Criminals or victims? (Should cannabis be legalised?)

Member Name: merlina

Product:	Should cannabis be legalised?
Date:	16/08/00 (32 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none at all to the present system

Disadvantages: none to decriminalisation

So, Queen Victoria was a criminal. And Bill Clinton (regardless of whether he inhaled). Not to mention just about everyone I know, have worked with etc etc. They've all smoked cannabis at some time or other which is, as the law stands, a criminal offence. Plus, if they passed a spliff to a mate, that's a serious criminal offence, in the eyes of the law more serious than mugging or burglary, with a mandatory jail sentence. Gets sillier doesn't it? So - who was hurt by these heinous crimes? Absolutely no-one that's who. The argument about whether they were hurting themselves or not is spurious - no-one has yet suggested jail sentences for eating a big fry-up or taking part in dangerous sports. Quite apart from the civil liberties issues and the stupidity of the law, as far as I'm concerned one of the key arguments for legalisation is this: As the situation stands, supplying cannabis is big business. Big drugs business. Most of it doesn't come from someone who grows a couple of plants in his back yard. It comes via organised crime. Now organised crime is not about selling an eighth to a pal. It's about people who murder, maim and blackmail to carry out their business. And if you buy drugs right now you have no way of knowing whether the profit from that isn't, in some way, going to finance that. The unpalatable answer is that your money, somewhere up the supply chain, is almost certainly going that way. Now I'm not a big fan of governments, but I would rather they were taking a cut of the profit of dope, or even that big business was, than major-league criminals. The fact is that dope smoking isn't going to go away. The only issue is how we make the whole issue more sensible.

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