So why is cannabis illegal? This is a really simple question which should be easy to answer, but it’s not really.

We’re told that cannabis is illegal now because it’s changed and isn’t the “nice” drug it used to be when it was originally made illegal. No, that doesn’t make sense but it is the reason given. Take the claim made by Debra Bell, one of the leading prohibition campaigners in the country, on her website “Talking about cannabis” for example:

It is not the same stuff as you may have smoked at college in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and can have devastating effects on the young.

So, according to people like Debra Bell, since cannabis was criminalised 40 or so years ago it’s changed from being a mild, pretty safe and enjoyable recreational drug into something utterly different – something dangerous and destructive. We’ll come back to this shortly, but the first question to ask is clearly why a pretty safe, mild, relaxing, recreational substance which people like Debra Bell tell us was used without too much of a problem was prohibited in the first place? Getting a sensible answer to that is hard, because in truth the original criminalisation of cannabis was done for no good reason, based on ouright lies and – lets be perfectly honest – racism and there isn’t a sensible answer.

The problem with cannabis is that it’s not just an enjoyable recreational drug, it also has a range of medical and industrial uses which could seriously challenge the vested interests of petro chemical, pharmaceutical and agricultural concerns, worse it was a drug most often used by people from cultures which were other than white western and later it became entwined with the alternative culture and anti war movements.

Also contrary to the claims made by people like Bell, cannabis was a pretty strong substance back in the 60′s and 70′s. Actually, lets be honest cannabis has never been simply a mild relaxing recreational drug, it has a long and well established cultural role and has been involved in – if not responsible for – a great deal of creativity in the past. If you doubt this take a look at a major article UKCIA hosts called Pot Culture, written some time back by Russell Cronin it takes you through the cultural role cannabis has played between 1914 to the end of the 1990′s.

UKCIA also has a chronology of cannabis prohibition which makes for an interesting read, we have the Cannabis timeline showing the significant events which lead us to where we are now and much more besides in our “history” section here.

Quite simply cannabis was not prohibited for any real or honest reasons to do with protecting the public from a dangerous, damaging, addictive killer drug, although that was the claim made at the time.

Before cannabis prohibition in fact there was not a cannabis problem in any way shape or form and it was not a drug used by children and young teenagers. Cannabis should not have been prohibited in the first place, but it was and because of this governments set about choking off the traditional trade routes which had been supplying the “mild relaxing” version people used to enjoy.

Now of course suggesting that some drugs should be prohibited assumes prohibition is a reasonable way to actually control dangerous drugs, which frankly is a difficult proposition to support given the demonstrable failure, death and destruction the policy is creating around the world. It is indeed a very strong argument that drugs should be legalised in order to properly control, regulate and limit the trade. What happens under prohibition is the trade and the culture it supports simply goes underground and gifts eye watering profits to organised crime and even terrorists.

So not only was cannabis not the sort of dangerous drug that should have been prohibited in the first place, the actual act of creating prohibition has itself introduced a whole new set of problems. The sad fact is, they are problems we could – and should – have seen coming because we saw it all when the USA tried to prohibit alcohol 90-odd years ago. What happened then is well documented; the mob took over and used violence to provide the consumer demand with a product which was a far more dangerous version of the real thing the policy originally tried to protect people from. Moonshine, bath tube gin and the rest were high strength versions of alcoholic drinks often contaminated by methanol. The heavy drinking of high octane spirits which took place in the “speakeasies” – the illegal drinking dens – was unrestricted by any workable law and roped in children en mass. Sounds familiar?

If we are to believe prohibition campaigners like Debra Bell what happened with alcohol has happened with cannabis today with the development of so-called “skunk”. Debra Bell claims the mob has produced a far more dangerous version of cannabis and children are using it en mass, which is leading to all sorts of problems. According to Talking About Cannabis (on the page linked above), signs to watch out for include

Sensitive eyes, runny nose, sores and burns on flesh, clothes, sheets.
Blood on sheets.
Burns around the mouth, rash around the mouth.
Keeping arms covered.

All of the above is wrong incidentally, as is so much that site. But the main case usually centres around the change in “potency” in recent years.

This is where things get sticky though because with cannabis strength as such is possibly less important than the ratio of THC to CBD – the two most common active active chemicals (drugs if you prefer) the plant produces. This is something we’ve discussed at length here before, but essentially THC produces psychotic like symptoms in users and is therefore claimed to cause psychotic illness in a small proportion of the population, whereas CBD has a moderating, even anti psychotic effect; the two drugs are thought to balance each other out.

According to Talking about cannabis, again on the same page linked to above, Debra Bell tells us that

Interestingly, CBD appears to have been virtually bred out of skunk, which may account for the devastating effects we are seeing, especially among the young.

So if you believe prohibition campaigners the modern “mob” has produced an extreme hybrid of cannabis akin to moonshine of old. The way to deal with this according to the drug warriors is more of the regime that caused the problem in the first place. Things have only gone wrong like this, they tell us, because we haven’t been energetic enough in enforcing prohibition.

The case being made by the prohibition camp is simply stupid and illogical, it’s straight from the “when in a hole dig faster” school of problem solving, you do not stop a sore thumb by hitting it harder with the hammer. But it gets a good press and Debra Bell is in high demand from a media only too eager to support her message. Those of us on this side of the argument need to ask ourselves another very simple question: How did this happen?

The cannabis law reform campaign has made a huge tactical error, born perhaps from a knowledge that the original prohibition of cannabis was groundless. That error was to assume that because the exaggerated claims of prohibition were originally groundless cannabis was harmless and thus by extension will always be harmless. Thus the cry went out to “free the weed”, the “harmless herb” and so on. In truth cannabis was never “harmless” – nothing on this earth is and even the good old style hash would have been a bad thing for school kids to be using. It was a pretty safe substance for adults to use, but even that doesn’t in itself guarantee that it couldn’t ever become something different. Had cannabis not been prohibited it wouldn’t have been exposed to the distorted economics of prohibition which it’s being argued created the modern strains selected not for the quality of the product but for the quantity and ease of growing under intensive conditions using huge amounts of chemicals.

All it took to undermine that simplistic mantra of the old legalisation movement was to point out this change in the supply side and to highlight the claims of a link to mental illness, because everyone is scared of madness. The claim was simple; these new, changed, even genetically modified varieties were causing an epidemic of schizophrenia in young people. It didn’t matter that the claims made were at best overblown, often groundless and – as in the case of “genetically modified” just plain wrong, the damage was done and reefer madness V2 was born.

Now of course, whereas there was hype and stupidly overblown claims, there was also a grain of truth in the psychosis claims. People with severe mental illness do seem to take to cannabis like ducks to water. People who use cannabis heavily when kids do sometimes seem to develop psychotic problems and so there is a linkage between cannabis use and the development of the illness. Yet when the rates of psychotic illness are looked at, there’s no evidence of any increase despite the huge increase in cannabis use which would seem to all but dispel the reefer madness V2 claims.

Beyond the hype there are serious issues which, although often deployed as reasons to keep cannabis illegal are actually strong reasons to support law reform. If there is any truth that low CBD cannabis carries an elevated risk of psychosis then we need a proper regulation of what is a massive multibillion pound industry. If there is a problem with kids using cannabis we need laws which focus on reducing their access to the trade, as we know illegal dealers seldom ask for proof of age. If some people are vulnerable, they should have the protection of the law, not be treated as criminals.

Of course the prohibition supporters counter these arguments by pointing out that vastly more people use legal alcohol than consume illegal cannabis and claim that law reform would lead to an increase in cannabis use. Well, yes it would increase use to an extent, but not all use is abuse and if the fears of prohibition created high potency hybrids are in any way true the risk would be far lower due to proper market regulation. At the very least a legalised regime would allow users to know what they’re getting, it could even prevent the sale of potentially dangerous varieties if that was felt necessary. We would also be able to study the whole issue in a way we simply can’t at present and health promotion campaigns would be evidenced based, not hype based as now. Laws which act in the interest of consumers have the support of consumers and are thus enforceable laws.

Regarding levels of use though it’s worth bearing in mind that if there were 5 million cannabis users – not an impossible figure – that would represent approaching a tenth of the number of alcohol users. Put that way cannabis use is already properly regarded as common place, like it or not.

What prohibition campaigners often neglect to mention is that alcohol is a product subjected to a lot of commercial promotion, what in the world of illegal drugs is called “pushing”. There is a lot wrong with the way we deal with alcohol as well, to be honest our whole approach to drug use needs a good shaking.

But the big problem is that what cannabis users see is blatant hypocrisy with the policy towards their drug of choice and those toward the problems caused by alcohol . This week the office of national statistics released some frightning statistics about our love affair with the bottle

The number of alcohol-related deaths in the United Kingdom has consistently increased since the early 1990s, rising from the lowest figure of 4,023 (6.7 per 100,000) in 1992 to the highest of 9,031 (13.6 per 100,000) in 2008.

Whatever the dangers of cannabis frankly it’s hard to imagine that it could ever come close to the damage caused by alcohol, yet the very people who regard cannabis as a dangerous drug don’t even consider booze to be a drug, they even leave the marketing and health promotion in the hands of the dealers, The Portman Group. Cannabis prohibition is well understood to be based on lies, hype and hypocrisy because of this.

If you lie to me once I ignore everything you tell me, the result is genuine concerns about cannabis are drowned in a sea of and disinformation and simply dismissed by the people who perhaps need to listen. This will not change unless this prohibition madness ends.