Feeding The Fish

I’ve talked about Andrew Keen before. Last night he popped up on the Colbert Report.

Still not convinced.

So Gordon Brown wants to raise Cannabis from a Class C drug to a Class B drug, making it as bad as it used to be until it was down-classified three years ago.

We then find out that many government ministers and MPs did some pot in their youth. This came as a surprise to many people, either because they believed that our leaders were outstandingly moral characters who do not and have never done anything illegal ever (these people are an increasingly rare breed and a national reserve should be created to help preserve their innocence) or perhaps more commonly, people just assumed politicians were far too boring to have ever touched drugs.

Naturally this sparked the tiniest bit of outrage at the hypocrisy it implies. “But not so!” we hear them cry, “Whilst we were wrong in our misspent youth, the cannabis back then was far weaker and so this reclassification is entirely valid and unrelated to our personal experiences”.

A clear and valid point that only has the slight downside of being completely and utterly wrong.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which examined the issue 18 months ago, will be asked to do so again. It concluded in its report in December 2005 that the strength of cannabis resin (hash) had changed little over 30 years and was about 5 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Skunk, it found was 10 to 15 per cent THC - two to three times as strong, not 25 times.

Professor Leslie Iversen, a pharmacologist at Oxford University, said the widespread belief that skunk was 20 to 30 times as powerful was “simply not true”.

The biggest change over recent decades has been in the strength of indoor-cultivated herbal cannabis, but even this has only doubled to 12 to 14 per cent THC. Although exceptionally strong skunk can be found on the market in Britain, it always has been available, according to reports from the UN Drug Control Programme.

So what is the actual danger from Cannabis? Ben Goldacre at Bad Science had a look:

It was also interesting to see how the risk was numerically reported. The most dramatic figure is always the “relative risk increase”, or rather: “cannabis doubles the risk of psychosis”, “cannabis increases the risk by 40%”. Because schizophrenia is comparatively rare, translated this into real numbers this works out - if the figures in the paper are correct, and causality is accepted - that about 800 yearly cases of schizophrenia are attributable to cannabis. This is not belittling the risk, merely expressing it clearly.

So we have at 800 cases. Is this a more or less pressing concern that the approximately 112,000 deaths each year as a result of smoking? How can we have some that lethal being sold to sixteen year olds and yet cannabis is banned when arguably it’s far less dangerous?

Legalise cannabis or ban tobacco; I don’t really care which, let’s just have some consistency. At the moment we’re not banning things because they’re dangerous but because we’ve decided that there are certain socially acceptable ways to have some fun with the risk of death (as well as creating a nice little tax revenue along the way) and those are the ones we’re sticking to them, facts be damned.