"Dick" by name, dick by nature...

From The Evening Standard:

Britain's most senior police officer has described the legalisation of cannabis in Canada and parts of the US as "interesting experiments" that should be watched... She said the debate around the subject was "complex"...

No it's not, it's perfectly simple.

... and believed if the UK was to legalise drugs immediately, it could lead to a variety of health problems.

Nonsense. We know from places where they legalised it that usage does not change massively (up or down), so there is little or no net effect. I, and I assume most people, don't like the stuff and wouldn't be interested even if it were legal.

However, speaking to radio show host Eddie Nestor on Monday, Dame Cressida said: "I think it is worth looking at what is happening in Canada and parts of the United States, albeit we have to recognise culturally that is very different."

Very little is 'happening', that is the beauty of it. As to 'culturally very different', she really is scraping the barrel. A sane person would consider Canada, the USA, Portugal, Netherlands as 'culturally very similar' to the UK.

"My concern is, I’m not a health professional, but you see what is happening with skunk and some of the damage done to people with mental health issues, is absolutely huge."

No you aren't, and no it isn't.

"The organised crime groups, in my view, would come in and cause problems in different markets and start selling different things to people. Let's see though what happens."

Wait, what? "The organised crime gangs would come in"??? They're already in! If you make something illegal, you end up with criminal gangs (Prohibition in the USA). If you legalise something (repeal Prohibition), the opposite happens.

And nobody said we should make the really strong varieties legal, that's no argument against legalising (and of course regulating and taxing) the normal strength stuff. You might as well say that because it's (quite rightly) illegal to drive a car that's not roadworthy, that you should simply ban all cars.

Another good reason to legalise cannabis

From the BBC:

Teenagers are less likely to use cannabis in places where the drug has been legalised, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Montana State University looked at health surveys of US high school pupils between 1993 and 2017. While overall use among US youth went up, the likelihood of teen use declined by nearly 10% in states where recreational use was legalised.

For sure, we can take all these stats with a pinch of snuff. If it's illegal, are people likely to deny smoking cannabis or more likely to exaggerate (bravado and general trolling)? How do we adjust to get the true figure? Is it even relevant to anything?

Overall, the trend appears to be slightly less usage (which should keep the bansturbators happy) and lower crime (acquisitive crime and turf wars) which is the important bit, so win-win.

Cannabis-related twattishness

The Evening Standard has launched a laudable campaign to get cannabis legalised in the UK, hooray, nonetheless, the article highlights some cases of extreme twattishness:

Nova Cannabis, just down the road from Hunny Pot, was the third brick and mortar [cannabis] store to open in Toronto, and I pitched up to find the owner, Heather Conlon, looking shell-shocked in her first week of business.

The 50-year-old was one of 58,000 people to enter the licence lottery, and her win has turned her into an instant multi-millionaire. “My husband and I run a locksmith so running a cannabis business is totally new to us,” she said.

The Toronto government should have auctioned off the licences rather than turning a random few people into 'instant multi-millionaires'. It is a protection racket, after all - you pay us, and we'll lock out the competition. Or they could have handed out more licences, or imposed an annual tax on licensed premises, such that the value of the licence is minimal.

“Our competition is not the other legal shops like Hunny Pot, it’s the prolific number of illegal dispensaries that operate without the same restrictions we have,” said Conlon. “They can undercut us on price because they don’t pay tax. It’s unfair. I hope they will make arrests and shut the lot of them down.”

The mark-up for anything illegal, like cannabis, is enormous because of the risks (being shot by a rival dealer or going to prison), the overheads (mainly bribes and hush money) and the fact that a lot of supply is confiscated (by the authorities or other dealers). So unlicensed dealers will have to drop their prices significantly to compete, not the other way round. Dealers aren't paying tax to the government as such, but a bribe to a government official is still a kind of tax.

And if unlicensed dealers have drop their prices significantly, that in itself is A Good Thing. The trade is now less attractive to criminals, so attracts fewer of them and acquisitive crime falls. If the government wants to shut them down, it just has to keep dropping the tax until illegal supply is simply not a commercially viable enterprise.

"Legalise cannabis sales to tackle criminal gangs, says Tory MP"

From the Evening Standard:

Crispin Blunt, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform, is urging the Government to control sales as he claims that 50 years of “prohibition” has failed “lamentably”.

Go Crispin!

"At the end of the day it'll be fine. A little speed bump. Everyone will forget all about it."

From the BBC:

Cannabis retailers in Canada began to run low on supplies from the very first day of legalisation a month ago. How long are shortages expected to continue as the new market for recreational cannabis finds its feet?

This is a great real life experiment. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for supply to rise to meet demand (at current prices). Part of the delay is probably down to bureaucratic stuff, but you can't set up a cannabis farm and get the stuff certified and to market overnight.

Problem is, we'll never see an article reporting that suppliers are up to volume and things are running smoothly, it's just not particularly interesting.

Exquisitely fucked up logic for keeping cannabis illegal

From this morning's Metro:

Legalisation of cannabis will not eliminate illegal dealing. There will still be a criminal element ready to supply it for a price undercutting the legitimate market.

HG, Kent.

That is just wrong on so many levels that it is impossible to know where to start.

The same old tired template

A retired politican, who toed the party line and dutifully trotted out the "illegal drugs cause harm so must remain illegal" mantra while in office/in power, now comes out and admits it's all stupid and that some things - like cannabis - should simply be legalised, regulated and - presumably - taxed.

Those still in office/in power, toe the party line and come out with the usual crap:

Prime Minister Theresa May remains firmly opposed to legalisation or decriminalisation of the drug because of the harm she says it does to individual users and communities.

See also, George Schultz (Secretary of State under Reagan);
Bob Ainsworth (former Home Office minister);
Paul Whitehouse (former chief constable, Sussex);
Tom Lloyd (former chief constable, Cambridgeshire);
Francis Wilkinson (former chief constable, Gwent);
Brian Paddick, (former Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Metropolitan Police);
and so on ad infinitum.

Give it five or ten years, and former PM Lady May will no doubt admit that the whole thing is for shit and maybe we should legalise it.

Rinse and repeat.

Outbreak of Common Sense

A new report by the TaxPayers’ Alliance details the enormous savings to British taxpayers by legalising cannabis. The UK could save at least £891.72 million a year in reduced spending by police, prisons, courts and the NHS through pain relief treatments.

Yes, this is all old hat and sane people have been saying it for years, I'm just pleasantly surprised that the TPA, the staidest and most small 'c' conservative of all pressure groups would even broach the topic.

(A list of their recent donors might give a clue as to why the sudden change of emphasis...)

Big Dope? WTF?

Peter Hitchens in City AM re the Lib Dem suggestion that we legalise cannabis:

No. This cynical and rather ignorant proposal is another triumph for the billionaire Big Dope lobby which hopes to open up an enormous and lucrative new pleasure drug market.

As usual, it prefers not to admit its real purpose, hiding behind the dishonest euphemism “regulation”, when what it really means is a free for all.

Cannabis powered rent-seeking

Emailed in by Mombers, from the NY Times:

QUINCY, Mass. — At the edge of an industrial park in this suburb south of Boston, past a used-car auction lot and a defunct cheese factory, is an unmarked warehouse bristling with security cameras and bustling with activity. Until recently, the cinder-block structure was home to a wholesale florist, a granite cutter and a screen printer. Today, it is home to just one tenant: a medical marijuana operation called Ermont...

And because the marijuana business comes with added baggage, landlords and property owners are charging a premium for new tenants working in the cannabis business. In Quincy, Ermont is paying above market rate for the previously dilapidated 36,000-square-foot building...

Commercial real estate developers say they have never seen a change so swift in so many places at once. From Monterey, Calif., to Portland, Me., the new industry is reshaping once-blighted neighborhoods and sending property values soaring.

In some Denver neighborhoods, the average asking lease price for warehouse space jumped by more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2015, according to an industry report. In the city over all, there are five times as many retail pot stores as stand-alone Starbucks shops.

Thus neatly proving two points at once; a) legalising cannabis makes an area more attractive on the whole (so is a good thing) and b) a large chunk of the extra value generated by any business accrues to landowners.

Seeing as part of the reason for legalising is to save wasting taxpayers' money on enforcement and collect taxes from the product instead (win-win), if the government can also tap into those higher rental values via higher property tax receipts (as most US states do), it's a win-win-win.

"Scottish party leader admits never taking cannabis"

From the BBC:

Three of Scotland's four main political party leaders have said being fairly normal, they had taken cannabis when they were younger.

Nicola Sturgeon and Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson both admitted that they had made the beginners' mistake of combining it with alcohol and it had made them feel sick. Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie said he had taken it "in his youthful days", adding that he still felt pretty youthful every now and then.

However Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy told the Glasgow University debate between the party leaders that as a terminally dull and joyless person who had always had one eye on a political career, he had always politely declined the offer of toke.

Mr Murphy told the audience at the university's Queen Margaret Union that lecturing friends and family about the dangers of cannabis as a gateway drug was a "working class thing to do" in the Glasgow estate where he grew up.

Outbreak of commonsense...

... in Jamaica.

From The Daily Mail:

As the birth place of reggae music and the Rastafarian religious cult Jamaica has long been associated with cannabis.

Now high ranking officials of the Caribbean state want to legalise the widely used but illegal drug – in a bid to spark a tourism boom.

They believe promoting the controlled sale of the narcotic will bring tens of thousands of extra tourists to the island which has suffered from a faltering economy and high unemployment.

Supporters hope to follow the example of the US state of Colorado which has raked in a fortune after the sale of cannabis was decriminalised – and taxed – on January 1 this year.

Two-and-a-half cheers for Uruguay

From the BBC:


If the Senate approves..., as is expected, Uruguay would become the first country in the world to regulate cannabis production, guarantee its quality, set its price and tax the revenues. It would also allow people to grow up to six plants of cannabis in their homes*.

The government says the aim is to stop people going to buy cannabis from drug traffickers and to put an end to a recent wave of violent crime associated with illegal drugs. In a BBC interview last year, President Jose Mujica said: "We are not so much worried about the drugs. What really worries us is drug trafficking."

... According to recent opinion polls, Uruguayans have shown to be more open to decriminalising abortion and legalising same-sex marriage than they are towards this new cannabis bill. At least two-thirds of the population are against the legalisation of marijuana, the latest poll suggests.

* That seems a bit stingy and what is not mentioned in that otherwise cheering article is that people will be restricted to buying 40 grams per month from official government shops, which a) doesn't sound like very much to me, and b) how are they going to police it anyway? The mind boggles.

My first thought is that people who want to smoke more than that without resorting to non-government sources will just ask non-smoking friends and neighbours to buy some for them, which gets us straight back to illegal dealing.

But I suppose they have to take into account that two-thirds of their voters oppose the idea, so they can't go too far too fast.

Bloody teenagers, I tell you, when I were a lad...

This afternoon, I broke the tedium of listening to some of my wife's friends regurgitating what they'd read in The Daily Mail/The Guardian as if it were gospel truth to pop round to the 99p Store to buy a job lot of cigarette lighters.

On my way there, three young lasses (aged 15 or 16, give or take, I'm no expert) asked me for a light, so I proferred my last lighter and told them that a) it would take about seven attempts before it worked and b) I was just popping round the corner etc. They replied that most shopkeepers wouldn't sell them a cigarette lighter, and I agreed that this was pretty low down inconsiderate of them.

One lass took the lighter and started trying to light what appeared to be (and what she hoped was) a small joint. At the roach end. Rather horrified, I took the joint from her and explained which end was which; the end you put in your mouth which contains the "roach" and the other end with the twisty bit of paper which you hold into the flame while inhaling.

"Are you sure?" she asked, at which stage I gave up the ghost, told them to keep the lighter and continued my journey shopwards.

I blame the education system myself. Why isn't making and lighting a spliff part of the basic school curriculum any more, along with handy tips on which snacks you'll need to accompany it?

Fun Online Polls: Over at The Sun

I was going to cut and paste the following Prohibitionist diatribe from today's Sun, by Tory MP Philip Davies...

I DON’T want any relaxation of the laws.

So much crime is fuelled by people getting addicted to drugs, so the idea that you’ll solve that by legalising everything is for the birds. Reputable retailers are not going to start selling hard drugs, so this would have the effect of legitimising some very unpleasant people.

Drugs cause so much misery, not so much to the people taking them, but to their families and the victims of crime. It’s naive to think that by liberalising the market you will solve the problem.

(For some reason, proper libertarian Dick Puddlecote still seems to hold Mr P Davies in high regard, f- knows why on the basis of outpourings like this.)

... when their Fun Online Poll caught my eye: so far, over 20,000 votes have been cast and 85% are in favour of legalising cannabis, despite the Sun newspaper being, on the face of it at least, very anti-legalisation (but the way they manipulate public opinion is so subtle and so clever, that they might be deliberately putting the case for Prohibition so badly as to drive people the other way, who knows?).

Which I thought was not only chucklesome but also rather heartening.

Knee Jerk Response Of The Day

From The Metro:

A six-year study by the UK Drug Policy Commission showed most of the billions Britain spends annually tackling illegal drugs is not justified. For cannabis, the commission suggested that amending the law relating to the growing of it, at least for personal use, might go some way to ‘undermining the commercialisation of production’.

And so on and so forth.

The Home Office insisted its approach to tackling drugs is the right one. "Drug usage is at it lowest level since records began," a spokeswoman said.

That's one way of trying to measure the success or otherwise of a drugs policy, even though actual usage figures are largely guesswork. Problem is of course, that countries which legalised e.g. cannabis all saw a slight fall in consumption (to the extent it can be measured etc).

And no doubt Dame Ruth Runciman, chairwoman of this Commission will get Nutted in due course.

Fascinating facts: The Diesel engine was originally design to run on vegetable oil.

My learned colleague Rohen explained this to me yesterday, and I recounted the episode of Mythbusters where they filled the tank of an old Mercedes diesel-engined car with off-the-shelf cooking oil and drove it round an airport perimeter until the engine conked out.

Only the engine didn't conk out, it drove perfectly normally all day (until they abandoned the attempt), miles per gallon weren't as good as with mineral oil, but apart from that, nothing unusual to report.

So it turns out that all this research into using vegetable oil as bio-diesel is over a century behind the times, Rudolf Diesel designed his first engine to run on pea-nut oil, which it did without problems.

It is true that vegetable oil is even worse than diesel oil at low temperatures, but that is easily fixed by chucking in some acid or something. Whether it is 'better' to run cars on vegetable oil and leave the mineral oil in the ground is another question, because of e.g. the resulting higher food prices, and I don't know whether it's cheaper manufacturing vegetable oil or extracting mineral oil. But hey.

Outbreak of common sense in Uruguay

From The Daily Mail:

Uruguay could become the first country in the world to sell marijuana to its citizens as it attempts to fight a growing crime problem.

Under the plan, only the government would be allowed to sell marijuana to adults who have registered on a government database - letting officials keep track of their purchases over time.

Minister of Defense Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro said the measure aims to weaken crime in the country by removing profits from drug dealers and diverting users from harder drugs.

I don't like the bit about the database, and by and large, cannabis is the sort of thing which can be best grown or imported and sold privately, but it's a huge leap in the right direction.

Having set a benchmark price (something below current street prices), the government would then ideally re-privatise the whole thing and levy taxes on producers to mop up the super-profits; the main thing is that the tax is not so high as to make illicit/unlicensed supply worthwhile on a large scale.

"Yeah, whatever," say stoners.

From the BBC:

Experts are warning that the public dangerously underestimates the health risks linked to smoking cannabis.

The British Lung Foundation carried out a survey of 1,000 adults and found a third wrongly believed cannabis did not harm health.

And 88% incorrectly thought tobacco cigarettes were more harmful than cannabis ones - when the risk of lung cancer is actually 20 times higher.

The BLF said the lack of awareness was "alarming".

Outbreak of common sense...

... at the Lib Dem conference:

The party’s annual conference in Birmingham voted for reforms to drugs laws which could also lead to Amsterdam-style cannabis cafes opening across Britain. The decision means it is now official Liberal Democrat party policy, to which leader Nick Clegg is bound – although the Home Office said it had ‘no intention’ of changing the laws.

Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies told delegates: ‘We have had drug prohibition for 50 years and drug use has increased. The only way to stop the criminals is to undermine the supply chain by taking away their income.’

Party members said possession of any controlled drug should be a civil offence which would see transgressors given health advice and education by social workers. They also called on the government to consider a framework for a ‘strictly controlled and regulated’ cannabis market with government-controlled retail outlets.

The Lib Dem proposal claims* that decriminalising the possession of drugs for personal use in Portugal has not led to a rise in abuse. It says ‘heroin maintenance’ clinics in Switzerland and the Netherlands have delivered health benefits for addicts.

* Why use the word 'claims'? As far as I am aware those statements are verifiably true.