Posted on 01/26/2004 2:36:49 PM PST by quidnunc
As David Blunkett contemplates the chaos and fury triggered by his decision to downgrade the law on cannabis, he could do worse than consider the case of Dominique Lansdowne.
Eleven years ago, when she was 18, the former care assistant from Swindon started smoking cannabis once a week. ‘After a couple of weeks, I found it was addictive’, she said. ‘As soon as you start you get the feeling you’re completely relaxed and calm, but then you crave it. I used it more and more until I was smoking it every day. Then I couldn’t work because I was too stoned all the time. I was so paranoid I couldn’t leave the house.
‘I haven’t worked for the past six years. I lost all my friends and nearly lost my family. I couldn’t afford to pay my mortgage, my house was repossessed, I had to live in a hostel. I was in hospital three times, and couldn’t cope at all in the community. I had no social skills left. My life was in tatters. I didn’t stop completely until two years ago.
‘I still take anti-psychotics, antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, and will probably have to take medication for the rest of my life. I’m positive cannabis was the cause; I became paranoid as soon as I started smoking it. I’ve known hundreds of people who smoke it; all of them have some kind of paranoia or a problem, whether they recognise it or not.’
All of which makes it truly extraordinary that this Thursday, cannabis will be downgraded from a class B to a class C drug.
The Home Secretary’s move has delighted the drug legalisers — but astonished and horrified those like Dominique, who know the truth about its effects.
Tory leader Michael Howard has boldly declared that a future Conservative government will reverse the policy. Yet Mr Blunkett’s so called ‘reform’ has already caused many people mistakenly to believe cannabis is now legal or safe to use.
Despite ministers’ desperate insistence that it remains illegal and dangerous, putting cannabis in the same category as slimming pills, painkillers, tranquillisers and anabolic steroids sends the inescapable signal that it is not very dangerous after all.
Dominique Lansdowne knows what nonsense this is. Before she used cannabis, she had not even smoked tobacco; afterwards she also tried speed, LSD and ecstasy. ‘I would never have touched hard drugs if I hadn’t taken cannabis. Reclassification is really dreadful and sad because the government is saying cannabis isn’t that bad and so people are going to take it thinking it’s not going to do them any harm.’
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(Excerpt) Read more at melaniephillips.com ...
Two words - "cognitive dissonance".
Your level regard for objectivity is noted.
As opposed to the claim, unsupported by any medical or forensic authority of any merit, that any amount of marijuana consumption, unaided by medical tools, could cause psychosis? To get psychosis from marijuana, you have to step up the concentrations of a couple of the cannabanoids in it beyond any possibility of smoking yourself into psychosis. And, incidently, under the right circumstances, a doctor is allowed to put you at that risk using a little pill called marinol, which is exactly that recipe. Pretty amusing eh? If you are poor, black and stupid, you can go to jail for something which, if you are rich, white and connected, you can get from a doctor at 100 times the dosage.
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