International - Report urges regulated market for cannabis to replace prohibition

[Lunar Loops]

This piece comes from The Guardian (article link):

Report urges regulated market for cannabis to replace prohibition

Duncan Campbell
Thursday October 2 2008

A report on cannabis prepared for next year's UN drug policy review will suggest that a "regulated market" would cause less harm than the current international prohibition. The report, which is likely to reopen the debate about cannabis laws, suggests that controls such as taxation, minimum age requirements and labelling could be explored.
The Global Cannabis Commission report, which will be launched today at a conference in the House of Lords, has reached conclusions which its authors suggest "challenge the received wisdom concerning cannabis". It was carried out for the Beckley foundation, a UN-accredited NGO, for the 2009 UN strategic drug policy review.
There are, according to the report, now more than 160 million users of the drug worldwide. "Although cannabis can have a negative impact on health, including mental health, in terms of relative harms it is considerably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco," according to the report. "Historically, there have only been two deaths worldwide attributed to cannabis, whereas alcohol and tobacco together are responsible for an estimated 150,000 deaths per annum in the UK alone."
The report, compiled by a group of scientists, academics and drug policy experts, suggests that much of the harm associated with cannabis use is "the result of prohibition itself, particularly the social harms arising from arrest and imprisonment." Policies that control cannabis, whether draconian or liberal, appear to have little impact on the prevalence of consumption, it concluded.
"In an alternative system of regulated availability, market controls such as taxation, minimum age requirements, labelling and potency limits are available to minimise the harms associated with cannabis use," said the report.
It claimed that only through a regulated market could young people be protected from the increasingly potent forms of cannabis, such as skunk. It is intended that the report will form a blueprint for nations seeking to develop a "more rational and effective approach to the control of cannabis".
The authors suggest there is evidence that "the current system of cannabis regulation is not working, and ... there needs to be a serious rethink if we are to minimise the harms caused by cannabis use."
Last night, the report was welcomed by drug law reform organisations. "The Beckley foundation are to be congratulated for the clarity of their call for cannabis supply to be brought within government control," said Danny Kushlick of Transform. "We look forward to the same analysis being applied to heroin and cocaine."
The report is being launched at a two-day conference, which will be attended by leading figures in the drugs policy world.
The conclusions are unlikely to be embraced by the government or the Conservative party, both of which are opposed to relaxing restrictions on cannabis use.

[Euphoric]

Cannabis less harmful than drinking, smoking: report

Thu Oct 2, 6:44 AM

LONDON (AFP) - Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, according to a report by a research charity Thursday, which called for a "serious rethink" of drug policy.

The Beckley Foundation, a charity which numbers senior experts and other academics among its advisors, said banning cannabis has no impact on supply and turns users into criminals.

"Although cannabis can have a negative impact on health, including mental health, in terms of relative harms it is considerably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco," says the report by the Foundation's Global Cannabis Commission.

The government is pressing for cannabis to be re-classified in law as a Class B drug compared with its current, less serious, Class C classification.

Authorities are concerned notably by the growing prevalence of the potent "skunk" form of the drug. Around 80 percent of cannabis seizures are of this strain, said to be linked to mental health problems, official figures show.

The Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust, claimed only two deaths worldwide have been attributed to cannabis, while alcohol and tobacco use together kill an estimated 150,000 people in Britain alone.

"Many of the harms associated with cannabis use are the result of prohibition itself, particularly the social harms arising from arrest and imprisonment," it said.

"It is only through a regulated market that we can better protect young people from the ever more potent forms of dope," it added.

The decision to reclassify cannabis upwards into the more punitive Class B category -- which includes amphetamines -- is a U-turn for the Labour government.

Cannabis was downgraded from Class B when Tony Blair was prime minister, but Gordon Brown announced a review of its status soon after taking over in June last year.

An earlier review of the cannabis classification, at the time of the last 2005 general election, resulted in it remaining Class C.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/08100...n_drugs_health

[Lunar Loops]

This from The Independent - UK (article link):

The Big Question: Is it time the world forgot about cannabis in its war against drugs?

By Michael McCarthy
Friday, 3 October 2008

Why are we asking this now?


Because yesterday a British think-tank published a report for next year's United Nations Strategic Drug Policy Review, suggesting that a decriminalised, regulated market in cannabis would cause less harm than the prohibition of the drug currently in force across most of the world.

What is the UN review?

It is an examination of progress made since the international community, at a special session of the UN General Assembly in New York in June 1998, agreed a 10-year programme of activity for the control of illegal drug use and markets – the "war on drugs". It is thought unlikely that enormous progress will be reported in 2009, as many drugs are purer, cheaper, and more widely available than ever before. Experts on drug policy are therefore looking again at the alternative to prohibition which is always in the background, but which no office-holding politician hoping for re-election appears able to contemplate - legalisation.

What exactly isthe think-tank report?

It is the Global Cannabis Commission report, launched at a conference in the House of Lords yesterday and prepared for the Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust "set up to promote the investigation of consciousness and its altered states from the perspectives of science, health, politics and history." The report, put together by a specially-commissioned international group of academics and experts in drug policy analysis, attempts to put the issue of cannabis in a global perspective with a comprehensive view of the evidence, so that governments can move beyond what is termed "the present stalemate in cannabis policy."

Which stalemate is this?

Cannabis is used worldwide by "a conservatively estimated 160m people", according to the report, so it can hardly be said that prohibiting it is successful – and increasingly, nations cannot agree on the way forward. Some countries take a hard line – in the US, about three-quarters of a million citizens are arrested every year for cannabis possession – while other countries have considerably relaxed their penalties or their enforcement policies (Until recently Britain could have been put into this category. Four years ago we downgraded dope from a class B to a class C drug – until in May, the Home Office, clearly at Gordon Brown's behest and in the face of official advice to the contrary, retightened the policy and made it class B once again, after fears in some quarters that stronger versions of the drug were leading to more harmful effects.) But internationally, cannabis is considered an outlawed substance, so changing the official regime is everywhere difficult.

Why does the report suggest cannabis should be legalised?

It argues that although cannabis can have a damaging effect in health and on mental health, it is actually far less damaging than alcohol and tobacco. "Historically, there have only been two deaths worldwide attributed to cannabis, whereas alcohol and tobacco together are responsible for an estimated 150,000 deaths per annum in the UK alone," the report alleges.
Much of the harm associated with cannabis use is "the result of prohibition itself, particularly the social harms arising from arrest and imprisonment," the report says, claiming that policies which control cannabis, whether draconian or liberal, appear to have little impact on the prevalence of consumption. It offers the alternative of a legal but properly regulated market.
"In an alternative system of regulated availability, market controls such as taxation, minimum age requirements, labelling and potency limits are available to minimise the harms associated with cannabis use," it says, claiming that through a regulated market young people could be protected from the increasingly potent forms of the drug, such as skunk.

Wouldn't the legalisation of cannabis pave the way to the legalisation of all drugs?

It might well do, which is why, no matter what the relative harm of dope may be compared to cigarettes or whisky, a move to end prohibition would be stoutly resisted by opponents of liberalising the drug laws, and welcomed by those who would like to see liberalisation brought in. For it is the issue of prohibition itself, rather than the issue of cannabis, which is really at the heart of the argument. The drugs-liberalisation pressure group Transform yesterday welcomed the Global Cannabis Commission's call for legalisation, but said it would also welcome its now being applied to heroin and cocaine.

Why is prohibition at the heart of the argument?

Simple economics, say its opponents. It is simply a matter of supply and demand. If you squeeze the supply of a much-desired commodity – especially an addictive one – its price will rise sharply, and in an unregulated market, it can go sky-high. It then becomes too expensive for addicts for buy, and so they turn to crime or social deviancy on a large scale to feed their habits – burglary, shoplifting, prostitution. At the international scale, the profits are such that the trade is taken over by organised crime and whole countries are destabilised.

So just how big are the profits?

Transform's Danny Kushlick says: "In the cocaine and heroin trade, the profit margin is anything between 2,000 and 3,000 per cent, which enables organised criminals to turn what are effectively vegetables into commodities worth literally more than their weight in gold." A large number of prominent and entirely respectable economists have bought this argument, and insist that drugs prohibition is entirely counter-productive, just as alcohol prohibition was in the US in the 1920s - until it was eventually repealed.
They range from Milton Friedman, the US guru of the free market, to Adair Turner, former director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, current chairman of the Government's Climate Change Committee and forthcoming chairman of the Financial Services Authority. A lot of senior scientists are also strongly in favour of drugs legalisation.

Wouldn't the legalisation of cannabis or indeed any drug just lead people down the path to addiction?

That is certainly the position of its opponents; it is more or less the position of the Government and of the Tory opposition. Economists might be in favour; politicians are very wary of legalising drugs. There seems to be no widespread popular call for it. Its proponents say that although more people might become drug users, the harm done would be far less than the benefit gained by taking the world's Mafias and local criminals out of the equation.

So what are the chances that cannabis will cease to be internationally outlawed?

With the US running the show? Don't hold your breath.

Should cannabis be legalised on a world scale?

Yes...
* It would immediately take the supply of the drug out of the hands of violent criminal syndicates.
* Compared to alcohol and tobacco, which are freely available, Cannabis is not very harmful anyway.
* Any increased use of the drug would be greatly outweighed by the benefits gained.

No...
* It would be a first step to more widespread, and potentially disastrous, liberalisation of other drugs.
* It would lead to a great increase in use, which might put people on a "slippery slope" to harder drugs.
* Some forms of cannabis are very harmful and have been implicated as a cause of mental health problems.

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Good finds.