Pubdate: Thu, 13 Feb 2014
Source: Irish Independent (Ireland)
Copyright: Independent Newspapers (Ireland) Ltd
Contact:  http://www.independent.ie/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/213
Author: Colette Brown

WHY SHOULD TEENAGERS BECOME CRIMINALS FOR TAKING THE ODD SPLIFF?

THESE days it's increasingly popular for politicians to admit to 
smoking cannabis in their youth, so why are we still criminalising 
young people for the same behaviour?

Last month, Barack Obama caused a stir when he said: "I smoked pot as 
a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different 
from the cigarettes that I smoked ... I don't think it is more 
dangerous than alcohol."

Meanwhile, in this country, even conservative types like Leo Varadkar 
and Brian Cowen have admitted to smoking the odd spliff when they 
were in college. However, despite their own dalliances with drugs in 
the past, politicians demonstrate breathtaking hypocrisy in insisting 
on the continuation of a failed policy - the blanket criminalisation 
of cannabis use.

While they emerged unscathed from their drug experimentation, they 
are happy for thousands of young people to have their lives 
permanently blighted by a drug conviction.

Their intransigence makes little sense when one considers that our 
current myopic drug policy is rooted more on anecdotal scaremongering 
than any verifiable scientific data.

Obama may think that cannabis and alcohol are equally harmful but it 
can be argued that alcohol is a far more dangerous drug.

According to Alcohol Action Ireland, 88 deaths in this country every 
month are directly attributable to alcohol; there are 1,200 cases of 
cancer each year from alcohol; one in four deaths of young men aged 
between 15 and 29 is due to alcohol and one in three road fatalities 
is alcohol related.

Meanwhile, alcohol has been identified as a contributory factor in 
97pc of public order offences and it has been estimated that 
alcohol-related health and crime costs stand at a staggering 
euro3.7bn per annum.

In comparison, cannabis use has sometimes been noted in coroners' 
reports but it has never been listed as a cause of death.

Some have attempted to draw a link between cannabis use and 
schizophrenia but a Harvard study published last year found that 
genetics, and not marijuana, was to blame.

"The results of the current study suggest that having an increased 
familial morbid risk for schizophrenia may be the underlying basis 
for schizophrenia in cannabis users and not cannabis use by itself," 
it concluded.

OTHER comprehensive studies have found no link between cannabis use 
and lung cancer or decreased lung function much to the surprise of 
the researchers involved. There is also little evidence to 
substantiate reports that the potency of cannabis herb in this 
country has increased dramatically in recent years.

That is not to say that there is no risk from smoking cannabis but 
rather that the risks are equivalent, and in some cases even less, 
than the risks from legal drugs like nicotine and alcohol. Given all 
of the available evidence, it is ludicrous that cannabis is treated 
by the criminal justice system as being just as dangerous as heroin 
and crack cocaine.

If society has deemed that cannabis should be illegal we should be 
able to draft laws that reflect its lower risk level. Of course, that 
would involve the framing of drug laws that were based on science, 
not hysteria.

If Obama had been arrested and charged with drug possession all of 
those years ago he would never have become president. According to 
the National Advisory Committee on Drugs and Alcohol, one in four 
Irish people aged between 15 and 64 have tried cannabis.

How many of them have been denied the right to attain their full 
potential because they had the misfortune to be caught?

Labour TD Michael McNamara recently called for possession of cannabis 
to be added to the adult caution scheme, so gardai could opt not to 
prosecute first-time offenders.

Rather than wasting state resources prosecuting thousands of people 
every year, funding could instead be funnelled into drug treatment 
programmes. This was considered when the scheme was set up in 2006 
but was inexplicably abandoned following consultations between the 
DPP and Gardai. There is no reason this decision cannot be revisited.

Once this is done, perhaps we can then begin to have a broader debate 
about the utility of continuing to pursue prohibitionist drug 
policies that have been an unmitigated disaster  resulting in 
availability increasing, prices falling, criminal gangs proliferating 
and prison populations multiplying.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom