JackClark

You're kind of helping my cause. Correct there is a black market for Alcohol and Tobacco, but we also raise a whole heap of cash from taxation of real goods and if you want a real pack of **** or you want to get off your face on booze you don't have to buy from the bloke on the corner who might sell you camel **** or antifreeze.

Galifrey

iTrader: (3)

Fact: Prohibition never works it just puts the returns in the hands of criminals.

Fact: It costs around £8bn a year to fight a market worth about £6bn a year

Fact: Not a single person has ever died because of Cannabis

Fact: We lose about 9000 people per annum due to alcohol (including my wife)

Fact: If we end the war on drugs we would save enough to fund the NHS shortfall completely for the foreseeable future.

Fact: It is pretty much the only medicine you can grow at home and cure/prevent a number of illnesses saving the NHS millions in prescriptions for other addictive and dangerous drugs

Like everything it has it's downside, cannabis use in teenagers can affect mental development. Cannabis use affects motivation and is a risk to road users. Smoking is bad full stop but you can vapourise or use a cannabis extract in an electronic cigarette (Vape).

I would rather they legalised and taxed it or licence people to grow at home.

Cannabis makes people mellow and chilled as opposed to alcohol which makes people larey and aggressive. Town centres would be a much nicer place on a Friday or Saturday night if people were stoned rather than p***ed.

The real anti legalisation propaganda on Cannabis comes from the place we entrust to do our research and who stand to lose billions if Cannabis is legalised, big pharmaceutical companies. They provide the govt reports on the affects and they cannot patent Cannabis so have the most to lose, you do the maths, (same as E-cigs incidentally where they stand to lose millions on NRT if Ecig use becomes widespread not to mention the extra cost of pensions from millions of ex-smokers living a few years longer).

There is only 1 party that properly supports legalisation right now, spookily called the Green party. Coincidence? I think not

Galifrey

iTrader: (3)

Nicotine is way less addictive once you get away from the "additives" Tobacco companies put in their products, and nicotine itself has medicinal uses such as Parkinsons and improvement to cognitive function. Like any drug, overdose is deadly, and Nicotine itself in low doses is no more dangerous than caffeine. The real danger in Nicotine is it's current delivery form through burning plant matter laced with chemicals and breathing it in.

Alcohol however, well that killed my wife so I agree 100%.

Galifrey

iTrader: (3)

Many strains have been grown to be higher in THC whilst cutting the content of the good CBD.

CBD acts as a positive medicine and that has dropped to an all time low in street cannabis in favour of more of a high. Properly grown cannabis has more cbd and less THC so when consumed in any way other than smoking it gives very good positive effects.

CBD is an anti psychotic, so if it was properly grown, sold and taxed we would eliminate much of the psychosis people get from street cannabis.

http://www.truthonpot.com/2014/09/24...en-cbd-vs-thc/

JackClark

Thank you, I'm voting Green. Tories are winning here anyhow.

JackClark

Thanks for posting Galifrey, I agree.

Funkii Munkii

Do you actively smoke weed Jack ?

I know this question has been asked before on SN and I have stated on this very subject I'm sure there are plenty on here who enjoy a joint but wouldn't want to advertise the fact for fear of losing any cred they feel they may have built up over the years.

JackClark

it would be wrong to say activly, but yes I do.

Funkii Munkii

Fair play to you for being honest.

I also enjoy the odd toot and if truth be known would prefer a joint over a drink nowadays.

f1_fan

iTrader: (9)

I don't do drugs these days, but used to be into the Es back in the day.... best nights out I have ever had by a massive margin!

Turbohot

I've never done drugs.

Once I drank Bhaang in almond milk shake as a child, in one of our annual festivals in India i.e. God Shiva's happy birthday. It's a ritualistic thing to do, kids abstain, but we drank by mistake. Anyway, my sister and I just laughed and laughed and laughed for no reason after consuming it.

My experience of cannabis was when I was passed on a spliff on share in some after-clubbing parties. I found it useless and unnecessary. Then, about a couple of years ago, I was with someone who sparked a spliff. We got talking about its pain relieving properties. I have this chronically broken toe, which experiences terrible throbbing pain sometimes. As I was having that 'pain' spell at the time, I took a couple of tokes of that person's spliff. Jesus! The impact was that all the walls of the room started to go far from me, and I felt as if I was suspending mid air! I had to go to bed instantly, and for the first time after months of bad sleep due to my painful toe, I had the most peaceful and intact sleep! I felt no pain whatsoever all night, and even all of the next day.

I certainly believe in cannabis' pain relieving properties. I don't ever want to smoke it again, because tbh my toe pain is ad hoc, and I don't like to become dependant on anything.

Once I was also duped into taking magic mushrooms in my coffee. I was watching Take That 'Relight my Fire' song on TV, then. After consuming some of my coffee, I started to see fire everywhere! On the sofa, on my bum, on the hills across my windows........everywhere! It was my party, and the naughty invitee who made my coffee was laughing his t1ts off with his mates, at my hallucinations! Bad sh2t. Never ever I'll let anyone do that to me, again!

JackClark

Everything in moderation, well almost everything. Most out there thing I've tried was DMT, just the once thanks.

Turbohot

Well, you have Apple as a part of your replacement therapy strategy.

We have a cannabis campaigner bloke from around here. He's quite famous. I'll find his name in a sec.......

Funkii Munkii

Spot on

I once saw a friend on MDMA (similar to DMT or so I believe) at Glasto, the come down was not a pretty sight and enough to stop me from ever wanting to try it...

Turbohot

.......His name is Jeff Ditchfield.

I think he lives between N. Wales and some other country now. A lot of old people with painful joints, spinal injuries and MS patients in pain just love him!


http://www.amazon.com/Jeff-Ditchfield/e/B005OIBJTY

JackClark

MDMA is Ecstasy. DMT is a very different experience, over in 10 minutes for me, totally left the room to a pretty scary place in my mind, then back again. Not recommended.

JackClark

Thanks for that.

Turbohot

Pleasure.

This was the case that made him famous:

http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/loca...-sense-2934661

He may have opened a that café in Rhyl and resided there for a bit, but he's not from Rhyl itself. He's no chav but a very intelligent and an educated man. His cannabis oil and other cannabis products are very popular among pain suffering people. Apparently at his 2004 court case, a lot of old people in their wheel chairs came out to support him; on the day of the verdict. It was a big day for all of them. He's no money grabber, he gives away his products to the needy, and vows to supply them to such as long as he lives, no matter what. I've never met him, but I hear that he's very approachable, and continues with his research on the effects of cannabis.

Funkii Munkii

My father had Chronic MS where his lower limbs would just lock solid, he was in the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery trialling drugs for the disease 20 years ago with little effect, and one massive effect which put him in a coma for three days, one of the nurses there told me her mother was a cancer patient and she used cannabis, so when he was next out of hospital, I bought some resin and the results were amazing his legs were as floppy as anything, so I have seen with my own eyes the benefits.

Sadly his body rejected it three weeks later as his immune system had a habit of sussing out the drugs he was on and would allow them to work briefly before rendering them useless, including a variety of combinations the NHNN had trialled, sadly at the end the same could be said for the Morphine.

It still amazes me that 20 years later people in the medical profession know the benefits of Cannabis but still the UK decide against using it in any form.

cookstar

iTrader: (6)

This.

JackClark

Look at the vote here, politicians are as likely to say they support cannabis as they are to admit there's no god.

Sorry to hear it didn't work for your Father for long, I have a friend who has MS and she's used it occasionally with varying success, she used to be staunchly anti drugs which is a bit of a riddle when she was often rattling from pills.

Turbohot

From Professor David Nutt:

Popular intoxicants – how do alcohol and cannabis compare?

September 29, 2011

I am often asked the question “if cannabis was as freely available as alcohol how many would use it and would its harms increase?. Of course the answer is yes to both. However as about half of young people use cannabis, the increase from removing criminal sanctions would be relatively modest unless it was actively marketed as is alcohol. Certainly the Dutch coffee shop model of regulated but not legalized cannabis access appears not to have increased use since young people in the Netherlands have some of the lowest rates of cannabis use in Europe.

Perhaps the more interesting question is in this circumstance would be what would the net effect on population harms be? Would liberalising access to cannabis reduce alcohol use to an extent that might reduce the sum total of harms? This issue is touched on in my new paper in the Journal of Psychopharmacology [Weissenborn and Nutt 2011, Popular intoxicants: what lessons can be learned from the last 40 years of alcohol and cannabis regulation? (PMID:21926420)]. The key points of this paper are briefly outlined below.
A good measure of harm is the costs to the NHS. Hospital admissions for cannabis number less than 1000 per year whereas alcohol now accounts for 1000x as many – over a million last year of which 13,000 were aged under 18yrs. The role of cannabis in causation of schizophrenia is still controversial – the ACMD in their 3rd cannabis review estimated that to stop one case of schizophrenia one would have to stop 5000 young men or 7000 young women from ever smoking cannabis. Some studies are now suggesting cannabis may help patients with schizophrenia. In contrast, that alcohol causes liver disease is as incontrovertable as is its contribution to the massively accelerating death rates from liver disease in the UK. The frightening contribution that alcohol use makes to domestic violence, child abuse and road traffic accidents were some of the reasons why alcohol scored as the most harmful drug to UK society today in the ISCD scale of drug harms, published in the Lancet last year.

Until the last government induced them to think otherwise by making cannabis a target, the police have always taken the view that cannabis users were much less prone to violence than those intoxicated with alcohol. Indeed the police were strong supporters of the ACMD recommendation to downgrade cannabis to Class C in 2004. It seems likely that the recent rise in alcohol intake in the UK may have been in part due to the pressure of anti-cannabis policing leading to young people switching their preferred intoxicant to alcohol.
Estimating the true relative harms of alcohol and cannabis is not easy as there are no societies today where the two drugs are equally available. However where neither are legal – as in some Islamic states – alcohol appears to cause more dependence than cannabis, even in Morocco a traditional cannabis growing country.

Taken together we estimate that alcohol is at least twice as harmful to users than cannabis and 5 times more harmful to society. The obvious conclusion is that the current legislation criminalising cannabis users is illogical as well as inhumane and may be causing much more harm than it does good. Time for a rational intervention Mr Cameron?

In 2009 he found that:

"Alcohol ranks as the fifth most harmful drug after heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and methadone. Tobacco is ranked ninth," he wrote in the paper from the centre for crime and justice studies at King's College, London, published yesterday.

"Cannabis, LSD and ecstasy, while harmful, are ranked lower at 11, 14 and 18 respectively”

Nutt the myth buster was sacked by Jacqui Smith in 2009 from his voluntary post as a drug adviser to the government of that time. He can be followed at drugscience website.


Sources:

https://profdavidnutt.wordpress.com/
http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early...69881111414751
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...id-nutt-sacked
drugscience.org.uk