You may have missed it, but the UK government has reclassified cannabis as a class B drug It's being reported as the Home Secretary going against the professional advisory panel to change the law, but it's a bit more subtle than that.
Essentially all the panel looks at is how harmful the drug is. Cannabis, and even skunk, while evil drugs, aren't particularly harmful in the way that other drugs in the class B range are. I hate cannabis with a passion because of the waste it makes of young people but I still can't really argue with the logic, in purely medical terms cannabis isn't as dangerous as other class B's like amphetamines. So the logic of changing cannabis to a Class B drug isn't to do with danger but to do with public perception and policing.
The current situation with cannabis and the law seems to be something like this; unless you're caught selling it, the police couldn't care. That's probably overstating the mark a bit, but it's not entirely untrue. Despite that it's two years maximum sentence for the possession of a class B I've yet to meet anyone who has had anything more than a slap on the wrists for possessing cannabis. And so if you increase the class it's in, you'll increase the policing of it and also thereby increasing the severity of how the public see it.
Which is all rather silly when you think about it. Because it means that to get the police to treat cannabis as a class C drug you have to label cannabis as a class B drug. And with that logic in effect you're then going to have to increase class B drugs to class A drugs to get them treated as class B drugs. And then what do you do with Heroin? Label it as A plus? And if you start applying this logic to other crimes, then all of a sudden you're liable for a life sentence for manslaughter, on the principle that you won't get a life-sentence. All this does is de-value the law and make a mockery of justice. Surely a better way to deal with the increase in serious cannabis use would to be enforce the existing laws?
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