The northlondonhippy

The most basic prin­ci­ple of busi­ness is that demand influ­ences sup­ply. If peo­ple want some­thing, what­ever it is, then some­one will be there to pro­vide it. Demand cre­ates the mar­ket econ­omy and is the basis of capitalism.

If you are against the legal­i­sa­tion of cannabis, then you are against the very basic foun­da­tion of cap­i­tal­ism. I’ve said this before. There is a demand for cannabis, which means by virtue of the nature of cap­i­tal­ism there is a mar­ket sup­ply­ing said demand.

The legal sta­tus of cannabis forces this mar­ket to be under­ground, untaxed and unreg­u­lated. I believe the cor­rect tech­ni­cal term for this is a black market.

This black mar­ket in cannabis is respon­si­ble for many of the ills asso­ci­ated with its sale and dis­tri­b­u­tion. From the shitty soap­bar hash that was pop­u­lar in the UK years ago, to the recent “grit weed” plague last year, can all be attrib­uted to the unfor­tu­nate and unjus­ti­fied laws which con­trol cannabis.

Soap­bar, for those of you who don’t know, is a hor­ri­ble con­coc­tion made up of a mix of adul­ter­ants, such as shoe pol­ish, wax, plas­tic and camel dung, with a tiny bit of cannabis. From what I’ve read, you were lucky if what you got was even 3% THC, the active ingre­di­ent in marijuana.

Last year, the UK was inun­dated with a sup­ply of adul­ter­ated herbal cannabis that became known as “grit weed”.

“Grit weed”, involved the ille­gal cannabis grow­ers impreg­nat­ing the buds of the plant with tiny, glass beads. This was done to make the buds appear more resinous and to bulk up the weight and increase prof­its. When you smoked grit weed, as many of us did, you noticed a funny, gritty feel­ing in your mouths. Users were advised to dis­pose of this tainted weed, rather than fur­ther risk their health.

If the sup­ply of cannabis were reg­u­lated and con­trolled, then inci­dents such as those described above, would be a thing of the past. Fur­ther­more, there would be no more street deal­ing and peo­ple under the age of 18 (or 21) would have a much harder time get­ting their hands on some.

At the moment, it is eas­ier for some­one under the age of 18 to score a bit of weed, then it is for them to secure a litre of vodka. Ask any 14 year old to find you some draw and it won’t take them long, but ask them to pur­chase you some alco­hol and they will be far less suc­cess­ful. Booze isn’t sold from your mate’s cousin’s friend’s bed­room, but cur­rently cannabis is.

Again, don’t take my word for it. Here’s a com­ment piece from the Inde­pen­dent news­pa­per, which I will pro­vide in full, as well as a link back to the orig­i­nal. If the Inde­pen­dent objects to this, please con­tact me and I will remove the full text, but main­tain the link.
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http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_m_z/deborah_orr/article2788635.ece

Deb­o­rah Orr: An unreg­u­lated, dan­ger­ous mar­ket — that’s the main prob­lem with drugs

Pub­lished: 21 July 2007

“That didn’t take long, did it? It’s now a rit­ual of pub­lic life: a new influx of min­is­ters means a new inves­ti­ga­tion into what ille­gal drugs, if any, they may have tried. The answer is that a lot of them have tried and hated cannabis, includ­ing Jacqui Smith, the Home Sec­re­tary. Gor­don Brown may have pro­vided the ideal oppor­tu­nity to place such a sur­vey on the imme­di­ate agenda, what with his half-baked per­ora­tions about the re-reclassifying of cannabis. But it would all have hap­pened any­way, for some rea­son, at some point, because it always does.

Pub­lic debate on drugs had taken an odd turn this week any­way, with the awful mur­der of Lucy Bra­ham by William Jaggs being touted as proof that dan­ger­ous drugs had now reached the pri­vate school, Har­row, and there­fore the high­est ech­e­lons of soci­ety. The poor, sad spec­tre of Olivia Chan­non, who died of an over­dose at Oxford in the early 1980s, was once again revived as a nec­es­sary counter-argument.

I’m not sure quite who believed the for­mer to be any­thing other than non­sense any­way, since the his­tory of drugs in Britain over the past 30 years has unequiv­o­cally been one of democ­ra­ti­sa­tion. As stu­dent acquain­tances from the Oxford days of Jacqui Smith told The Times this week: “Posh peo­ple had proper drugs and voted SDP. Labour and Tories drank lager and had the odd spliff … [Drugs] was the ter­ri­tory of the posher, more fey places like Mag­dalen and New College.”

I can vouch for this myself. At a Scots uni­ver­sity in the early 1980s I took lots of drugs. But such sub­stances as cocaine or heroin were entirely unheard of, and right out of our finan­cial league any­way. Our favourite was mush­rooms, which grew free in the fields and could be dried for year-round use. We also took the speed that was man­u­fac­tured by a drop-out medic, who was even­tu­ally impris­oned for his pains, and acid was a cou­ple of quid for a 12-hour special-occasion trip. We also grew our own grass, while hash was a pre­cious com­mod­ity, taken in the form of hot knives, which were much less waste­ful than joints. At times of more des­per­ate poverty we could be wit­nessed dry­ing banana skins under the grill (never worked) or munch­ing extremely copi­ous amounts of nut­meg (not worth the effort).

The main prob­lem with drugs now is that, if one dis­counts their total ille­gal­ity, they oper­ate in the most free, the most vio­lent and the most glob­alised mar­ket there is. Dam­age lim­i­ta­tion has to start there, not with the rel­a­tively inno­cent, annoy­ingly stub­born, arro­gantly youth­ful end user.

There are many rea­sons why the focus on clas­si­fi­ca­tion of cannabis is of lit­tle rel­e­vance to any­thing except the response of the local crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem to its use, just as there are many rea­sons why the local crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem can only ever be use­ful in deal­ing with a nar­row aspect of the cul­ture of drugs in our society.

In the case of cannabis, peo­ple buy it on the black, free mar­ket with­out know­ing exactly what they are get­ting. Some cannabis is mild, because it con­tains lit­tle of the main ingre­di­ent, tetrahyr­do­cannabi­nol, and some of it is haz­ardously pow­er­ful, because it con­tains much more of it.

This is a fact of life because it is all ille­gal and all unreg­u­lated, and no amount of reclas­si­fi­ca­tion will get over this dif­fi­culty. For many, this is a no-brainer argu­ment for legal­i­sa­tion.”
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I’m not the only sane, ratio­nal, hon­est per­son, shar­ing the truth about cannabis and the drugs mar­ket. There are oth­ers out there who want to keep you all well informed. You just need to look for the truth, amongst all the men­dac­ity and lies.

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