Free Colin NOW

This just goes to show that governments will never legalise cannabis no matter how hard the legalise cannabis campaigners try with their massive legalise cannabis campaines, demonstrations and festivals. The legalise cannabis cmapigners are fighting a losing battle.

Two different drugs - one which carries high dependency risks, causes severe physiological and psychological damage over time, is linked with violence, aggression and crime and is part of mainstream British culture, the other which carries few dependency risks, causes no proven physiological or pschological damage, is not linked with violence and only linked with crime because possession of it has been criminalized. The significant difference, though, is that the first, alcohol, is socially acceptable and culturally embedded because it brings in high tax revenues, and the other, cannabis, brings in no tax revenue at all. The key difference, in short, is about government control of revenues, not 'protection' of the public. The only crimes associated with cannabis are directly associated with its prohibited status.

There are confusing messages going out to all of us, but particularly to youngsters who really do believe, because of some initiatives, that cannabis use is now legal, and don't understand why they are being hassled by the police. Some of those kids are going to end up inside, not for doing anything anti-social or nasty, but because they will at some point have stepped unwittingly over an invisible line drawn up between policing policy and the confusion that is government drug control policy. That anybody at all is inside for possessing cannabis is obscene, and in years to come we will look back to this in the same way that we now look at outmoded laws associated with social control, such as Poor Laws and Bastardy Laws, which imprisoned men and women for being poor, and women for giving birth outside of marriage!

New Labour (aka ' Old Conservative') are so busy doing a headless chicken job trying to satisfy middle England that they are creating a situation where how you are treated in relation to possession depends on where you live. No big surprises that there are no principles involved here - but the approach to weed defies even the government's own distorted logic.

As for the message that moves to legalize 'will never win' - I hope it satisfies you that innocent people are in prison, victimized and harassed by the police for smoking or eating something less harmful than the pint that you plan to sink tonight down the pub.

STARFISH