Peter Hitchens has a very good post today on drugs.
Furthermore, there should be one class of illegal drug, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on.
And the despicable "Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs", a publicly funded body for the incitement of serious crime, should be abolished. We learn today that, having failed to get its own way first on cannabis and now on ecstasy, it is instead turning its attentions to the "downgrading" of LSD. Away with it!
So where would these draconian proposals leave multiple sclerosis sufferers who, for reasons not remotely their fault, find that cannabis is literally the only thing that relieves their symptoms? I have a friend with MS who doesn't even like cannabis - but nothing else works anything like as effectively.
ReplyDeleteVery sensibly, the police and the courts currently turn a blind eye to these cases, though presumably you're avocating a crackdown?
We don't treat headaches by eating or smoking bark.
ReplyDeleteThat's highly disingenuous, and I suspect you know it.
ReplyDeleteThere are proven, reliable and inexpensive remedies for headaches. There are no proven and reliable remedies for the symptoms of MS, current drug programmes like beta-interferon are unavailable on the NHS and duly cost a fortune - and it just so happens that one of the only cheap remedies that really does work (in that it relieves some of the worst physical symptoms of many MS sufferers' day-to-day existence) happens to be cannabis.
Believe it or not, these people don't enjoy being caught up in the drugs debate - they just want something to help them get through the day without cramping up in agony. Fortunately, the police and the courts tacitly recognise this, which is why a prosecution for possession in such circumstances is highly unlikely unless the quantities are vast.
But what would you advocate, given you seem to think that all possession should be cracked down upon? Surely the argument that you keep putting forward, that cannabis has unpleasant side-effects, is pretty irrelevant when applied to people who suffer unpleasant side-effects if they DON'T take it?
This is all rubbish. What matters is the active ingredient, identifiable by medical science and then controllable by clinical practice. I say again, you might as well treat a headache with bark.
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