Beware the cheap potshots about cannabis

[Lunar Loops]

Voices of reason in the media are becoming more plentiful, but sympathetic ears in influential places are hard to come by. This from The Guardian (UK):

Beware the cheap potshots about cannabis

Thursday September 28, 2006
The Guardian


Here in the UK while the police are busy looking for cannabis growers (Do you have a pot farm next door?, September 27), the UNODC 2006 World Drug Report authors have inadvertently laid out a convincing case for ending cannabis prohibition. After asking us to treat cannabis cultivation and consumption as serious problems, the report systematically undermines the logic of doing so.
Telling us that cannabis is a relatively harmless and inexpensive intoxicant, the report presents statistics that the drug is grown and consumed everywhere and in very impressive quantities. Based on public polling data from 134 countries, the report explains that an estimated 4% of humanity enjoys the planet's most popular illicit drug. Given the understandable reluctance of respondents in many societies to answer pollsters' questions about their illicit drug use, the survey's findings are probably too conservative. Even so, 4% of humanity is 162 million people - a number equivalent to the entire population of the UK, Germany and Sweden. In a style akin to what's what in the cannabis world we hear that it is relatively inexpensive in Kazakhstan, where "as much as 400,000 hectares of cannabis grow wild". "Swaziland is known for producing high-quality cannabis," according to the report, while, "Malawi is ... world renowned for the quality of its cannabis."
With the UNODC, providing evidence that an inexpensive and harmless recreational drug continues to be consumed by at least one in 25 people on the planet, and that it is supplied by a vast army of small growers with economic activity of an enormous scale, one would think that even the most gung-ho politician would realise that cannabis prohibition is a failed policy. In a world challenged by mass poverty, global warming, nuclear proliferation not to mention terrorism, what possible sense does it make to expend scarce government resources on enforcing the unenforceable?
Sebastian Saville
Executive director, Release