Historic hangover

The re-classification of cannabis comes from sloppy double-think, says Peter White

As Olympic multi-gold medallist Michael Phelps started on his three-month ban from swimming, he may well have reflected that if he’d been photographed holding a whisky-glass instead of what looked like a marijuana pipe, no-one would have turned a hair, even though the chances are that neither would have had much effect on his performance.

My objection to the inconsistency in our attitudes to various substances, goes back to those long but pointless 60s arguments, as my father inveighed against the evils of drug-taking, whilst contentedly sipping his third large double of the evening and puffing on his fortieth fag of the day.

I, one of the few non drug-taking university students I knew, could only marvel at the double standards which made my dad, usually a combative but reasonable debater, see one as the devil’s work, and the other as his sacred right as a working man. Even in those innocent days, we already knew that alcohol and nicotine were enormously versatile wreckers of human lives.

As for pot, well at that stage we weren’t quite sure what its long-term effects were.

We still know that alcohol is a random killer and wrecker of lives, indeed statistics suggest on an increasing scale; and no group vouches as strongly for the medicinal effects of alcohol, as do those with multiple sclerosis for the beneficial effects of “weed“. Of course, even amongst disabled people, this argument is not a simple one.

There are those convinced of the aggravating properties of cannabis for a number of psychiatric conditions. But in a way: that’s not the point. If legislation for prohibition were based on the weight of evidence of harm, and the numbers of people affected, who could say that the balance would not swing heavily against alcohol?

And yet, rather than adopt the logic of saying “if we ban the one, surely we must ban the other”, we simply take the line that we should go on making it a bit un-comfortable to enjoy the one – smoking bans in pubs, the “disapproval” of happy hours, etc., whilst at the same time restoring cannabis to its former higher classification of danger.

This is not a plea for cannabis. I still don’t use it, and I enjoy alcohol. It’s just a plea for consistency. As I listened to a magistrate defending restoring cannabis to its B classification the other day, but clearly having no knowledge whatsoever about its physical effects or dangers, I was struck forcibly that I was listening to my dad again, back inthe sixties.