Long-term potheads display on average an eight-point decline in IQ over time, an elevated risk of psychosis and permanent brain damage.
- MELANIE PHILLIP – The Times – September 26, 2017
Four men had to be rescued last weekend from England’s highest mountain, Scafell Pike, after becoming “incapable of walking due to cannabis use”. Said Cumbria police: “Words fail us.”
Well, yes. Does everyone agree that these men placed an irresponsible burden on a public service? Apparently so. Does everyone agree that the use of cannabis should be discouraged to reduce its irresponsible burden on society? Well, no; quite the opposite.
Last week Prince William raised the “massive issue” of drug legalisation. Although he expressed no opinion, merely to raise it was inescapably to express one, since the only people for whom it is a “massive issue” are those who promote it.
At the Labour Party conference yesterday the comedian Russell Brand called for drugs to be decriminalised. At next week’s Conservative conference, the free-market Adam Smith Institute will be pushing for the legalisation of cannabis. Legalisation means more users. That means more harm, not just to individuals but to society. The institute, however, describes cannabis as “a low-harm consumer product that most users enjoy without major problems”. What? A huge amount of evidence shows that far from cannabis being less harmful than other illicit drugs, as befits its Class B classification, its effects are far more devastating.
Long-term potheads display on average an eight-point decline in IQ over time, an elevated risk of psychosis and permanent brain damage.
Cannabis is associated with a host of biological ill-effects including cirrhosis of the liver, strokes and heart attacks. People who use it are more likely than non-users to access other illegal drugs. And so on.
Ah, say the autonomy-loving free-marketeers, but it doesn’t harm anyone other than the user. Well, that’s not true either. It can destroy relationships with family, friends and employers. Users often display more antisocial behaviour, such as stealing money or lying to get a job, as well as a greater association with aggression, paranoia and violent death. According to Stuart Reece, an Australian professor of medicine, cannabis use in pregnancy has also been linked to an epidemic of gastroschisis, in which babies are born with intestines outside their abdomen, in at least 15 nations including the UK.
The legalisers’ argument is that keeping cannabis illegal does not control the harm it does. Yet wherever its supply has been liberalised, its use and therefore the harm it does have both gone up. In 2001 Portugal decriminalised illegal drugs including cocaine, heroin and cannabis. Sparked by a report by the American free-market Cato Institute, which claimed this policy was a “resounding success”, Portugal has been cited by legalisers everywhere as proof that liberalising drug laws is the magic bullet to erase the harm done by illegal drugs.
The truth is very different. In 2010 Manuel Pinto Coelho, of the Association for a Drug Free Portugal, wrote in the BMJ: “Drug decriminalisation in Portugal is a failure … There is a complete and absurd campaign of manipulation of facts and figures of Portuguese drug policy …”
According to the Portuguese Institute for Drugs and Drug Addiction, between 2001 and 2007 drug use increased by 4.2 per cent, while the number of people who had used drugs at least once rose from 7.8 per cent to 12 per cent. Cannabis use went up from 12.4 per cent to 17 per cent.
The latest evidence about Portugal, a study by the Intervention Service for Addictive Behaviours and Dependencies, shows “a rise in the prevalence of every illicit psychoactive substance from 8.3 per cent in 2012 to 10.2 per cent in 2016-17”, with most of that rise down to increased cannabis use. For complete article http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/thinking-is-warped-on-cannabis-legalisation/news-story/b557ae72f9e2d5959c259c38abf77e45