TRIMMING THE WEEDS

Home secretary, Jacqui Smith, decided, yesterday, that cannabis should be reclassified from a class C to a class B drug.

Smith justified her decision by highlighting the strength of "skunk" strains of herbal cannabis now widely available.

Last week, Gordon Brown warned of the "more lethal quality" of much of the cannabis now available, described it as a gateway drug, and said that the reclassification was needed to "send a message to young people that it was unacceptable".

The home secretary told the Commons today: "Reclassification reflects the fact that skunk, a much stronger type of the drug, now dominates the cannabis market."

She said it accounted for 81% of cannabis available on the streets compared to just 30% in 2002.

The average age of first use is 13 years old and young people may binge on skunk in the same way as alcohol, trying to achieve the maximum effect

This story comes hot on the heels of another, however, that smoking marijuana might help prevent cancer. This does not come from someone with a great history of supporting cannabis use, but from UCLA medical school professor Donald Tashkin, who

was the lead investigator on studies dating back to the 1970s that identified the components in marijuana smoke that are toxic. It was Tashkin et al who published photomicrographs showing that marijuana smoke damages cells lining the upper airways. It was the Tashkin lab reporting that benzpyrene -a component of tobacco smoke that plays a role in most lung cancers- is especially prevalent in marijuana smoke. It was Tashkin's data documenting that marijuana smokers are more likely than non-smokers to cough, wheeze, and produce sputum.

Nevertheless,

Tashkin's team interviewed 1,212 cancer patients from the Los Angeles County Cancer Surveillance program, matched for age, gender, and neighborhood with 1,040 cancer-free controls. Marijuana use was measured in "joint years" (number of years smoked times number of joints per day). It turned out that increased marijuana use did not result in higher rates of lung and pharyngeal cancer (whereas tobacco smokers were at greater risk the more they smoked). Tobacco smokers who also smoked marijuana were at slightly lower risk of getting lung cancer than tobacco-only smokers.

And

As to the highly promising implication of his own study -that something in marijuana stops damaged cells from becoming malignant- Tashkin noted that an anti-proliferative effect of THC has been observed in cell-culture systems and animal models of brain, breast, prostate, and lung cancer. THC has been shown to promote known apoptosis (damaged cells die instead of reproducing) and to counter angiogenesis (the process by which blood vessels are formed -a requirement of tumor growth). Other antioxidants in cannabis may also be involved in countering malignancy, said Tashkin.

So, it is nice to know that our own Home Secretary may well be putting us more at risk of cancer than we need otherwise be! So why the fear of "skunk" that has lead to the reclassification? There have been claims that it can be linked to schizophrenia amongst regular users. If use has been increasing amongst our nation's youth, and this link with mental illness is real, then this may indeed be a problem. However, returning to the Guardian article,

The ACMD chair, Professor Sir Michael Rawlins, refused to criticise the home secretary, saying that the ACMD's recommendations were based entirely on harmfulness - but that the government had the right to consider other factors.

He said: "We don't take into account 'the message', we don't take into account policing priorities; we are obliged by law only to take into account the harmfulness.

"The government may want to take into account other matters. That's their right; they are the government. We are only an advisory committee and from time to time governments, for their own reasons, may wish to ignore the advice."

...

His council heard evidence that the potency of homegrown herbal cannabis tended to be two and a half times that of imported resin. But they said users now often moderated their intake.

They were also told that the incidence of new schizophrenia cases reported to GPs had gone down, not up, between 1998 and 2005, indicating a weak link between increased potency and use in the past two decades and mental health problems.

Since cannabis was downgraded in 2004 the proportion of young people using it has fallen each year from 25.3% in 2003-04 to 20.9% now. Among those aged 16 to 59, the proportion over the same period has fallen from 10.8% to 8.2%, according to the British Crime Survey.

Libertarians believe that people should be free to do as they choose with their own person and property as they want. That means free to put it at risk if they think doing so is worth the benefits. Here we have two opinions - and it is common in serious medical matters for patients to seek a second opinion. But in this case, as in so many others, the government has decided to try to prevent people from following the second opinion and is trying to force you to accept its preferred opinion. It has decided that it, and not you, should be the one that decides when or when not it may be worth putting your body at risk. It is, thereby seizing control of your body. And yet so many people seem to find this fact so less nauseating than I.

How sad.