Losing to the Hysteria

This is just odd. Something is going on with the media in Britain that is hard to comprehend.

More than 22,000 people were treated last year for cannabis addiction - and almost half of those affected were under 18. With doctors and drugs experts warning that skunk can be as damaging as cocaine and heroin, leading to mental health problems and psychosis for thousands of teenagers, The Independent on Sunday has today reversed its landmark campaign for cannabis use to be decriminalised.

Of course, this is just days after a two year study by the Royal Society for the Arts in the UK came to the exact opposite conclusion:

The RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, set up in January 2005, also called for the main focus of drugs education to be shifted from secondary to primary schools and recommended the introduction of so-called "shooting galleries" - rooms where users can inject drugs.

The report, compiled by a panel of academics, politicians, drugs workers, journalists and a senior police officer, also called for the Home Office to be stripped of its lead role in drugs policy.

It recommended the Misuse of Drugs Act be scrapped in favour of a wider-ranging Misuse of Substances Act, and the current ABC classification system be abandoned in favour of an "index of harms".

Current laws, the panel claimed, were been "driven by moral panic" with large amounts of money wasted on "futile" efforts to stop supply rather than going after the criminal networks behind the drugs on British streets.

At the heart of the report was a call for an end to what the panel called the "criminal justice bias" of current policy in favour of an approach that would treat addiction as a health and social problem rather than simply a cause of crime.

The Independent now says that there's a more potent form of marijuana called skunk that really, really does cause mental illness (no, really, this time they mean it, and they have doctors and everything who agree). The whole thing is absurd. Holland, where marijuana has been decriminalized for over 30 years, does not have high numbers of teenage addicts. And even if there was some mystical "super-cannabis" that was causing all of these problems, the most effective way to fight that would be to allow people to buy regular cannabis instead.

But we already know that it's complete bullshit. If cannabis "caused" schizophrenia, you'd see massive amounts of new cases, considering that over 80% of young Britons have tried it. We don't. Even the "medical specialist" cited in the article said that only 10% of the cases of schizophrenia were caused by cannabis. That's only 25,000 in a country of 60 million. There has been a noticeable pushback against common sense in the British media recently. When the RSA report originally came out, the Telegraph printed this pathetic rebuttal.

The only thing we don't know is why so many British media outlets all of a sudden have their head up their ass about something that has become blatantly obvious over the past decade, that it makes no sense at all to keep cannabis illegal. Oh wait, going back to the article on the RSA report, I think I may have found it [emphasis mine]:

The report, compiled by a panel of academics, politicians, drugs workers, journalists and a senior police officer, also called for the Home Office to be stripped of its lead role in drugs policy.

Funny how the same thing seems to happen here in the U.S. any time someone suggests that a useless government function related to the war on drugs should be eliminated.

Meanwhile, in other news from the UK:

Specially converted sea containers imported from China are to be turned into temporary jails to ease the British prisons overcrowding crisis, The Observer has learned.

The plan is to have the modules installed in five prisons by June at a cost of UKP3.5m each. Prisons earmarked for the new units include Stoke Heath Young Offenders Institution in Shropshire and Wayland Prison in Norfolk.

The government has also placed an order for two large-scale units comprising five containers bolted together and capable of holding 300 prisoners apiece. These larger modules will require planning permission, which means they are unlikely to be introduced until the end of the year. It is understood Rochester Prison in Kent has been identified as one possible site for the new units.