One might assume, given my previous blog post where I highlighted my lack of interest in “extra curricular substances” aka “drugs”, that I think getting stoned should be illegal.
Let’s step back for a minute and look at the big picture – I highly recommend reading this article about how social structures affects alcohol’s impact on societies.
In it, Malcom Gladwell explains researchers who studied how the Camba people in Bolivia drank a considerable amount of exceptionally high proof alcohol, yet rarely had any sort of the social trouble usually associated with alcohol use. Go read it, it’s time enjoyably spent.
Despite my earlier article asking why, why one would take drugs, I do understand why people would, and clearly society is very strongly shaped by socio-economic issues which I suspect correlate with recreational drug use.
Actually, I’d prefer to let “evidence based policy making” mean actual evidence based policy making, rather than pretending “the policy is based on evidence but I’m going to go with my ‘moral’ gut feeling anyway”.
I think it’s important for those considering the evidence to weigh up the potential for harm, both to the user, and to society around them, in comparison to other controlled but currently legal drugs such as caffeine, alcohol and tobacco.
My suspicision is that cannabis is much less likely to induce violence in the user – putting others at risk – than alcohol, whilst having similar cancer risks to the user as tobacco, however, I’ve not read the papers and I’d be happy to be proven wrong by independent researchers.
Were it to turn out that health was not a concern, then I’d suggest
it would make a lot more sense to legalise it and tax the hell out of it. The country is having financial issues – perhaps we can use the tax revenue to support the NHS and to fix those social issues.
Now as I’ve said before, and will continue to say, I’m personally I’m exceptionally uninterested in having these experiences, however I don’t see that criminalisation in the current manner can have any kind of positive effect.
When Richard Branson and other business leaders are saying the same thing, isn’t it time for a brave political party to take note and make this a policy point?