SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Hague's call to legalise cannabis rejected by government
The government has rejected a call from Lord Hague to consider legalising the recreational use of cannabis. In an article for the Daily Telegraph, the former Tory leader said the war on cannabis had been "irreversibly lost" and a change of policy was needed. His call was prompted by the case of a boy with epilepsy who was given a special licence to use cannabis oil.
Home Secretary Sajid Javid has told MPs there will be a review of the medical use of cannabis in the UK. The Home Office has set up an expert panel to review the rules on the therapeutic use of the drug, but a spokesman stressed that the existing laws on the recreational use of cannabis would not be changed.
[...] Last week officials at Heathrow Airport confiscated Billy Caldwell's cannabis oil, which the 12-year-old's mother Charlotte had been attempting to bring into the UK from Canada. The Home Office returned some of the medicine after protests from Ms Caldwell, and assurances from the medical team treating Billy that the treatment was necessary. [...] Lord Hague said the debate about Billy Caldwell was "one of those illuminating moments when a longstanding policy is revealed to be inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date". By returning the medicine to the Caldwell family, the Home Office had "implicitly conceded that the law has become indefensible", he said.
[...] Prime Minister Theresa May remains firmly opposed to legalisation or decriminalisation of the drug because of the harm she says it does to individual users and communities.
Guardian editorial. Also at The Telegraph.
See also: Cannabis: What are the risks of recreational use?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday June 22 2018, @05:45PM
In the US, it was racism and a hatred of left-leaning young people. The people doing this were quite explicit about it. Indeed, even the name "marijuana" was invented and used because the people restricting its use wanted the plant associated with Mexicans even though it had been cultivated in the US since colonial times. Richard Nixon was also very clear that the purpose of his ramping up of the War on Drugs didn't have anything to do with the drugs, and everything to do with having an excuse to arrest black people and hippies, especially anyone who was considering, say, leading a protest against the bombing of Cambodia.
Because drug crimes are written so that having an object is the crime rather than doing something with it, it means planting evidence is extremely easy to do. All a cop has to do to ruin the life of anybody they like is carry a bag of drugs around, make up an excuse to stop somebody and pat them down, and during the pat-down "find" the bag. They get a collar, and their victim gets jail time and legal discrimination against them the rest of their lives.
Another relevant point: After some states started legalizing cannabis, many cops complained that they could no longer arbitrarily search a vehicle by claiming to smell cannabis. Any doubts that this has anything at all to do with the effects of cannabis on humans should go away based on that alone.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.