inckley fox

Funny, I put 'Kaya' by Bob Marley on the other day and couldn't understand why I'd stopped listening to him when I was 16. Similar thing with 'Mellon Collie'. And someone mentioned 'Attack of the Grey Lantern' - I put that on and couldn't understand why I'd ever liked it in the first place!

I may be wrong, but this implies that your stance may be because (a) you don't like cannabis and (b) you don't trust yourself to be responsible around illegal drugs. ...While this suggests that your stance is because you have seen cannabis damage people's lives, and consider it to have ruined Amsterdam. As far as Amsterdam is concerned, cannabis has been legal there for all of my lifetime so it's hard to do a before-and-after. There are, I think, seven cities in Europe which are more dangerous than Amsterdam and none of them have such liberal laws on cannabis or prostitution, the latter of which makes it hard to pin anything on Amsterdam. On top of that, the drug trade is drawn to Amsterdam because of drug tourism, which obviously wouldn't be a problem if cannabis were to be decriminalised in more places. Crime in other parts of Holland where cannabis is decriminalised is much lower than the British average. In Spain cannabis is partially decriminalised and the crime rate is massively lower than in the UK. Now I wouldn't want to comment on your own personal experiences, but if your personal taste for drugs / lack of faith in yourself were to be a factor in your opinion, then I don't believe it should be. I'm of the opinion that people should be responsible for their own decisions in life. A kid of 7 can walk into McDonalds and buy two Happy Meals a day for a year, and obesity rates suggest that this is a bigger health concern than spotty students smoking pot. Now the student is old enough to make his mind up, the kid isn't. Even so, I wouldn't want to push for prohibition. As for my experiences, well I knew a lot of people who smoked pot at school and I don't think it's destroyed any of them. One of them ended up in prison because of heroin addiction, but then again another chap I know nearly wound up in the same place because of coke (although he'd never touched a reefer in his life). As a teacher we're advised not to tell teenagers how to live their lives, not unless we believe they have a problem. If I think a kid is smoking pot I tell them that (a) I don't want to know the precise details of what they get up to and (b) I'm not really supposed to dictate how they should live their lives; but I add that I wouldn't want to lecture them on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll even if I could (I mean, they're hardly going to listen, are they?). I tell them they'll get a partner, grow up, have a few fun years at college and quickly get bored of it, but it's important that they learn how not to throw their lives away in the meantime. And, needless to say, it tends to turn out that way. It sounds cruel, but the dropouts I see staggering around smacked out of their faces at 26 would have ended up like that regardless of whether they tried marijuana on the way or not. Sorry if that went on a bit...

Erm, no it isn't. Unless you think that (a) The government's economic record is popular or (b) that the phone-hacking scandal has made the government more popular. You accept one sensational, unpopular headline which reflects badly on you, in order to take front page space away from another which reflects even worse. That's what diversionary policy largely consists of, and has throughout history. As I said, the Russo-Japanese War was another example and some have argued that the foreign policy of Bush / Blair was another.

Have you never heard of 'diversionary policy' before? It's one of the oldest political tricks in the book. Try starting with the burning of the Reichstag or the Russo-Japanese War and going from there. Politicians are frequently happy for bad news to fill the newspapers if it means keeping attention away from something even worse (it has been widely suggested, for instance, that the Conservatives are not nearly as worried about the phone hacking scandal as Labour are, and are quite happy to see this in the newspapers at the expense of our economic problems).

Is that picture of Oasis ironic? I'm most definitely not a pothead, but in my lifetime the heir to the throne has said he supports its use for medical purposes, it's been briefly downgraded, decriminalised for medical purposes, fully legalised in parts of the USA, decriminalised in Portugal, partially decriminalised in Spain and discovered to be useful for the treatment of some medical conditions. Government health advisors repeatedly call for its legalisation and our current PM has refused to deny having taken it. If that can happen in a little over thirty years, then it's quite possible it will be legalised in the next thirty. And besides, people aren't arguing that it 'will' be legalised, they are arguing that it 'should' be legalised. There's quite a difference.

There are plenty of historical precedents you know.

The comparison with alcohol is far more relevant these days than ever before. When I was a teenager, thirteen years ago, I was told by the doctor to 'average' no more than eleven or twelve pints a week. He also told me to try a red wine with my meal instead of a pint, because it is 'the only food supplement in the world that is proven to be good for your health'. Previously the comparison between alcohol and cannabis focused on them both being psychoactive drugs, and alcohol having a worse impact on social problems. Now the comparison should look at how successive governments have attempted to underline the health risks of these substances. Cancer rates have surged over the past four decades and continue to year on year, despite massive percentage drops in the number of cigarette smokers and alcohol drinkers, and greater dietary awareness. It amazes me that more people don't ask why 'alcohol related deaths' are rising, while alcohol consumption isn't. The problem is that many of these deaths are 'alcohol associated' but not necessarily caused by alcohol. For instance a drinker who suffers from colon cancer goes towards the statistics, whether we can establish that alcohol was to blame or not. And this is the problem with advice on cannabis too. Increasingly people become convinced that the government are hellbent killjoys, and as a result we do our 'own' research. Today it was revealed that two drinks per year should be the maximum. Cancer rates from drinking are on the up. 4500 people died from alcohol-associated causes last year. But hold on - 75% of adults (according to one recent study) drink above the recommended amount. What - thirty million people? And 4500 of them die a year as a result. Many of those deaths are from accidents / cirrhosis / alcohol poisoning etc., so it's not unreasonable to assume that your chances of dying from cancer as a result of over-drinking are in the region of 15000 to 1. When I see the cannabis-related scaremongering (including those long since disproven assertions that one reefer is equivalent to twenty cigarettes), I think of the alcohol-related scaremongering. And I can't help but wonder why it happens. Is it the old Orwell theory that there is nothing more dangerous to a government than people getting together and having a good time?

You asked 'why draw the line at cannabis?' Well in Portugal they didn't and they have, per capita, half the number of drug users that Britain has. Managing drugs, decent rehabilitation, re-focusing police resources and putting drug dealers out of business by legalisation are all possibilities. Government health advisors keep irritating the government by telling them that this would work, and the government has to keep replacing them with people who will agree with what they want them to say. And then they don't. Again you are confusing the argument as to whether smoking cannabis is a good thing (if we pool mental health risks and general health risks together, then I don't believe it's any better than drinking a lot or eating too much sugar, salt or too many beefburgers), with the argument as to whether it should be decriminalised / legalised. And society has plenty to gain. In America it was estimated that legalisation in Washington would reduce spending and increase tax revenue by 0.5% (this was an estimate by critics of legalisation). Police can focus on targeting harder drugs. Casual dealers who depend on pot for their pocket money go out of business. 500,000 people are decriminalised in the eyes of the law (and, remember, it has been proven that people who consider themselves to be 'criminals' are more likely to behave like criminals). On top of this there is no evidence from other countries to suggest that more people will smoke pot, or drug-related crime will rise. As for the mental health risks. The only evidence for this is among smokers of 'skunk', which does not have sufficient quantities of CBD to counteract the THC. Legalisation - and regulation - would obviously handle this. On the other hand, cannabis has also been shown to have positive mental health effects (in the alleviation of bipolar depression symptoms, paranoid schizophrenia symptoms and a 10% reduction in the suicide rate among people who are treated with it). So I'd say that the 'mental health' counter-argument works for and against. But, seeing as we won't have any more cannabis smokers on our hands anyway, it's barely relevant.

Well a YouGov poll just over six months ago (in conjunction with that bastion of tolerance The Sun) found that 60% support legalisation, so you're not necessarily right there. However, it seems to me that when people lose an argument about the rights and wrongs of something, they resort to the 'well everyone agrees with me' argument. But you've confused representational democracy with mob rule. The Civil Rights movement would never have won had it not had consideration for a noisy minority. And in Britain our land would look very different were we to do everything by majority consensus. Thankfully we don't do things that way, because otherwise it would be illegal to be a Muslim or a Gypsy, illegal to wear hoodies, illegal to hold a rock concert, illegal to ride a bike on the road, to study Social Sciences, to get fat, to be unemployed, to be gay, to smoke cigarettes, to busk... Either way, the majority don't agree with you. So no, it's not as simple as that and, in response to your previous points, yes you can do comparisons from one country to another (do you seriously think we don't look at how other nations handle major issues, and which measures work / don't work?). The truth is that cannabis legalisation has never been associated with high crime figures, nor even high cannabis use. And high cannabis use in a country isn't associated with high crime figures either. In Britain more people use cannabis than in countries where it's partly decriminalised, so the message is clear: If you despise cannabis, those that take it and the effect it has on them then criminalisation doesn't make sense. And if you don't have anything against the third of young people that have tried it, or the half a million plus who use it regularly, then it doesn't make sense either.

Okay, like in Italy where the laws are much tougher but there are three times more users? Or Holland where laws are more relaxed, prevention is based on education, and less people smoke it? As for 'try living next door' to 'potheads' - is that as close as you have got? As a teenager and young adult I lived with a few, and during half a decade in Spain I had neighbours who smoked and saw nothing to make me change my tune, or believe they were all 'empty headed wrecks'. I got more intelligent conversations out of them than I get out of most of the trembling drunkards clinging to the bar at my local. Besides this isn't about advocating cannabis use, it's about the law. A government should be very careful when it comes to criminalising people - it does little to build respect for the law when you turn people who otherwise aren't breaking it into criminals. So what do we gain from criminalising potheads? We waste police resources at a time of economic crisis, miss out on tax revenue, keep drug dealers in business and watch as the number of drug users in Britain continues to rise. So those neighbours of yours - as empty-headed as they may or may not be - aren't going to go away any time soon, whether we toughen the laws or not.

Yes, but when drug-related street crime also falls, and less young people in the area concerned use drugs, then the picture is clearer. In Europe, there is no evident relationship between the stringency of drug legislation and that country's drug use rate. In Holland cannabis use is lower than in Britain and France, and a lot lower than in Italy, where drug laws are far tougher than here. It's lower still in Portugal, which also has partial decriminilisation. On the other hand it is quite high in Spain (although crime figures in general are very low). But for me, I don't think you're arguing this. You think we're suggesting that cannabis is a good thing. For my part, at least, this isn't the case. The legalisation of cannabis, to me, is not a means of saying 'this thing's alright, feel free to smoke all you want', but rather a way of raising tax revenue, reducing police workload, decriminalising half a million people and putting a few drug dealers out of business. And there's no reason to believe that, in the process, we will have more cannabis users on our hands.

Yes, lots of things in the world are dangerous if (a) you react badly to them and (b) you do too many of them. That could include recreational drugs like cannabis or alcohol, medicinal drugs like paracetamol, or foodstuffs like hamburgers etc. And, while I'm pleased that you are on the mend, I'm never convinced by language like 'invaded by the demons of weed' (all a bit too Pat Robertson for me - who are you trying to convince?!), nor by the tendency that people have of blaming their failure to hold down meaningful relationships on a substance. I got drunk once and told a girl I didn't fancy her anymore, which was appalling. We broke up, which was a shame. Was it alcohol's fault? No, it was mine! Cannabis can have a negative effect on some people. It may tip an unstable person over the edge. Equally, it may be precisely the sort of thing that an unstable person chooses to prop themselves up on in life. A chicken and egg thing, if you see what I mean. It's a good thing that you're staying off the weed and keeping optimistic - but if you work out all of your problems it may well have as much to do with the latter as it does with the former.

Well, actually there is proof. Holland, in spite of its relatively lax drug laws, is lower than us on the crime index, and lower than other countries with far harsher drug laws such as Italy (which also has three times more cannabis users). It also has a slightly lower number of cannabis users than us. Spain, where cannabis was partially decriminalised decades ago, has a lower crime rate than most countries in Europe, regardless of having more cannabis smokers. Portugal largely decriminalised all drugs in the early 2000s. Of course crime figures were reduced, but there was also an immediate drop in the numbers of young people substance abusing. I suppose time does tell, then.

I remember the days when someone would want to score and spend three hours phoning shady contacts, groaning "nah he's not got any". waiting for people who never turned up, wandering round parks looking for someone who isn't there, knocking on doors with no reply, picking up from terrifying bedsits then complaining that it was bad weed or not enough bad weed... I'm sure they would pay a few extra quid to go straight to the corner shop and get what they paid for. And surely dealers inflate prices too? Burning plastic into hash, or cutting teething powder into cocaine is a tax of sorts, isn't it?

I tend to agree, but where do you stand on under-age porn on the Internet? The creepy old dock-end toothed perv looking up pictures of under-age girls, or exchanging them with others, isn't directly harming anyone either - should that be legal? The harm, in both cases, is done indirectly. I think I saw once that a third of street crime is connected to heroin use (muggings etc.). I doubt that 1% of street crime comes from cannabis use. Who do you think provides funding for the NHS? And it's not only revenue gained through taxation that's at stake, it's the huge resources needed by the police to combat cannabis use. And besides, cannabis use isn't statistically highest in places where it's legalised. Italy has a virtual zero tolerance policy towards cannabis possession, and has nearly three times more users than Holland, which has - in places - a very relaxed stance.

Whether she's ugly / northern / a bitch doesn't concern me. The glaring holes in her argument do. When she says there are 96 reasons why standing shouldn't return it certainly redirects the blame from the police to the fans. While it doesn't point towards their behaviour, it certainly suggests that the nature of football terracing was largely to blame for what happened. This is untrue and to use the deaths of people, even if some of them were related to you, in order to back up a misguided argument seems just a little immoral. Firstly standing never went away. Until five years ago I regularly watched non-league and lower league football and had to stand pretty much every time. People have been doing it at concerts for many a year. What went away was standing for heavily policed football matches, that's all. Secondly, the proposals bear very little similarity to the standing people were used to in 1989. Finally there have been football disasters since Hillsborough. Some were due to crowd violence, some to police firing tear gas into the stands; some occurred in seated stadiums and others on the terraces. What they have in common is over-crowding. If a proposal makes that impossible, then arguments like hers become spectacularly irrelevant.

Good day, I've been reading this thing for years and just lately haven't been able to resist the itch to say something!