.

If we go back a few years this need to keep the infrastructure of repression intact was at the root of the prohibitionist campaign against cannabis reclassification to class C.  The relaxing of the law against cannabis (such as it was) was seen as a crack in the dam, the thin edge of the wedge. So the door for further reform was clearly open and it had to be slammed shut and quickly. Cynics amongst us would argue politicians of both main parties saw the logic in this because a major change in the drug laws would result in a huge change to the infrastructure of repression their power base is built on.

So it is with repressive regimes which can only survive by keeping the lid on things. As soon as the repression is eased up demands for further change are only to be expected. Once change begins it becomes hard if not impossible to control and tends to run it’s own course. Repression has to be absolute and unquestioned or it falls, just like the Berlin wall.

The question is, has the damage (from the drug warriors point of view) already been done? The answer is probably “yes” because one of the main planks the policy is built on - that it has some kind of grounding in science - no longer exists. That is now something which is widely understood amongst the general public and indeed, isn’t really being denied by the government.

But more - and again it’s doubtful if Johnson had this in mind when he sacked the professor - the reason he gave for the sacking is about to be undermined by the very thing Prof Nutt did becoming enshrined in the rights afforded to independent advisers. Scientists of course must have the right to lecture on their work and if the government is to continue to have the input it needs from scientists, then it has to accept their right to criticise government policy in the public domain if that’s what their work leads them to conclude. The reason given by Johnson for sacking David Nutt was because he (Nutt) had exercised precisely that right. Alan Johnson therefore has a big problem because this aspect alone means the secrecy element prohibition needs in order to keep functioning has been compromised.

But there’s even more because Alan Johnson has asked for a review of the ACMD, including - and this is the howler - an examination of the “value for money” the ACMD represents. Apart from the fact that the members of the ACMD are unpaid and thus one would think quite good “VFM” he is on very, very thin ice with that one. The value for money of the policy of prohibition is a total unknown and the government has long refused to even contemplate an examination of it. Transform have been demanding a proper cost-benefit analysis of government drugs policy for some time of course and the government’s consistent refusal to even consider such a thing lead Transform to do it themselves. with interesting if predictable results. How much better it would be if the government were to allow the real thing though and just what secrets would it reveal about the effectiveness of the war on (some) drugs? They won’t do it of course, probably because the huge cost and ineffectiveness of the regime would be exposed by openness and public scrutiny.

So for now the lid is kept on, Alan Johnson is still in post and the political establishment has rallied round, but out on the streets  those difficult questions are being asked and the policy of prohibition is in he spotlight like never before.

There are a few voices speaking up for The Home Secretary’s action of course including most politicians. Most of the rest most of them were either mentioned in or contributed to the comments section the latest blog from Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies: Names such as Neil McKeganey head of the centre for “drugs misuse”, Professor Parrot the self-proclaimed “ecstasy expert”, Mary Brett of Europe Against Drugs and Peter Stoker, National Drug Prevention Alliance are of course, all well known characters supportive of prohibition. Missing from that list of course is Debra Bell, who has non the less been over the moon regarding the sacking.

The thing is cannabis prohibition and the move back to class B are claimed to be based on concerns built on scientific evidence, or at least, that’s how it started. Now they’re based on “public perception” which may not be as it was before all this blew up and the need to “send out messages”, which is now open to criticism because there is no evidence to show that such “messages”work. The line in the sand will probably move again soon and another reason for prohibition will be constructed, but this constant moving of the goalposts is a sure sign of weakness.

Once one person was allowed through the Berlin wall on the night of 9th November 1998 it was all over. Once a small move is made in the regime of prohibition it will be all over for that as well. The collapse, when it comes, will be almost as spectacular as happened in Berlin twenty years ago in it’s own way . That day can’t come soon enough.

Alan Johnson is probably a nice bloke, but his qualification for holding high office was through experience of life being a postman, it’s hard indeed to see how he is better qualified to pontificate on the issue of drug use than someone who is a professor of psychopharmacology at Bristol University and head of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London.

Alan Johnson sacked Professor David Nut, the former chief drugs adviser and head of the ACMD because his comments

…damage efforts to give the public clear messages about the dangers of drugs.

and

I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy

Read the full letter from Alan Johnson here (BBC website)

In other words giving the public information might make them question the way government applies the criminal law. Now that argument is, in itself, very dangerous and is totally unacceptable in  a democracy. It doesn’t matter what the subject at hand is, the idea that information should be kept from the public domain in order to allow governments to do what they want flies in the face of the democratic process. In sacking David Nutt, Alan Johnson has stepped over a very important line and has shown himself to be totally unsuited to high office. Any government policy should be able to withstand a vigorous and well informed public debate and such debate should always be encouraged.

Thing is, the misuse of drugs act, flawed and despised in  some quarters as it is, actually accepts that knowledge of drugs will change and that from time to time it may be desirable, because of this change in knowledge, to move drugs around the classification system and the ACMD is there to give governments such advice.

Politicians claim the right to make decisions, but those decisions should be evidence based, not based on what they think might play well with the media.  Jacqui Smith, the previous Home Secretary  defended her decision to reclassify cannabis in large part on the grounds of “public perception”. This would seem to be an misuse of the MoD act, which is simply not concerned with such matters.

As all this is happening there is an interesting legal case unfolding on behalf of Edward Stratton which is claiming that the misuse of drugs act is being misapplied. You can read the full explanation on the Drug Equality website. The DEA mission statement reads:

The Drug Equality Alliance (DEA) is a UK based not for profit organisation whose purpose is to transform the “War on some people who use some Drugs” from its subjective historical and cultural roots into a rational and objective legal regulatory framework that secures equal rights and equal protection to all those who are concerned with dangerous or otherwise harmful drugs.

Our mission is to use domestic and international legal jurisdictions to interrogate the law and its application to those who exercise property rights with respect to such drugs. We believe governments have failed to administer drug law in an evidence-based manner. This failure contributes to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and imprisonments each year. The Drug Equality Alliance seeks to remedy this.

It would seem pretty clear that Alan Johnson’s statements and actions have provided clear an undeniable proof that the present drugs policy is indeed subjective and that this government has failed to administer drug law in an evidence-based manner. The criminal law is being used  to “send out messages” that some drugs are unacceptable based on “public perception”. That is not the intention of the act and it would seem that Edward Stratton now has a much stronger case thanks to Alan Johnson.

Not only that, but David Nutt’s comments about alcohol and tobacco  needing to be brought within the act are also in line with the DEA argument. The fact that booze and fags were not included in the MoD act is purely cultural, because the act was drawn up by alcohol drinking tobacco smoking politicians. Alan Jonson’s crass stupidity can only help Edward’s case on so many levels and we await developments with interest.

The truly  impressive aspect of all this so far though has been the public reaction, which has been almost entirely hostile to the government’s position. It’s hard to think of any other example where public opposition has been so universal other than perhaps the reaction to the Iraq war.  But a reading of the comments on web reports, forums and blogs shows an amazing near unanimity of opinion, the only real support coming from morons who post comments such as

Not called Nutt for nowt, is he?

That was posted by someone called “Annon” and rated as a bad post by 345 people on the Daily Mail website. So despite being so keen to play to public opinion, it would seem that the government has seriously misjudged it with this sacking.

But all that pales into insignificance if they can’t put the lid on this quickly because scientists don’t like being ignored and told to shut up. Mark Easton of the BBC wrote

I understand that senior figures within the scientific and academic community are already looking to rally behind Professor Nutt, whose response to the home secretary suggests that he is happy to become a “poster-boy” for science as a contributor to policy-making.

We are witnessing a collision between science and politics (see my earlier post, Science v Politics?). There may be significant fall-out.

Resignations have started so the question is how far will it go? If a sizeable number quit, or if senior people quit - that would count as a vote of no confidence in at least Alan Johnson, he could surely not survive and if that were to happen and how could Gordon Brown cling on? Would such a rebellion be limited to the ACMD or could it spread to other areas? We will see over the next few days.

But perhaps the biggest casualty of all this is the policy on cannabis and the perception people have of the various warnings which have been promoted about cannabis use over the past few years.

Prof Nutt said (as reported in the Daily Mail)

‘When Gordon Brown says that cannabis is a “lethal drug”, when it clearly isn’t, young people are not going to pay him any notice. You don’t reduce drug harm by lying.’

Cannabis users now know that the policy of prohibition isn’t based on fact, they now know that alcohol is more dangerous than cannabis and they all know the government is imposing this law on them for simply political ends. It doesn’t take much to imagine what is likely to happen to the rates of cannabis use amongst children as a result. UKCIA has long warned that this was likely to happen if or when the exaggerated claims were shown to have been based on lies, it’s the baby and the bathwater all over again.

Absolutely the worse thing to have happen if you’re concerned about  young people’s drug use is to have the whole effort shown to be no more than the lies of politicians, especially when the politicians are held in such low regard as this present lot are. If we know they are lying, why should we believe anything they tell us is, in all fairness, a perfectly logical conclusion.

There is already a Facebook group calling for Prof Nutt to be re-instated, next week will be very interesting indeed.

The problem in the other world - the one occupied by the media and politicians is that the hype which determines the news agenda and government policy isn’t supported by the facts, which annoys the experts paid to provide those facts who get ignored as a result.

Professor David Nutt is one such expert who has been ignored. Prof Nutt as we all probably know was asked by the government in his role as chief drugs adviser (or “Drug Tsar” as the Daily Mail described him) to carry out yet another review of the classification of cannabis prior to this years reclassification. The idea no doubt was that the ACMD would rubber stamp the Gordon Brown’s decision to move cannabis back to class B, despite failing to do so only a couple of years before. Anyway we all know the history, Prof Nutt did the research and still came to the same conclusion as the ACMD did last time; that cannabis should remain at class C. Gordon Brown of course ignored this advice because he had already decided what he wanted to do  and Jackie Smith, the then Home Secretary did as she was told and reclassified cannabis back to class B. In doing this, Brown destroyed any pretence that the UK drug laws are evidence based and showed himself to be more concerned with the opinion of the tabloid press than is healthy. It was, perhaps, the start of his present unpopularity.

Anyway it seems Prof Nutt isn’t just going to let this go and he’s been  making a lot of noise about it again today. We all know the arguments about Prof Nutts research finding no evidence of a causal link between cannabis use and severe mental illness (The Keele Study), no evidence of a desire on the part of the public to see longer prison sentences for cannabis possession (the only effect of a more back to B) and so on. Dr Nutt remains scathing about the way he was ignored, and rightly so.

But of course, the reaction in large sections of the media has been predictable, the London Evening Standard  was outraged:

Drugs chief under fire for saying cannabis is safer than alcohol

The Government’s chief drugs adviser was expected to be facing calls to resign today after criticising ministers for not reclassifying ecstasy, LSD and cannabis as less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes.

He “was expected to be facing calls to resign” was he? Who was expecting that then? We’re not told. Instead we get a quote from a drugs “charity”. Which respected charity did they ask for a quote? Release maybe, or Lifeline? No, it was non other than Mr James “Clearhead” Langton himself:

Professor Nutt has been criticised by drugs charities. James Langton, a drugs counsellor with support network Clearhead, said: “If we reclassify cannabis as less harmful than alcohol it could influence more children to take it up.”

Clearhead is not a charity actually, and in all honesty, James is no expert on cannabis or on youth guidance, but he can be trusted to come up with the prohibition line  and so gets quoted.

BBC Breakfast carried a vox pop from Debra Bell, the self-appointed “expert” who runs the fact-free website Talking About Cannabis (check out the facts about cannabis page) which really annoyed one blogger:

Of course, as this was a voxpop Mrs. Bell’s comments were not challenged at all, and again she seemed oblivious to the psychology of teenagers, thinking that telling them cannabis is bad for you and is frowned upon by the authorities will be enough to make kids reconsider smoking the drugs.

Do read that blog for an excellent critique of the BBC’s truly awful coverage on the Breakfast TV show. Of course, non of these reports invited cannabis law reformers to comment, so why is it that Debra Bell and James Langton get quoted and UKCIA or Transform for example never do? Odd, isn’t it? But it is typical of the level of debate we have on this subject that studies by experts such as Prof Nutt  are “balanced” by the opinion of people like Debra Bell and James Langton, is that really the best they can find?

The outrage expressed in so many quarters of the media seems to be that by even daring to spark a debate about the true harmfulness of cannabis, Dr Nutt is undermining the war on drugs and encouraging children to queue up at the playground skunk dealer. This is the problem we face sadly, there can be no debate about drugs unless it’s of the “say no” variety because any debate will undermine the efforts of the anti drug campaigners who must be protected from the truth for the good of us all. Actually, this might be true, because if we were allowed a fully open. factual debate the argument for legalisation would walk all over the prohibition movement.

Strangely the Mail’s report was pretty objective and perhaps predicted what might happen as a result of the cannabis debate being opened up again:

They also raise the possibility of the current drug classification system - which puts banned substances into A, B and C categories - being ripped-up.

This has been the dream of the prohibition lobby for some time in fact.

But the real surprise with the Mail article (on the website) is the feedback. It used to be that comments to the Mail website were heavily moderated, such that anything which went against the paper’s hard-line policy simply didn’t make it online, but no more. Now everything goes up and you can vote for the posts you like the best and you can arrange them in order of popularity. Easy winners in the popularity stakes were posts supportive of Prof Nutt or in favour of legalisation, perhaps more surprisingly the less popular were the anti drug posts, which one would have expected Mail readers to have mostly supported.

It’s true to say that comments on all the news websites were generally supportive of Prof Nutt, or of wholesale law reform. There must be prohibition supporters out there, but they don’t seem to use the internet very much.

There’s no doubt that Prof Nutt is the hero amongst those who want a more intelligent way of dealing with drugs today, but to come back to the real world again it’s important to remember that he is a prohibition supporter; he opposes real law reform and still believes that cannabis should remain illegal, it’s just he believes that it should be less illegal than it is now, which is a distinction lost on many of us in this world. Thing is cannabis users don’t give a hurled roach about the classification of cannabis within the misuse of drugs act, the act itself isn’t a respected bit of legislation amongst the people it tries to influence.

Prof Nutt is right to be annoyed at Gordon Brown’s decision to ignore his advice, but he must be more depressed at the thought of the misuse of drugs act - an act he seems to believe in - being dragged further into disrepute like this. But on this side of the reality divide we can take some considerable satisfaction at seeing this non-debate ploughing on, day after day, month after month, year after year. Cannabis has been in the news for the best part of twenty years now and doesn’t show any signs of slipping off the agenda. There’s a reason for that which has nothing to do with which class of illegality it has…

A strange bit of research was published this week by researchers at Bristol, London, Cardiff and Cambridge Universities. Amongst the names involved was one Stanley Zammit who got a metion a couple of weeks back for demonstrating (against his expectations) that cannabis use during pregnancy doesn’t seem to be related to psychosis later in the offsprings life.

Dr Zammit, as this has blog already observed, has been involved in the cannabis and mental health debate for some time and seems to be of the opinion that there is a causal link between cannabis use and the development of severe mental illness. Indeed, he published a study a few years ago which was widely reported as claiming to have found that those who had used cannabis were 41 per cent likelier to experience an episode of this kind than people who never smoked.

This latest bit of research seems designed to quantify what that means in terms of public health policy: How many people would you have to prevent using cannabis in order to reduce the incidence of severe mental illness?

In order to do this, they invented a new scientific term, the “NNP” - defined as “The number of cannabis users needed needed to prevent  one case of severe mental illness”. Now in all honesty when terms like NNP start getting used the UKCIA “Cod science” alarm bell starts ringing and it’s fair to say it hasn’t really stopped, despite us quite liking the results.

The study was called “If cannabis caused schizophrenia—how many cannabis users may need to be prevented in order to prevent one case of schizophrenia? England and Wales calculations” and the abstract - for what it’s worth - can be seen here although if you get a cookie error message you may have to go to the front page of Wiley Interscience and do a search for “cannabis schizophrenia”to actually get to the page.

The first problem with this effort is in the title - “If cannabis caused  schizophrenia” implies an assumption which begs a lot of questions in and of itself, not least of which is what do they mean by cannabis? Do they mean all cannabis or only the dreaded “killer skunk” of Daily Mail fame? Sadly the abstract doesn’t give any clues as to what they mean by “If cannabis caused schizophrenia” and the article isn’t on open access so we can’t get to it. But presumably they laid out their theory as to what the nature of the  causal role  would be.

So anyway, the object of the study was to determine the NNP of cannabis (don’t you just love science jargon) - just how many people would you need to keep away from cannabis to reduce the incidence of schizophrenia by one. The results make uneasy reading for those who campaigned so strongly on the cannabis and mental illness ticket and seriously throw into question the government’s logic reclassifying cannabis because of the concerns expressed in the Daily Mail about this issue.

Results  In men the annual mean NNP for heavy cannabis and schizophrenia ranged from 2800 [90% confidence interval (CI) 2018–4530] in those aged 20–24 years to 4700 (90% CI 3114–8416) in those aged 35–39. In women, mean NNP for heavy cannabis use and schizophrenia ranged from 5470 (90% CI 3640–9839) in those aged 25–29 to 10,870 (90% CI 6786–22 732) in 35–39-year-olds.

Equivalent mean NNP for heavy cannabis use and psychosis were lower, from 1360 (90% CI 1007–2124) in men aged 20–24 and 2480 (90% CI 1408–3518) in women aged 16–19. The mean and median number of light cannabis users that would need to be prevented in order to prevent one case of schizophrenia or psychosis per year are four to five times greater than among heavy users.

So in other words for adults over 20 or so you would have to prevent around 3,000 heavy cannabis users, or 150,000 light users. If you use a wider definition of “psychosis” rather than “schizophrenia” the numbers are lower and they are lower for younger aged people. Even so these numbers hardly demonstrate a strong causal relationship and in all honestly putting a lot of effort into prevention of cananbis use isn’t going to have that much effect on the rates of serous mental illness. All this, of course, working from the assumption that there is indeed a causal  role at work here at all.

The conclusions drawn in the study state:

The number of young people who need to be exposed to an intervention to generate NNP and prevent one case of schizophrenia will be even larger. The public health importance of preventing cannabis to reduce schizophrenia or psychosis remains uncertain. More attention should be given to testing the hypothesis that cannabis is related causally to psychotic outcomes, and to considering what strategies will be the most effective in reducing heavy cannabis use among young people.

An English translation of this might read something like:

The number of young people who would need to be  exposed to anti cannabis use programs would be even larger than the figures quoted here, it would not seem to be a sensible way to spend the money. There is little evidence that cannabis does cause schizophrenia and policies designed to reduce the use of cannabis are not likely to have much effect on the rates of the illness.  More effort needs to be put into trying to prove a causal link between cannabis use and schizophrenia because we haven’t managed to prove it yet. But it’s a good idea to reduce heavy use amongst young people anyway.

If that is a fair translation of the conclusions of this rather odd study then no-one could really disagree with the last sentence. But it is yet another study which has failed to support the cannabis and mental illness scare of a few years ago to add to the ever growing list.

A question not asked and apparently not considered in all of this is what would the effect on the rates of mental illness be if cannabis users were to be persuaded not to use tobacco? Did they even consider the role of tobacco in mental illness? There’s no way to tell from the abstract but the answer is probably “no”, after all if the elephant in the room is really that big, it simply can’t be considered.

Before we consider these two reports, it’s perhaps a good idea to remind ourselves that illegal drugs are called “controlled substances” and those who support prohibition claim that policy represents “drug control”. I only mention that (again) because for normal substances and pastimes not subject to this special special form of “control” we can simply survey the population to find out what’s actually going on. Because drugs are illegal it takes special research studies to give us at least a clue as to the truth.

The result is to  let the cat out of the bag in that those people who like to think they are in”control” of the situation really haven’t got the faintest idea of the true extent of recreational drug use, the studies show this by virtue of the fact that newspapers announce with shocked headlines what everyone involved in the culture already knows, which is that despite all the efforts of prohibition, lots of people use drugs.

The first story concerned cannabis and so it was reported in traditional style. It featured a report from Wayne Hall and Louisa Degenhardt from Australia; Wayne is a  name well know to cannabis campaigners as someone prominent in the debate who usually seems to support a strange mix of prohibition and common sense. A few years ago at the Cannabis and mental health conference in London he argued against cannabis law reform on the basis that although it would be a good idea, governments are incapable of regulating and policing anything so it couldn’t be done. Anyway Wayne published his study in the Lancet last week and was reported in many papers including the Independent. Of course, being a report about cannabis the paper had to paint as negative a picture as possible

It is 40 years since cannabis unleashed the “flower power” revolution of the 1960s, encouraging a generation in Europe and the US to “make love not war”. Young people at the time hoped their legacy would be world peace. Instead, it has turned out to be a world of fuzzy dope-heads.

Oh dear, this sort of reporting got tiresome years ago - it’s just pathetic now. Anyway it was LSD that unleashed flower power.  The headline was “The world map of cannabis - Study demonstrates the extraordinary scale of the drug’s global popularity” and hinted at the bones of the story but the anti cannabis theme continued for a bit before preparing the reader for the shocking news to come:

Writing in The Lancet, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland and Louisa Degenhardt of the University of New South Wales, Australia, say cannabis slows reaction times and increases the risk of accidents, causes bronchitis, interferes with learning, memory and education and, most seriously, may double the risk of schizophrenia. Yet these effects have failed to dent its popularity.

<Sigh> notice the phrase “and, most seriously, may double the risk of schizophrenia” is added for spine chilling effect, even though it’s a meaningless and dubious claim really which obviously includes the possibility that it may not do so.  Anyway they then added an almost grudging  qualifier that

However, they add that the ill effects of cannabis are modest when compared with the damage done by alcohol, tobacco and other illicit drugs.

But it’s still worth emphasising the negative aspects because of the “news” being presented is designed to scare:

Citing figures from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for 2006, they say cannabis use is highest in the US, Australia and New Zealand (where more than 8 per cent of the population indulge), followed by Europe. But because Asia and Africa have bigger populations, they also have the highest proportion of the world’s cannabis users, accounting for almost a third (31 per cent) and a quarter (25 per cent) respectively.

Note use is highest in the home of the war on drugs - the USA, this correlation wasn’t picked up in the report of course. The “news” contained in this story is the fact that cannabis use is widespread - a real shock horror revelation to almost no-one other than those in “control” - and, it seems - the media.  Journalists of course never take drugs and don’t have friends who do either.

But what is clear is it really doesn’t matter that they continue to feed us this anti cannabis line, the people who matter - those interested enough to try cannabis and those who already enjoy using it simply ignore this stupidity in their millions. One can only speculate how many more users will come out of the woodwork when drug prohibition finally collapses, but few people expect the real number to be lower than crime survey guestimates.

Fact is these crime surveys are no substitute for proper population surveys, the fact that they even show the figures they do is an indication of just how out of control this “controlled drug” actually is.

Interesting a non-story as that item may have been, today’s Times carried a real shocker which no-one ever suspected (sorry, that was sarcasm) : High society: Britain’s drug-taking clubbers - Almost all Britain’s thousands of clubbers routinely take drugs, in particular cocaine , cannabis and ecstasy.

It’s true, the Pope really is a Catholic.

This was a report from Dr Fiona Measham and Dr Karenza Moore and published in the journal Criminology and Criminal Justice which found that

98 per cent of club customers had tried an illegal drug at least once
79 per cent had taken an illegal drug within the previous month
Only half as many bar customers (35 per cent) had taken an illegal drug in the previous month
85 per cent of clubbers had tried Ecstasy at least once
83 per cent had tried cocaine at least once
44 per cent had tried ketamine at least once
40 per cent had tried MDMA at least once

Actually, if this is news to any readers, you really do need to get out more. This is nothing new and the night club scene has been like this for well over a decade at least. Around 2000 - 2001 the government imposed a whole new set of regulations on what it called “The night time economy”, many independent clubs closed down and entertainment areas appeared, featuring  clubs run by national companies which claimed to be “drug free” (alcohol not being a drug of course). The only surprise really is that anyone believed this rubbish.

Unlike the immature report in the Independent  described above with it’s anti cannabis slant, this report in the Times read like a breath of fresh air, calmly reporting the fact that a huge number of people use recreational drugs without causing or getting into trouble(and hence not featuring on crime surveys). The paper reported

To use the phraseology of Russell Newcombe, a drug researcher for Lifeline Manchester, drugs represent “cocktails of celebration” for one group. For the other, they are a “cocktail of oblivion”. And the difference is profound.

Indeed it is, as anyone who has ever been involved in the recreational drug scene will know, and that is an awful lot of us. But the story does contain a really dark message, the trend towards poly drug use is escalating and because drugs are illegal and clubs cannot admit they have drug use on the premises, there is no drug information being provided to these people. Forget Talk to Frank here, this is no job for a prohibition supporting advertising campaign.

The reports authors sum it all up

“We would like to see a sensible debate about drugs without the shock, horror bit — if only because of the sheer numbers we see involved,” says Measham. “People have a desire to get intoxicated on a Friday night — the American pharmacologist Ronald Siegel once described intoxication as the fourth strongest irrepressable human desire after food, sleep and sex.

“That suggests that blanket prohibition is destined to be a disaster. We need a more sophisticated but also more realistic response. If people have a choice they don’t really want to break the law. That’s where the debate needs to take place.”

It really is time to accept the reality of all this; illegal drugs are not controlled drugs, but they are very, very popular. Prohibition is a dangerous, expensive failure and those in charge aren’t.

Needless to say it didn’t hit the headlines although the BBC did quietly report it with the  headline “Pregnant smoking ‘psychosis link’” (BBC news).

Of perhaps special interest is that the researcher at Cardiff was one Prof Stanley Zammit who featured in the cannabis and mental health debate a few years ago with his analysis of the famous Swedish study into military conscripts which Dr Zammit claimed to demonstrate a causal link between cannabis and serious mental illness. He was also behind the study which was widely reported as warning

The study found that those who had used the drug were 41 per cent likelier to experience an episode of this kind than people who never smoked.

Or as the Daily Mail put it

Smoking just one cannabis joint raises danger of mental illness by 40%

Of course we don’t blame Sr Zammit for the Mail’s excess, but it would be reasonable to assume from his past work that Dr Zammit was looking for, and expected to find, a link between cananbis use during pregnancy and later mental illness. Indeed, on his university profile page he writes of the study:

Approximately 15% of the population report psychotic-like experiences not meeting criteria for clinical disorders. These occur more commonly than schizophrenia, and are likely to be closer to underlying aetiological pathways. Studies of PLIKS (sub-clinical, psychosis-like symptoms) may increase understanding of schizophrenia aetiology, and help focus prevention and intervention strategies. All the genes above, as well as cannabis and tobacco, are thought to affect glutamatergic transmission. Examination of gene-environment interplay may provide further insights into aetiological mechanisms.

So it’s reasonable to conclude that Dr Zammit did not go into this study with the mindset of someone trying to disprove a relationship between cannabis use during pregnancy and later psychotic symptoms in offspring.  That is a good thing and makes his results all the more interesting.

What the study found was that tobacco and alcohol use by pregnant women was associated with the development of serious mental illness in the offspring, but cannabis was not. The BBC reported this finding thus:

The group was also studied for their mother’s use of cannabis and alcohol. No link was found for the drug, while only those whose mothers drank more than 22 units had a higher chance of psychotic episodes.

Notice how cannabis is referred to as “the drug”, as if alcohol and tobacco are something else. But that sort of subtle bias is only to be expected sadly.

Now of course demonstrating a link does not mean proving a causal mechanism - a point which has often not been fully appreciated by sections of the media when covering the cannabis and mental health debate, but showing no link would seem to go some way to disproving any such causal role. After all, if there are no ill people, there isn’t a cause.

Now of course no one study is going to give a clear cut answer like that and it has to be noted that although the study sample was large, the number of cannabis users who had claimed not to have used tobacco during pregnancy was relatively small

So what of the study? It reports this:

Cannabis use during pregnancy
Maternal cannabis use was not associated with any suspected or definite PLIKS in the crude analysis (OR for linear trend 1.22, 95% CI 0.83–1.79). The odds ratio was reduced after adjusting for confounders (Table 2), with adjustment for maternal tobacco use having the greatest impact on attenuation of this estimate (adjusted OR = 0.94, 95% CI 0.62–1.41, P = 0.755). Of the 157 women with PLIKS data who used cannabis during pregnancy, 51 (32.5%) claimed not to have smoked tobacco during their pregnancy. There were insufficient numbers of women using cannabis to examine trimester-specific effects of cannabis use.

However, you can bet that had a link been found, the headlines would have screamed the message of cannabis use during pregnancy causes schizophrenia because it would have fitted the media’s agenda.

What the study did find was a link between tobacco use and later mental health problems in the offspring and that should be ringing those alarm bells for mental health campaigners. Throughout the cannabis and mental health campaign of the middle of this decade, no reference was ever made to the use of tobacco by the people supposedly damaged by their cannabis use, yet every one probably smoked tobacco filled joints, the nature of which give huge doses of tobacco along with the cannabis. It’s also more than possible that the parents of these ill people also smoked tobacco of course.

The evidence is still only circumstantial, but it’s looking ever more likely that tobacco has a role in the development of mental illness. That isn’t to claim that cannabis is always harmless in this respect, but  it should give us cause for concern and to perhaps encourage those interested take a more critical look at the role of tobacco.

Non of the above is intended to imply that cannabis use - or the use of any drug come to that - during pregnancy is safe and the advice as always is not to drink, smoke, toke, snort or spike when pregnant for the good of your kid.

The problem we have is real; we have ever younger kids getting hold of and smoking  cannabis and despite of all the effort being put into trying to dissuade them, kids are still doing it.

Now it doesn’t take much of a leap of logic to conclude that is probably not a good thing; there are plenty of common sense reasons to want to keep kids away from drugs of all kinds - not just cannabis, be the drug alcohol, glue, cannabis or whatever. Drugs will affect the child’s development and cause a range of other harms, but the government has decided to focus its efforts on cannabis and hence we have seen a whole series of government anti cannabis campaigns aimed at kids in recent months, coupled with an increase in legal sanctions with the move back to B all supported by the BBC and reported as factual news items.

So it was with interest that Radio 1 Newsbeat carried a shock horror story this week under the headline “Cannabis warnings ‘not working’” in it’s latest effort to support the government campaign:

The government has spent millions trying to warn young people about the risks of smoking cannabis, but despite high-profile television campaigns, it remains the most commonly used illegal drug in the UK.

Er, hang on. If some other - probably class A - drug had overtaken cannabis as being the most used illegal drug we really would have a serious problem on our hands. That rather daft introduction set the standard for what was to follow.

The report was in fact a trail for a programme in the “Revealed” series shown last Saturday - this one claiming to expose the truth about cannabis. If you’ve never seen “Revealed” (and I hadn’t before seeing this) it’s one of those awful “Yoof” TV shows with camera work that is carefully designed and scripted to look amateurish and  spontaneous featuring trendy looking people who are only just too old to be called young. The blurb for the programme sounded interesting:

Reporters Anthony Baxter and Aidan Campbell investigate the UK’s most commonly used illegal drug, cannabis. Adina visits a forensic lab to examine resin up close, while Anthony travels around the country to discuss attitudes towards the class B drug.

The show meets Terri who saw her life spiral out of control after spending hundreds of pounds on cannabis, and talks to teenagers who say it is easier to get hold of than alcohol.

With the help of doctors and scientists, the team separates fact from fiction and asks whether cannabis really can mess with your mind.

As usual the programme relied on selective use of information, such as

The Royal College of Psychiatrists says there is evidence to support claims that if you start smoking the drug before the age of 15, you are more likely to develop mental health problems in later life.

Maybe the Royal College of Psychiatrists does say it, but there is also quite a lot of studies out there which don’t support this claim and indeed, the concerns which were widespread a few years ago about cannabis causing severe mental illness have largely gone unsupported in more recent research. No mention was made of this of course, although anyone reading that Newsbeat report on the BBC website would see a link pointing to a story from January this year which states:

But Professor Nutt from the ACMD reckons the link between cannabis use and that kind of severe mental health problem is “probable but weak”. The latest research suggests the government would have to stop 5,000 men and 12,000 women from smoking cannabis to prevent a single case of schizophrenia in both groups.

“Using cannabis will tip a few people over the edge but in terms of most of the population, there isn’t really a risk there,” he said.

The programme drew on the recent “Frank” survey which claimed to show a large number of young cannabis users had experienced what it called “mental health problems” because getting stoned had lead to feelings of paranoia, re-enforcing the false idea that such unpleasant feelings are a symptom of real mental illness. It also made the point that cannabis is ILLEGAL and it’s AGAINST THE LAW (caps for effect). It wasn’t explained that Frank is a government sponsored anti drug advertising campaign and works to government directives.

As might be expected for a “yoof” programme, the whole thing was very shallow. Perhaps the most ridiculous part came in the forensic lab, where  Aidan is shown handling rather good examples of Indian hash and so-called “skunk” weed, then being made to wear protective clothing - mask and gloves - in order to handle young plants which hadn’t even flowered yet and to would not have contained any active constituents. Why they did this is unknown but can only have been at the direction of the people in the lab.

Of course, what the programme didn’t do  was to express even the slightest misgivings about the workings of the law in all of this, the focus was all on young people ignoring the warnings about using cannabis and asking - without really daring to give the real answer - why so many people broke this law. No thought was given to the possibility that it could be because the law is a bad law.

You can watch this episode of “Revealed” on i-player for the next few days and you’ll see what I mean about the rather tired “yoof” style production values, but don’t worry, it only last 15 minutes.

So what’s going on? Why is the government’s anti cannabis drive apparently falling on deaf ears? Perhaps it’s down to the “crying Wolf” issue mentioned above.

It should always be remembered that the best form of advertising for any product is word of mouth recommendation from people you know. Now lots of young people know older people who use cannabis without ill effect. Cannabis is very, very widespread and it’s use established in large parts of society. Many children have grown up in homes where cannabis is used, their parents or brothers and sisters use it. So these kids will know personally people who have used and continue to use cannabis without ill-effect. So who are they going to believe? A government run campaign or their family and friends? Do we even have to ask that question?

The problem is that the things the government is trying to warn the young people about are claims built on the back of wild exaggerations. Remember the cannabis makes you mad campaign so enthusiastically promoted by campaigners such as Marjorie Wallace of SANE (Radio 4 MP3 from 2005) and the associated claims of 25-fold increase in cannabis strength as promoted by the Independent newspaper in 2007?

The skunk smoked by the majority of young Britons bears no relation to traditional cannabis resin - with a 25-fold increase in the amount of the main psychoactive ingredient, tetrahydrocannabidinol (THC), typically found in the early 1990s.

These claims have been rubbished often enough now and are widely understood to be hype - to be crying “Wolf” - yet the present campaign is based on these over-egged claims. Just as the old legalise cannabis campaign slogans of “the harmless herb” were easy to demolish, so are claims built on such obvious hype. It hasn’t been helped by certain people taking the lead in bringing it all about; the whole exercise is well understood to be a government inspired and directed campaign because it follows the enthusiastic support of Gordon Brown and other government figures and the move back to class B which was done against expert advice. In other words, this sort of thing is something “everybody knows” is a government lie.

The other problem is  the anti cannabis campaign is seen as hypercritical - and in truth it is. We are seeing all these warnings about cannabis and very little if anything similar about alcohol. Indeed, if you’re a teenager you’ll probably be familiar with the ongoing sexual health campaign featured on posters appearing in colleges around the country.  This is actually a very good campaign warning kids to be aware that when they get drunk they’ll lose their inhibitions and be likely to have unprotected sex. Nowhere on the posters does it say “don’t drink” or “don’t have sex”, this is a real world campaign giving sensible advice in a way that can be believed.

There are also good campaigns which encourage sensible drinking and awareness of what can happen if you drink too much. Young people are told to expect to fall asleep in the loo, to pass out and to injure themselves through excessive drinking. Again, it’s all good advice but the difference between it and the information given for cannabis is only too obvious to young people.

The plain talking of the alcohol and sex advice  stands in start contrast to the cannabis information which warns of the danger of feeling a bit paranoid and of getting arrested.

The real danger of all this hype is to cause the baby to be thrown out with the bathwater - to discredit all the information now being given out about cannabis - and as we started off by saying, there is a real problem out there with kids using drugs. Cannabis is not 100% harmless and we need effective measures to keep kids away from it. If it is true as the TV programme claims (and as personal experience also shows) that cannabis is easier to get than alcohol for kids, then we should accept that the problem rests with the way the establishment treats cannabis, which is so far removed from the way large chunks of society treat it.

So rather than spending our BBC licence fee making programmes which simply reflect government propaganda,  perhaps the BBC could actually tell the truth about the failings of drug prohibition and the dangers it’s causing? After all, don’t we have a right to expect the BBC to tell us the truth, or is its role no more than a government mouth piece?

So it was with some interest I saw a report of a study from the USA in the August e-zine of the Australian anti cannabis campaign NCPIC (National Cannabis Prevention and Information Campaign).

The study, called “Comparison of subjective, pharmacokinetic, and physiological effects of marijuana smoked as joints and blunts” (abstract here) was carried out by Ziva D Cooper and Margaret Haney at Columbia University in the USA. In the best tradition of scientific research they performed a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to directly compare the subjective, physiological, and pharmacokinetic effects of marijuana smoked with an without tobacco.

It’s worth pointing out a huge cultural difference between the USA and the UK. In the USA most people who smoke cannabis smoke it pure. A “joint” in US stoner slang is simply grass rolled up in a ciggy paper without the pile of Golden Virginia you’d expect to get here. However in recent times the habit of smoking “blunts” has appeared. A “blunt” is a hollowed out cigar filled with cannabis. A blunt is therefore cannabis wrapped in tobacco leaves, a concept most British tokers would understand as being a joint. It’s important to bear this in mind when reading the study.

The sample was rather small - just 12  people who were already cannabis/tobacco smokers over just 6 sessions.

Participants were blindfolded and smoked three puffs from either a blunt (tobacco joint) or a joint (pure cannabis) containing marijuana with varying Delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) concentrations (0.0, 1.8, and 3.6%). Subjective, physiological (heart rate, blood pressure, and carbon monoxide levels) and pharmacokinetic effects (plasma THC concentration) were monitored before and at specified time points for 3h after smoking.

The results?

(Tobacco free) Joints produced greater increases in plasma THC and subjective ratings of marijuana intoxication, strength, and quality compared to  blunts (tobacco/cannabis), and these effects were more pronounced in women compared to men.

In other words the tobacco free joints were better at delivering the cannabis “hit”, more cannabis per puff.

However, blunts (tobacco/cannabis) produced equivalent increases in heart rate and higher carbon monoxide levels than (Tobacco free) joints, despite producing lower levels of plasma THC.

In other words the tobacco joints are more harmful in terms of carbon monoxide levels and don’t work as well as pure joints.

The conclusion?

These findings demonstrate that smoking marijuana in a tobacco leaf may increase the risks of marijuana use by enhancing carbon monoxide exposure and increasing heart rate compared to (tobacco free) joints.

Wow, proof at last. Mind you to conclude that cannabis plus tobacco is more dangerous than just cannabis is a pretty obvious conclusion really. It would seem pretty intuitive to assume that one drug taken alone is going to be less hazardous than two taken in combination, but a least now there’s some solid evidence to support the common sense logic.

It would be good to see some similar research carried out on UK tokers to better guage the effects of mixing the two drugs, but as has already been said, the government has consistently refused to address the issue.

The reaction in Australia isn’t any better, despite tobacco/cannabis use being somewhat more common there than in the USA.  NCPIC’s Dr Melissa M Norberg reported:

In addition, participants reported liking joints more and believed that they were stronger and produced a better high than blunts.

Well, as the plasma levels of THC were higher with the tobacco free joints they probably did get more stoned. But as to whether the subjects found the pure grass joints more to their liking is debatable and is a claim not made in the abstract as such (the pure joints were rated as a higher “quality” than the tobacco blunts, that could mean a few things). If true though it would bes very interesting, because that’s not what (tobacco) joint smokers so often say here. The usual reaction is that tobacco joints are more enjoyable than pure grass joints. Tobacco is a good mixer drug - it goes with almost every other drug and it’s drug effect is to make users feel good about having taken it.  Again though, this should be seen as a problem caused by tobacco as it is very likely to lead to higher levels of cannabis use as people chase the feel good effect of the tobacco, indeed experience at UKCIA indicates that people who smoke tobacco joints smoke more cannabis than those who do not. So that comment by Dr Norberg is probably a wrong interpenetration of the results.

The conclusion the anti-cannabis NCPIC draws is predictable for a drug war campaign:

These findings suggest that smoking (tobacco/cannabis) blunts may increase cannabis use harms.

In non-prohibition speak that means smoking tobacco joints makes cannabis use more dangerous, but as with the British government’s anti cannabis campaign run by Frank, there’s no suggestion of doing the obvious thing to reduce that harm - giving cannabis users information about safer methods of use and encouraging them to toke pure.

Last Sunday in the Observer saw a comment from the head of the UN Office of Drug Control Antonio Maria Costa entitled “How many lives would have been lost if we didn’t have controls on drugs?“.  We’ve noted Mr Costa’s attempts to argue that black is white before on this blog - indeed he’s becoming something of a favourite for drug law reform satirists - but last weeks article really took the biscuit for it’s twisted delusional logic.

Lets start off with the Collins Essential English Dictionary 2nd Edition 2006 definition of the word “control“:

Noun
1. power to direct something: the province is mostly under guerrilla control
2. a curb or check: import controls
3. controls instruments used to operate a machine
4. a standard of comparison used in an experiment
5. an experiment used to verify another by having all aspects identical except for the one that is being tested
Verb
[-trolling, -trolled]
1. to have power over: the gland which controls the body’s metabolic rate
2. to limit or restrain: he could not control his jealousy
3. to regulate or operate (a machine)
4. to restrict the authorized supply of (certain drugs) [Old French conteroller to regulate]

So what definition of the word “control” is Mr Costa using to describe the present policy of drug prohibition?

As a noun we clearly don’t have the power to direct the illegal drug trade,  definitions 4 and 5 clearly don’t apply.

As a verb we don’t have power over the illegal trade and we (society) certainly don’t operate it. Definition 4 is perhaps the most inapplicable definition as prohibition simply seeks to prevent the authorised supply of drugs rather than to restrict it.

So that leaves the noun meaning the “power to curb or check”, or the verb to” limit or restrain” the trade. Given that we can’t even keep drugs out of prisons and that children of an ever younger age are using drugs it would seem a bit rash to claim that the trade is being limited or restrained or that we are curbing or checking it. Indeed over the past few decades the illegal drugs trade has grown and grown, despite - we would argue because of - the false idea that control can be exerted through prohibition.

So the first and simplest response to Mr Costas’s  question is we are not controlling drugs. In truth we’re not really trying to control them, the war on drugs is trying to eliminate them - remember the slogan “A drug free world - we can do it”? from Mr Costa’s office a few years back? Of course, they don’t believe that any more, but the policy hasn’t changed.

Lets be clear about this: Illegal drugs are not controlled drugs; prohibition prevents control - there is no control over who produces drugs, who sells them, where from, the quality (strength or purity) of what’s sold,  who they are sold to (no age limits etc) and so on. What we have is NOT, quite emphatically not, “drug control”.

But ignoring if we can Mr Costa’s misuse of the word control, he goes on to suggest that had we not had prohibition, more people would have died because of drugs than have in fact died. Well, this is a difficult one simply because we don’t know how many people have died under Mr Costa’s regime, but we can speculate that the number of deaths of peasants living at the point of a gun point in producer countries (be it the gun of the narco producers or the anti narco military) is not insignificant and of course we have those involved in the trade from producer country to consumer market - again usually the poor and exploited who never really count for much. Once we’ve counted all these victims we can perhaps begin to count the victims prohibition has created amongst the drug users in the consumer countries, along with those victims of gangland violence of course. It won’t be a small number.

Now of course, under a legalised, regulated regime we would know how many people died from the trade. Indeed, we would know how many died of precisely what, be it overdose or health and safety problems in the supply industry. That’s the irony of all this, Mr Costa makes a claim he can’t substantiate against an alternative regime that would make the harm it caused absolutely measurable.

What we also wouldn’t have is the environmental degradation, the  exploitation, the corruption, the violence  or even some of the global wars Mr Costa has brought us through his regime so laughably called “drug control”. Include these wider issues and the question looks far more clear cut and Mr Costa’s argument rather weak.

The main thrust of Mr Costa’s argument is that legalisation here would lead to an explosion of addiction in the producer countries - a “drug tsunami” he calls it. Actually that has already happened in many producer countries, yet he ignores this as if it was an unheard of concept. He fails to explain why a properly run legal trade would produce more drug harm than the criminal/terrorist trade we have now. He is, in truth, clutching at straws.

About halfway down the page Mr Costa drops a real bombshell of delusion: He writes

Drugs are controlled (not prohibited) …

Hang on, is he trying to claim we don’t have drug prohibition, or that prohibition is not the policy he supports? Is he really trying to claim that we do not have a war against drugs based on prohibition? This man is almost defining George Orwell’s “newspeak”  by redefining the English language to mean what he wants it to mean, not what it has always meant.

Actually, this might be an evolving tactic as prohibition supporters try their best to make us believe that we don’t really have prohibition any more, it’s not the first time we’ve been told that our drugs policy is not really prohibition in recent months. It was only back in August that Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies wrote in her blog

… law enforcement – hyperbolically designated as ‘prohibition’ by the pro drugs lobby…

I’ll be keeping my ear to the ground to see if this re-writing of reality comes up again, but just to set this straight as well: What we have as the corner stone of drug policy is drug prohibition, nothing else. It is illegal to possess or trade in so-called “controlled” substances and that is what prohibition is whether Mr Costa or the likes of  Kathy Gyngell like to think so or not. Actually, it is important to keep sight of this and not to let revisionists win with this deception.

The other brave effort this week to oppose the growing clamour for drug law reform worth a quick mention came in The Times from another regular: Prof Neil McKeganey, the director of the Centre for Drug Misuse Research at the University of Glasgow. Prof McKeganey presented the argument as he sees it against heroin maintenance - ie the NHS providing heroin to addicts. He made this statement:

If the NHS has rubbed the hard edges off the habit — effectively saying: “You don’t need to be a criminal”…one of the important drivers of recovery is being diluted.

It is unbelievable that anyone could seriously suggest that the criminal law has a role to play in the development of medical policy, in that the law should be used to endanger life in the hope it will “encourage” people into treatment. That is just so utterly vile a concept as to be quite repugnant, one that is quite unacceptable outside of a totalitarian regime. Let’s be clear, he is suggesting that the law making heroin addiction medically more dangerous and its use more chaotic actually encourages addicts into recovery and is therefore good. I would be interested to see his evidence for that actually working because it isn’t my personal experience of the way things happen. Having watched heroin addicts repeatedly jab themselves with blunt spikes in delicate parts of their bodies in countries with the death penalty for such things it’s pretty clear that the “hard edges” provided by the law need to be very, very hard indeed to have the effect Prof McKeganey seems to believe they can have.

But of course, this is the concept of “deterrence” - the idea that prohibition and criminal sanctions actually protect people and society by making drug use as dangerous as possible, yet there is scant proof if any at all that deterrence works and indeed there’s quite a lot to suggest it doesn’t.

It’s worth noting that, according to the University of Glasgow website:

In 2008 the Unit for the Study of Serious Organised Crime (USSOC) was established within the Centre (for Drug Misuse Research) with the aim of linking expertise between academia and law enforcement sectors.

This seems a strange arrangement for a university to have, but probably explains the funding route and hence Prof McKeganey’s logic.

What these examples of prohibitionist’s writings show clearly is that the support they have for prohibition is not built on hard evidence or experience, but on what they try to convince us is their faith. In the case of Mr Costa and, sorry to say, Prof McKeganey, it’s probably got more than a little to do with concerns for their position and status than any consideration of the real world, or a genuine concern for those exposed to such avoidable dangers.

Given serious drug law reform of course, these two would be out of a job.