Chill The UK Out! (Should cannabis be legalised?)

Name: sparksteroid

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Product:	Should cannabis be legalised?
Date:	26.01.08 (216 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: relaxing, therapeutic, no short term dangers

Disadvantages: short term memory loss, paranoia

Cannabis is a completely natural drug which grows naturally in various parts of the world, in some parts it is rife. Tobacco is also a naturally growing plant. So how can governments distinguish the dangers between each one? But then again I could go on to state that the coca plant grows naturally, though the drug refined from it holds a very different story.

A more logical way of thinking about the issue is to assess the effects of legal drugs that are in consumption, such as caffeine, nicotine and of course alcohol. Currently the UK government spend millions of pounds every year due to damages caused by alcohol consumption. Violence, street crime, accidents, drinking and driving and hospitalizations are caused every week by the use of alcohol. How much does cannabis consumption cost the UK government each year? If it was legal then it would probably be a very small amount made up by regular respiratory disease sufferers, who would have probably just smoked tobacco anyway if they couldn't get hold of cannabis. It seems totally illogical that the government can allow people to consume a potentially lethal (pure it would kill you!) drug to the point where they are not in control and haven't got a clue what they're doing. Yet, they disallow people to use a drug which will calm them down, chill them out and make them want to keep away from trouble, aswell as reduce the amount of people hospitalized by alcohol related incidents.

Cannabis also has many well known therapeutic uses and can be used to treat all sorts of medical disorders particularly athritis, yet doctors are not allowed to prescribe it. They are, however, allowed to precribe antidepressants which can be even more lethal than alcohol and are basically a class a drug.

It seems to me that the original banning of the substance was more due to both tobacco companies worried about sacrificing a substantial amount of income to the drug and the governments relation of how the drug works and is used compared to the use of much harder drugs such as crack cocaine, which is taken in a similar way. Short term memory loss and paranoia are well known effects of the drug but seem to disappear after the drug wears off. It's true that hydroponics and the way the drug is now being grown causes a significant increase in strength more likely to cause permanent mental impairment, but if the drug was legalized the process of cultivating it could be controlled and the purity could be tested.

The UK government seems to have got things backwards and if the process was reversed so that alcohol was illegal and cannabis legal, the streets of the UK would probably become safer, calmer and much more enjoyable. Not that I have anything against anyone drinking of course, I'm just expressing my thoughts.

Summary: safest and most popular recreational drug ever