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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"one of those illuminating moments when a longstanding policy is revealed to be inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date".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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @10:10PM (1 child)
When you make things illegal you encourage violence. They are already breaking the law, why not knock it up a few notches and REALLY make some money?
Not how I'd go about it, but plenty enough humans do.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday June 23 2018, @03:22PM
Take a look at some of the lesser know people of the prohibition era, like Al Capone. He went from being a school thug, to a bouncer at brothels to being a bodyguard for the head honco for a bootleg liquor racket which he later on ended up running, with increasingly agressive means for that racket.
So no, he didn't bring it up a few notches, he brought the game from a smaller field into a less violent field.
Also, when making something illegal you don't really encourage violence but rather you remove the discouraging elements that prevents the escalation of violence (in a completly legal playing field the capacity for violence tends to include annexing whole countries and involving armies, see letters of marque for this)