Cannabis classification to be tightened | Reuters
LONDON, UK – Cannabis will be raised to a class B drug with a maximum five year jail term for users, the government said on Wednesday, rejecting a recommendation from its own drugs advisers to leave the classification unchanged.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the decision had been made because of concern, particularly amongst the public, about the “alarming” use of skunk, a stronger strain of the narcotic which now dominates the market.
Throwing people in jail for years on end is working wonders for the bottom line of privatized prison systems. And by putting prisoners to work the UK and the USA can better compete with China for prison-made goods. This is solid good news for investors. We need to jail more people and keep them there longer.
UPDATE: Oddly, this flies in the face of last year’s research findings.
#31 – The actual article implies otherwise.
ah, I meant ‘a clothing optional’ state….
If they had this law where I live, I’d be in big trouble.
By my calculations, if you take 365 days in a year times approximately two joints per day, that equals approximately 730 joints per year on average – times 40 years equals around 29,200 joints – times five years per joint is… holy shit!
146,000 years in jail for smoking grass? Actually, that sounds more like the States than England, doesn’t it?
They better do like the Americans and start building prisions really fast. Skunk weed’s ok but most of it’s domestically cultivated in small quantities, I guess if they can’t get rid of the source they’ll try to discourage consumption. Reasonable up to here, however 5 years for smoking dope is just stupid. A 2000 pound fine, that’d do the trick. They’ll never stop that most popular of human activities – gettin’ hammered -. But they’d get the stoners paranoid enough to get them to be more discreet and politically the problem is solved. Filling prisons is not always a good political move.
From the article:
“Cannabis was downgraded to Class C — which includes substances such as anabolic steroids — on the ACMD’s advice in January 2004.
“That meant possession of the drug was treated largely as a non-arrestable offence.
“Under the tighter class B rules, which put cannabis on a par with amphetamines and barbiturates, users face up to five years’ jail and suppliers a maximum of 14 years.”
Which means the new law is, indeed, tougher – although not anywhere near as strict as a 5 year mandatory as the headline here would have you believe.
As to cannibis causing less societal harm than tobbaco – while technically true, drug *dealing* does, in fact, cause a lot of collateral damage, much more than tobbaco does. So its somewhat misleading to say that the “marijuana industry” is less harmful than the “tobbaco industry”. (Even though this is only a technical difference – the former is dangerous largely due to its illegal nature.)
#35 – ah, I meant ‘a clothing optional’ state….
I have been in Florida and I oppose this law!
By association, this is how they maintain the ban of growing the hemp plant. If another rival of cotton were to be found, that too would probably be declared harmful. Yet tobacco gets a free ride, because of the huge existing industry involved. Simply, few startups get to first base if it threatens already existing megabuck entities. And if that takes a government ban of some kind, so be it.