The northlondonhippy

Archive for October 2nd, 2008

It’s about bloody time!

The Global Cannabis Com­mis­sion report is being pre­sented at the House of Lords today. It was under­taken by the Beck­ley foun­da­tion, a UN-accredited non-governmental organ­i­sa­tion in advance of the United Nations strate­gic drug pol­icy review expected next year.

The report makes a rather sur­pris­ing recommendation…surprising because it is so sen­si­ble! They sug­gest that a “reg­u­lated mar­ket” should replace the cur­rent (silly and unen­force­able) inter­na­tional pro­hi­bi­tion of my favourite plant. The report pro­poses that we con­sider replac­ing pro­hi­bi­tion with a sys­tem of labelling, tax­a­tion and min­i­mal age requirements.

This is a seis­mic shift in atti­tude for the United Nations, which as an organ­i­sa­tion, sits at the cen­tre of cannabis pro­hi­bi­tion, but I can’t say for cer­tain that they will take this advice on board. After all, sim­i­lar rec­om­men­da­tions have been made here in the UK and have been promptly ignored by our igno­rant politi­cians. Espe­cially that incom­pe­tent ues­less twit, Gor­don Brown. I really thought he would be gone by now, but the Labour Party is seri­ously lack­ing com­mon sense and balls and they pussed out at their party con­fer­ence. Wimps!

This report puts the issue in con­text, going on to say “…in terms of rel­a­tive harms it (cannabis) is con­sid­er­ably less harm­ful than alco­hol or tobacco. His­tor­i­cally, there have only been two deaths world­wide attrib­uted to cannabis, whereas alco­hol and tobacco together are respon­si­ble for an esti­mated 150,000 deaths per annum in the UK alone.”

I’d like to know how 2 peo­ple died from weed. Did they choke on on it? Oh and the word “his­tor­i­cally” in that con­text means since records began, which is a seri­ously long-old time!

Nat­u­rally this report is being warmly wel­comed by cannabis cam­paign­ers world-wide, myself included.

My dope smok­ing recently hasn’t been recre­ational, as much as it has been med­i­c­i­nal, thanks to my recent health prob­lems. Spliff helped when my back was seized up like a clenched fist and it con­tin­ues to calm the nau­sea I am feel­ing from my chronic thy­roidi­tis, which is another name for Hashimoto’s disease.

I don’t know what I would do with­out weed and I know that is the same for lit­er­ally mil­lions of peo­ple around the world, who are unnec­es­sar­ily crim­i­nalised for our love of dope. I am not a crim­i­nal and nei­ther are they! It’s about time the law caught up to this unde­ni­able truth.

If you would like to read the Guardian’s take on this new report, all you need to do is CLICK HERE.

And if you would like to find out more about weed, please fol­low this link to the hippy’s cannabis truth series.