What can a German do but a Briton cannot? What can a New Yorker, a Chicagoan and a San Franciscan do, but a Londoner cannot? What can Canadians, Dutch, Portuguese, Chileans, Uruguayans, Maltese all do? The answer is they can legally smoke cannabis. In California there are now courses for cannabis sommeliers. In Britain they would be thrown in jail.
Half a century ago, Britons prided themselves on being in the vanguard of social progress. In such matters as health care, sexuality, abortion, crime and punishment, they considered their country ahead of the times. Now it limps nervously in the rear.
I don’t use illegal drugs, neither am I addicted to nicotine or alcohol or fatty foods. Having sat on two drugs-related committees, I accept that narcotic substances can, in varying degrees, cause harm to their users and, through them, to others. If after half a century of a “war” on drugs, banning had solved or even reduced this harm, I could see the argument for banning. It has not.
Roughly a third of adults in England and Wales aged under 60 have tried cannabis. Almost 8% use it occasionally and 2% regularly. Far fewer use hard drugs. But nearly one in five residents of English and Welsh prisons are estimated to have been jailed for a drug-related offence. Half of all homicides are drugs-related. In many prisons, more than half the inmates use drugs regularly. The authorities turn a blind eye for the sake of peace and quiet.
Successive home secretaries have a terror of even discussing the issue. Tony Blair delegated drugs – as so much of his policy – to the Daily Mail and the Sun. While other countries researched, experimented and piloted innovation, Britain simply shut down debate. When, in 2009, the government’s chief drugs adviser, Prof David Nutt, evaluated the relative harm of different narcotics, he was sacked.
It is a wonder how this can go on. I live in London and I, like most people, can have weed delivered, just as you would a pizza flavours and all.
Most people who’ve been on the internet long enough are aware of the CIA flooding the US with crack in the 80s. They thing most people don’t realise is that the CIA have also run the global heroin game since the 1940s too. The crack in the 80s job was neither the first nor the largest time they did it. For anyone interested, Google operation gladio.
Heroin was grown in Myanmar, moved out through Thailand, shipped to France where it either ended up with the mob in the US or flooded into eroupe all under the protection of the CIA. Myanmar was the largest supplier of heroin in the world, right up until Afghanistan took the title in the 2010s.
I know right?
It make no sense at all why the UK wouldn’t legalise weed. Well, that is, it makes no sense at all, right up until the second you stop presuming any kind of good faith. The second you stop, then, as if by magic, everything clicks into place.
Adding, the UK is the world’s largest legal weed exporter. And many politicians are connected with that industry. Directly or via funding through other financial industry means.
The illegality in the UK makes setting up legal grow farms more complex and outside of smaller investors / business startups. So the laws help to keep competition out of the legal export market.