Labour’s Drugs and Crime Folly…

On 19th March 2005, the Times reported that the Government is to review its decision to downgrade cannabis after mounting scientific evidence that the drug could be more harmful than thought.

In his letter to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, Mr Clarke implied that the findings have emerged since cannabis was reclassified. Although the two studies he referred to are new, but both authors had been publishing similar findings for several years.
David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, described the review as “a humiliating recognition of the failure of a central plank of Labour’s drugs policy”.

In 2004, a study of 2,437 people aged between 14 and 24 by Professor Jim van Os of Maastricht University concluded “cannabis use moderately increases the risk of psychotic symptoms in young people but has a much stronger effect in those with . . . predisposition for psychosis.”
The study found that half of those who were psychologically vulnerable and smoked cannabis developed psychotic symptoms over a four-year period. This was twice the rate among those who did not use cannabis.
In another study, Professor David Fergusson of the University of Otago collated data over a 25-year period on a group of 1,055 people born in 1977. They were questioned about their use of cannabis at the ages of 18, 21 and 25.

Taking into consideration all possible confounding factors, Professor Fergusson said “there was a clear increase in rates of psychotic symptoms after the start of regular use, with daily users of cannabis having rates over 150 per cent those of non-users”.
In the journal Addiction, he wrote “these findings add to a growing body of evidence from different sources, all of which suggest that heavy use of cannabis may lead to increased risk of psychotic symptoms.”