What Causes a Fuss, and What Doesn't

Curious that a new study of cannabis effects on the young, which looks impeccable to me, has attracted so little attention, whereas the Liberal Democrats’ increasingly desperate flirtation with the destroyers of the drug laws always gets endless publicity, as does any new propaganda body purporting to be a ‘commission’ and so purporting to be impartial, which just so happens to oppose the alleged ‘prohibition’ of drugs, and the phantasmal  ‘war on drugs’ which are supposed to be making so many lives a misery, and flinging so many first-time users of drugs into prison.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/heavy-cannabis-use-makes-teenagers-more-likely-to-quit-school-9721694.html?origin=internalSearch

 

Yet here we are, with a clear correlation between cannabis use and bad school performance, plus suicide attempts and the use of other dangerous drugs, and you’d barely know the study had happened.

 

None of these correlations is really surprising, when you consider what cannabis is and does, and I believe it is only lack of research (caused by lack of political and commercial interest in such research, and not just negative lack, but actual positive unwillingness in a culture increasingly dominated by the pro-drug lobby) that prevents us finding correlations between cannabis and violent crime, cannabis and homelessness, cannabis and unemployment,  cannabis and long-term mental illness etc.

 

Yet I could find only two references to this study in British national newspapers (there may have been more, but my search engines and electronic libraries have not uncovered them).

 

No doubt the pro-drug ‘Comment warriors’, whose dreary hunched shapes I can see gathering on the telegraph wires nearby, will flap down here to attack this, as they always do. This is because they are terribly afraid of the truth about the drugs they pretend are harmless, and hope to frighten people such as me into silence.

 

Less neglected, though not as prominent as it should have been, and amazingly unexamined, was a  story ( again based on what appears to be a reputable study) suggesting that use of certain sleeping pills may be linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

 

Six million prescriptions for the types of sleeping pills involved were issued in England alone last year.

 

Yet I have seen no mass panic calls for the immediate banning of these pills (compare this with the effects of the salmonella in eggs scare and the wholly illogical beef and CJD scare), let alone any examination of the possibility that all and any pills of this kind, or of any mind-altering drugs whose operation is poorly understood, might *by their nature* pose risks to the who use them.

 

I don’t myself urge any such panic. I am against panic. But I do wish people would wonder more about the things they happily inhale, ingest and swallow to influence their brains. We know almost nothing about the long-term effects of these things.

 

Between panic and complacency there must surely be a healthy, science based scepticism which resists calls for the general availability of mind-altering drugs (legal or illegal)  whose use is correlated with quite frightening effects; which demands hard evidence of any alleged good that they do; and which also points out that even if that good is demonstrated (which it often isn’t or cannot be), it has to be weighed against the disadvantages. It may well be that cannabis provides symptomatic relief in some cases to some sufferers. But so did Thalidomide. The risk of long-term and irreversible mental illness seems to me to cancel out any such benefits.