The northlondonhippy

Archive for January 20th, 2008

A few days ago, I learned of a pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion that’s to be held on the sub­ject of the “pos­si­ble” reclas­si­fi­ca­tion of cannabis. It takes place in Lon­don on the 5th of February.

This gov­ern­ment has appar­ently decided the out­come of this con­sul­ta­tion and Jacqui Smith has already leaked their deci­sion to put cannabis back into Class B from its cur­rent sta­tus of Class C.

It widely known that the gov­ern­ment has cho­sen this path for one sim­ple rea­son, to appear “tough on drugs.” They iden­ti­fied this issue as one which Tony Blair and David Blun­kett left them vul­ner­a­ble to crit­i­cism that could be eas­ily changed with­out much pub­lic outcry.

They’re cor­rect on that score. How many dope smok­ers do you know that would attend a government-held, pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on cannabis, and con­fess to reg­u­larly break­ing a law, which is about to become a lot harder on peo­ple who enjoy weed?

Let’s not bull­shit around this…a change in clas­si­fi­ca­tion from C to B means only one thing and that is to fur­ther crim­i­nalise peo­ple who smoke a bit of dope. The penal­ties for pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of cannabis are exactly the same under class B and C — exactly the same! The dif­fer­ence is on the oth­er­wise law abid­ing cit­i­zen, who par­takes of this plant — the penal­ties for sim­ple pos­ses­sion are sig­nif­i­cantly harsher.

Why would the gov­ern­ment wish to crim­i­nalise so many peo­ple? Could it have to do with build­ing new pris­ons and need­ing peo­ple to fill those places? Dope­heads aren’t dan­ger­ous or vio­lent, you would have a prison pop­u­la­tion that was cheap and easy to manage!

Think that’s a bit “con­spir­acy the­ory” even for me? Ok, have you got a bet­ter explanation?

Just about every think tank, pol­icy group and gen­uine expert feels it should be left class C, decrim­i­nalised or legalised com­pletely. Many cops believe this too, and so do a fair few MPs and min­is­ters, but many are afraid to voice their opin­ions for fear of the wrath of the Mail/Express/Telegraph set.

I con­sid­ered attend­ing that con­sul­ta­tion on the 5th of Feb. I thought long and hard about going, stat­ing my real name and read­ing a selec­tion of entries I’ve writ­ten on this sub­ject so near and dear to my heart. And then I pussied out.

Look, either we all go, or none of us go! That’s right, all 6 mil­lion (esti­mated) reg­u­lar cannabis smok­ers have to reg­is­ter to attend. Every last one of us. I’ll go, if you’ll all go. They can’t put us all in jail, can they? If they try, we can just seek asy­lum in the Netherlands!

Here are a few inter­est­ing and related links:

This is from the can­nazine and talks about the 5th Feb con­sul­ta­tion and how they are ignor­ing the experts in the deci­sion to regrade
Click Me.

This one is from the Inde­pen­dent, it’s the same story, only with some ques­tion­able men­tal health details thrown in to con­fuse the issue
Click Me.

This is from the Times and talks about how the gov­ern­ment should base its poli­cies on sci­ence, not emo­tion. It sites the cannabis “debate” as an exam­ple
Click Me.

And here again is my cannabis truth series, which is worth read­ing if you want to know the real story and not the twisted shit they want you to believe!
Click Me.