Why is Cannabis still illegal?

Author
Discussion

blindswelledrat

25,257 posts

231 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
BJG1 said:
Did you know, for example, that victims of child abuse are more likely to become addicts in later life than obese people are to develop heart disease?
biglaugh No I didn't and it wouldn't even occur to me to compare the two.
Did you know that victims of child abuse are more likely to become addicts than stick insects are to eat ivy?

StottyEvo

6,860 posts

162 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
RichB said:
The Spruce goose said:
too many scare mongers, i've smoked a bit, not got addicted to heavier drugs and work. maybe 1 in a 1000 goes nuts, that is what people focus on...
Unfortunately my son must be one of the 1000 you mention. He is now 33 but got got into cannabis at school when he was about 16. In his early 20s he was 'sectioned' and in hospital for 6 weeks, probably the lowest point of my life seeing your own son shuffling round like a zombie in a mental ward. A year later he was back in again for another spell. He has "Cannabis induced psychosis". Posts absolute unintelligible stuff on FB, talks to himself, cannot hold a job for more than 6 weeks; gets paid thinks he's rich beyond his wildest dreams, blows it on dope, doesn't turn up for work until Tuesday and gets sacked etc. etc. Over the last 15 years it's been a nightmare. Apart from that he's a lovely chap and would have been very bright working in web design and network software. As it is I expect he'll be on benefits all his life, never achieve anything, probably never have a steady girlfriend or have a family etc. I don't think he enjoys life much but maintains dope is harmless and like many on here says it should be legalised! Bless him... Forgive me for having a jaundiced view.
My uncle had a very similar story, from my childhood I remember him being extremely anti-social. He'd sit in his bedroom away from a family meal and smoke a joint.

My mum passionately blames cannabis but I always have doubt, was it the cause or was he that way to begin with? Although if your son claims it is harmless, how does he respond when you question about the nonsense that he posts on Facebook whilst high? Surely his logic must have a hole somewhere, either the cannabis caused it or he's insane by his own admission that it isn't the cannabis.

Dragoncaviar

67 posts

203 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
blindswelledrat said:
biglaugh No I didn't and it wouldn't even occur to me to compare the two.
Did you know that victims of child abuse are more likely to become addicts than stick insects are to eat ivy?
Childhood trauma is the biggest cause of addiction. Science knows this, it's just slow to address it, and we have too much vested on our current model of addiction. This is an instance where correlation and causation aren't being confused, no matter how irrelevant you might think it is.

Here's an excerpt from Johann Hari's 'Chasing the Scream' (which would be a truly enlightening read for someone as ignorant as you - I'd highly recommend it) ...

“After thinking about it deeply, Gabor came to suspect that it means, as he told me, “nothing is addictive in itself. It’s always a combination of a potentially addictive substance or behavior and a susceptible individual. So the question we need to keep asking is — What creates the susceptibility?”

Since the drug alone can’t explain the addiction, there is clearly an additional ingredient, or several—things that are present in some people but not in others.

Gabor began to read about a group of American scientists who had carried out something called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. It is the most detailed research ever conducted into the long-term effects of early childhood trauma. It looked at ten different terrible things that can happen to a kid, from physical abuse to sexual abuse to the death of a parent, to track how it shapes that child over their lifetime.

These scientists discovered that for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult. Nearly two-thirds of injection drug use, they found, is the product of childhood trauma. This is a correlation so strong the scientists said it is “of an order of magnitude17 rarely seen in epidemiology or public health.” It means that child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease.18

Another long-term study, published in American Psychologist,19 followed kids from the age of five until they were eighteen, to figure out how much the quality of your parenting while a child affects your drug use as you get older. When the children were still small, the scientists gave them a task to carry out with their parents—like piling up building blocks—and then they watched how well the parents helped and encouraged them through a one-way mirror. They wrote down which kids had parents who were loving and supportive, and which had parents who were disengaged or nasty to them. It turned out the kids whose parents had been either indifferent or cruel were dramatically more likely to heavily use drugs than the others. They had grown up, they found, less able to form loving relationships, and so they felt more angry and distressed and impulsive a lot of the time.

If we can figure out at the age of five which kids are going to be addicts and which ones aren’t, that tells us something fundamental about drug addiction. “Their relative maladjustment,” the study found, “precedes the initiation of drug use.” Indeed, “Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause,20 of personal and social maladjustment.”

“And Gabor found that another scientist, Dr. Vincent Felitti, had conducted a similar huge study of the effects of childhood trauma, looking at seventeen thousand kids for the insurance company Kaiser Permanente. Felitti concluded, as Gabor writes, that “the basic cause21 of addiction is predominantly experience-dependent during childhood, and not substance-dependent. The current conception of addiction is ill-founded.” This fact forces us to radically reconsider many of the stories we are told about drug epidemics—including, I was to learn later, the prescription drug epidemic in the United States.”

FredClogs

14,041 posts

160 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
^^

Right you are.

But...

To go back to your first point - drugs use and addiction as a symptom of trauma, I firmly agree that many if not all the UKs problem drug users are self medicating for something, even if it's just the trauma of living the life of a drug addict - but how can this be avoided by making drugs more freely available, legal and socially acceptable? Assuming the trauma won't stop and assuming the treatment for the trauma won't be forthcoming, all you're going to do is legalise and legitimise self medication and further hide the root problem - is this desirable?

Tonsko

6,299 posts

214 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
Whilst there is a serious discussion about this, and it is interesting, I'd just like to draw attention to correlation does not imply causation. I don't want to derail it either, but it deserves a mention. It should be said that I happen to believe that in this case, there is a causal link.

For example (from http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations):




XM5ER

5,087 posts

247 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
Cannabis is harmless in some, irrevocably damaging in others and many people are on a spectrum between the two.
MDMA is harmless in some, irrevocably damaging in others and many people are on a spectrum between the two.
LSD is harmless in some, irrevocably damaging in others and many people are on a spectrum between the two.
Heroine is harmless in some, irrevocably damaging in others and many people are on a spectrum between the two.

Alcohol is harmless in some, irrevocably damaging in others and many people are on a spectrum between the two.
Sugar is harmless in some, irrevocably damaging in others and many people are on a spectrum between the two.
Etc.

To legalise, regulate and educate are the only sensible ways to deal with any of the above because you won't change human nature.

BJG1

5,966 posts

211 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
blindswelledrat said:
BJG1 said:
Did you know, for example, that victims of child abuse are more likely to become addicts in later life than obese people are to develop heart disease?
biglaugh No I didn't and it wouldn't even occur to me to compare the two.
Did you know that victims of child abuse are more likely to become addicts than stick insects are to eat ivy?
You don't think that suffering traumatic events early in life may lead to substance abuse later? Can you genuinely not see how there might be some causation in that statistic? Don't be a knob, you're not very good at it.

Dragoncaviar

67 posts

203 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
FredClogs said:
^^

Right you are.

But...

To go back to your first point - drugs use and addiction as a symptom of trauma, I firmly agree that many if not all the UKs problem drug users are self medicating for something, even if it's just the trauma of living the life of a drug addict - but how can this be avoided by making drugs more freely available, legal and socially acceptable? Assuming the trauma won't stop and assuming the treatment for the trauma won't be forthcoming, all you're going to do is legalise and legitimise self medication and further hide the root problem - is this desirable?
The trauma treatment should be forthcoming.

What they did in Portugal was spend all the money they spent on police on doctors, psychologists, other health care professionals, and as well as that they MASSIVELY subsidised jobs for addicts, to try and reintegrate these people into society.

Portugal had one of the highest rates of heroin use in the world in 2001 when the new legislation came in. It's believed 1% of the population was injecting heroin. They had the highest rates of HIV spread in the EU. I don't have the figures at hand, and don't really have the desire or inclination to search for them, but rates of use today have dropped dramatically.

It's massively important that education and harm reduction goes along side regulation. You're absolutely right. A heroin aisle in Tesco isn't going to go well. With education and social integration, these problems can be addressed and help can be more forthcoming when it's needed and sought.

Luke Warm

496 posts

143 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
Most people who take cannabis do so because they have a kind of neurosis such as depression or anxiety.

There are better, less harmful, and cheaper ways of treating neurosis legally.

Tonsko

6,299 posts

214 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
Luke Warm said:
Most people who take cannabis do so because they have a kind of neurosis such as depression or anxiety.

There are better, less harmful, and cheaper ways of treating neurosis legally.
Could you qualify that a little?

BJG1

5,966 posts

211 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
Tonsko said:
Whilst there is a serious discussion about this, and it is interesting, I'd just like to draw attention to correlation does not imply causation. I don't want to derail it either, but it deserves a mention. It should be said that I happen to believe that in this case, there is a causal link.

For example (from http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations):

Yes, but that doesn't mean things which are correlated are not causal. If you DON'T think that childhood trauma can cause addiction in later life, you'd be better off presenting some evidence that supports that, than simply saying "correlation doesn't equal causation" which i think everyone here is intelligent enough to know. It isn't a good argument against something, Dragoncaviar has posted an excellent argument suggesting causation, why don't you try to pick that apart instead if you think he's wrong?

Also doesn't cheese cause more vivid dreams? Maybe there is causation there after all biggrin

BJG1

5,966 posts

211 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
Luke Warm said:
Most people who take cannabis do so because they have a kind of neurosis such as depression or anxiety.
MOST people? Seriously? Do you have a source for that other than somewhere deep inside your rectum? I'd wager most people do it because it's good fun.

Tonsko

6,299 posts

214 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
BJG1 said:
Yes, but that doesn't mean things which are correlated are not causal. If you DON'T think that childhood trauma can cause addiction in later life, you'd be better off presenting some evidence that supports that, than simply saying "correlation doesn't equal causation" which i think everyone here is intelligent enough to know. It isn't a good argument against something, Dragoncaviar has posted an excellent argument suggesting causation, why don't you try to pick that apart instead if you think he's wrong?

Also doesn't cheese cause more vivid dreams? Maybe there is causation there after all biggrin
I think you missed the sentence where said that I believe one exists smile

...and all the other posts that broadly echo Dragon's.

Regarding cheese dreams, the same thought crossed my mind!

RichB

51,435 posts

283 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
StottyEvo said:
Although if your son claims it is harmless, how does he respond when you question about the nonsense that he posts on Facebook whilst high? Surely his logic must have a hole somewhere, either the cannabis caused it or he's insane by his own admission that it isn't the cannabis.
Good question and one I have put to him but he does not answer, simply goes off on an incoherent "rant" about it being everyone else's fault and starts mumbling. I've given up trying logic with him.

blindswelledrat

25,257 posts

231 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
BJG1 said:
blindswelledrat said:
BJG1 said:
Did you know, for example, that victims of child abuse are more likely to become addicts in later life than obese people are to develop heart disease?
biglaugh No I didn't and it wouldn't even occur to me to compare the two.
Did you know that victims of child abuse are more likely to become addicts than stick insects are to eat ivy?
You don't think that suffering traumatic events early in life may lead to substance abuse later? Can you genuinely not see how there might be some causation in that statistic? Don't be a knob, you're not very good at it.
Lighten up. I wasn't mocking that assertion- I completely believe it and it is interesting.
It was light hearted ribbing about you irrelevantly connecting child abuse victims and obese people.

FredClogs

14,041 posts

160 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
Dragoncaviar said:
FredClogs said:
^^

Right you are.

But...

To go back to your first point - drugs use and addiction as a symptom of trauma, I firmly agree that many if not all the UKs problem drug users are self medicating for something, even if it's just the trauma of living the life of a drug addict - but how can this be avoided by making drugs more freely available, legal and socially acceptable? Assuming the trauma won't stop and assuming the treatment for the trauma won't be forthcoming, all you're going to do is legalise and legitimise self medication and further hide the root problem - is this desirable?
The trauma treatment should be forthcoming.

What they did in Portugal was spend all the money they spent on police on doctors, psychologists, other health care professionals, and as well as that they MASSIVELY subsidised jobs for addicts, to try and reintegrate these people into society.

Portugal had one of the highest rates of heroin use in the world in 2001 when the new legislation came in. It's believed 1% of the population was injecting heroin. They had the highest rates of HIV spread in the EU. I don't have the figures at hand, and don't really have the desire or inclination to search for them, but rates of use today have dropped dramatically.

It's massively important that education and harm reduction goes along side regulation. You're absolutely right. A heroin aisle in Tesco isn't going to go well. With education and social integration, these problems can be addressed and help can be more forthcoming when it's needed and sought.
Ok, so in the real world how is this going to work?

We force schools and other social institutions to track and detail individuals behaviour and target those who we consider at risk from having suffered trauma or likely to suffer trauma, barrage them with support services and offers of psychotherapy? Sounds a bit intrusive to me, sounds a bit prone to error and people taking offense and crying invasion of civil liberty.

The other option is to wait until people start to self medicate then jump on them, surely that's too late they've already replaced the trauma with the blanket of addiction (especially in the case of opiates) - can you really pull them back? Isn't this what we're seeing in Portugal and especially in Switzerland, that once people are self medicating with booze or opiates talking twice a week with a counselor doesn't really cut it and easy access or prescribed access to the drug of choice takes them out of a life of crime but isn't a huge incentive to get them away from the addiction. It's only really the choice of true abstinence that works and the "message" of illegality aids that choice.

Luke Warm

496 posts

143 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
FredClogs said:
Ok, so in the real world how is this going to work?

We force schools and other social institutions to track and detail individuals behaviour and target those who we consider at risk from having suffered trauma or likely to suffer trauma, barrage them with support services and offers of psychotherapy? Sounds a bit intrusive to me, sounds a bit prone to error and people taking offense and crying invasion of civil liberty.
It works in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_Childhood_Ex...

"Trauma-sensitive, or compassionate, schooling has becoming increasingly popular in Washington, Massachusetts and California. Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, Washington, adapted a trauma-informed approached to discipline and reduced its suspensions by 85%.[37] Rather than standard punishment, students are taught to recognize their reaction to stress and learn to control it. Spokane, Washington schools conducted a research study that demonstrated that academic risk was correlated with students’ experiences of traumatic events known to their teachers.[34][38]"

Username888

505 posts

200 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all

According to the tour guide in Amsterdam who took us on a bike ride around the city, - far more teenagers in the UK have tried Cannabis, where it's illegal, than in Amsterdam where it (more or less) isn't.

He suggested the reason for this is because in the Netherlands it's so readily available and legal (ish) it's no big deal, - it's not the same taboo as it is here.


XM5ER

5,087 posts

247 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
Username888 said:
According to the tour guide in Amsterdam who took us on a bike ride around the city, - far more teenagers in the UK have tried Cannabis, where it's illegal, than in Amsterdam where it (more or less) isn't.

He suggested the reason for this is because in the Netherlands it's so readily available and legal (ish) it's no big deal, - it's not the same taboo as it is here.
Most of the Dutch people I know are remarkably socially conservative (as well as being outspoken and frankly bloody tall), this might have a bearing on their actions as well.

FredClogs

14,041 posts

160 months

Thursday 30th July 2015
quotequote all
XM5ER said:
Username888 said:
According to the tour guide in Amsterdam who took us on a bike ride around the city, - far more teenagers in the UK have tried Cannabis, where it's illegal, than in Amsterdam where it (more or less) isn't.

He suggested the reason for this is because in the Netherlands it's so readily available and legal (ish) it's no big deal, - it's not the same taboo as it is here.
Most of the Dutch people I know are remarkably socially conservative (as well as being outspoken and frankly bloody tall), this might have a bearing on their actions as well.
They probably drink less at 16,17 and 18 than UK kids do too, their teenage pregnancy rates will almost certainly be lower... Why is this? Less trauma as children? Possibly - or the Dutch could just be incredibly boring...