Cannabis should not be decriminalised - AIBU?

[Alwaysoneoddsock]

I hate the smell of cannabis. It’s becoming the norm to smell it. I think decriminalising this drug will make it more prolific.
It is a gateway drug.
It does not help mental health (in fact it worsens it).
People driving under the influence of cannabis is a real issue.
AIBU to say it should not be decriminalised?

I think the use of cannabis gummies accounts for children and dogs being poisoned?

It's absolutely a gateway drug. It's destroyed half my family.

@QuaintShaker

Thanks for the link, I’ll have a proper read tomorrow. I’ve only skim read it so far because it’s late, I should be working rather than arguing about drugs with strangers and I wanted to reply to you, but I’m not totally convinced. It says they’ve got their data from two surveys; a community health survey and under 6k people who have used in the past 12-months who have completed national surveys. Are these the sort of people who will be looking for alternative sources of income because their customers have gone elsewhere? I doubt there is one, but I’d be far more interested in reading a study on the effects of legalisation on people in deprived areas.

And FWIW, I've lived in two of the most deprived areas in the UK (never in a HA complex but next door to a large one) and have lived a low-income apartment complex in Canada (post-legalization), so you're wrong to assume my only experience is in "naice", middle-class areas That’s fair enough; I over generalised. How did you cope with the smell and the constant stream of young lads on bikes going to and from their dealers?

Hate the stuff. Only dopes smoke dope.
Seen many a good person ruined by it.

I lived in a terrace house next door to someone who smoked very, very strong cannabis all day, every day. I kept all my windows and doors shut and it still stunk out my entire house and impacted my families health. It was horrendous- I hated being at home and couldn’t invite friends and family round. He was an addict so wouldn’t stop even when told how much it was impacting our lives. I reported to everyone - police, environmental health, landlord of neighbour - no one did anything to help despite them all saying it was illegal and needed to stop - we had to move. Yes maybe cannabis has some similarities to alcohol - but cannabis has other antisocial pathways which impact the health of those living in proximity to users.

Cannabis should not be legalised not least because it saps people’s motivation to work and that is not what the country needs right now.
Also, just because the use of cannabis is already prolific doesn‘t mean we should make it legal. That would just encourage MORE people to use it.
I don’t want this to happen because I know using cannabis triggers psychosis in people who are susceptible. My cousin developed schizophrenia from smoking cannabis. The more people who do cannabis the more who will be affected in this kind of way - and each and every one of those people’s lives matters.
We are already in a mental health crisis and legalising a substance that’s proven to have negative effects on some people’s mental health is not going to help with that.
It also risks increasing the number of people who start to do harder drugs. People don’t tend to do harder drugs before they’ve done cannabis - the gate to harder drugs only opens after they’ve done cannabis - so cannabis is a gateway drug. The fact that not everyone goes on to do harder drugs does not stop it from being a gateway drug for some people.
Also, smoking per se is unhealthy and buying cigarettes is being made illegal for people under a certain age - moving forward for the rest of their lives. Banning people from buying cigarettes while simultaneously legalising cannabis sends a contradictory message, doesn’t it? Comparisons with alcohol don’t work either.
Alcohol is already legal - we can’t put that genie back in the bottle, but that doesn’t mean we should unleash another one.
Using cannabis for medicinal reasons is entirely different to using it for recreational purposes so that’s irrelevant to this debate. Cannabis can be legal medicinally while still being illegal recreationally: this applies to many different drugs.
I suppose legalising cannabis might make money through tax, I don’t know about that, but I do believe the trail of wasted and/or unproductive lives it would leave in its wake would soon outweigh any financial benefit.

What a boon for crisp and snack companies if this goes ahead. I’m going to get shares in walkers now

@bombastix

decriminalising doesn’t solve your neighbours. They won’t change. What changes them is likely much much stricter rules on housing. That kind enforcement which means they have to leave. This can be dealt with, but clearly no one cares about smoking That’s pretty much my exact point. There are insane levels of anti social behaviour going on in some places and the HAs struggle to tackle that. Smoking is so far down the list of their priorities that it’s nowhere near being dealt with. So it’s all very well shouting for legalisation from, what in effect, are your ivory towers, but for the millions of us in social housing, many of who already see the effects of cannabis use, it’s us who has to deal with the practicalities of legalisation. And those will be a lot worse than we’re dealing with currently because as I’ve repeatedly said, major drug dealers are not going to suddenly go straight and lose their drug revenue.

I don’t disagree that many cannabis dealers are in practice teeny circles of people buying kilos and splitting them. Most low level dealing is done by children, which is desperate. The choice of children is deliberate because of a) the lesser penalties given to them and b) their lack of judgment. Cannabis dealing via gangs depends on this structure. It is countrywide. We need to break that up and pull what are mostly stupid young teens from something that is going to ruin their lives and others. A legal market doesn’t prevent it all, but it would shrink the benefits of gangs who would be operating in a smaller market I disagree. The people running those stupid young teens are still going to want their flash trainers. The people running them are still going to want their flash cars. And the people running them are still going to want their flash houses. I only had a very quick Google but I can’t see any studies to show that arrests for large scale drug smuggling has dropped in countries where cannabis has been legalised or decriminalised. Their money is going to come from somewhere, and I don’t think it’s going to be legal.

I suspect that's true with kids. Dogs, maybe not, I have heard of dogs eating cannabis that isn't meant to be edible at all.

@RaininSummerthey don’t contact the job centre about the job applicants no, but the job centre contacts the companies and asks how the applicant was in the interview. To check they haven’t deliberately scuppered their chances of the job.

I don't really find comparisons to alcohol that useful tbh.

The basic differernce is that while cannabis is simply a drug that people take to change their perceptions, alcohol, although it can be used as a drug, is also a food, and can be and often is used as such.

Historically alcohol products were primarily a means of preserving harvested fruits, grains, and other vegetation for human use - you can pick grapes, or corn, and they will only be good for so long. Ferment them and they will last longer and also have some advantages over water where contamination is a factor. In the middle ages for example quite a lot of people's daily intake of beer accounted for a good portion of their caloric intake.

If you distil the products like wine or grain liquor, you are then preserving all those calories in a very small amount of space that will last indefinitely, so your extra harvest will not be lost to rot, mold, or mice.

The amount of available product in the past was kept in check because of the limits or agriculture and production. It was the industrialisation of the production processes that led to the easy availability of strong cheap booze, and that has of course been a problem for many people.

However, I don't think that changes the fundamental fact that alcohol is a food product as much as a drug.

I think the point on crime reduction is that on a kind bloody obvious scenario then if you legalise then you stop allocating resources to enforcement and that element of crime declines. And in some areas where there has been legalisation there has been a decline in associated crime.Largely because dealers move their markets to places where they can totally dominate.

People don’t have personality transplants when they use drugs. We probably all know nasty alcoholics and nicer ones. The same is true for weed smokers. You will not change them. About all you can do is change the rules on social housing to be much stricter than they are, which is cheaper and easier than securing criminal convictions. You would have to change tenancy rules and probably have on site enforcement.

Arsehole people don’t respond to anything less than a personal consequence. If they weren’t dealing weed it would ketamine or coke smashed with dental powder. If you could make their market smaller and their influence less I would say it’s worth it. The cannabis market isn’t totally clean in other countries due to legalisation but it is a lot better than we have in the UK.

In the US there has been some research but results are contentious as different studies seem to have different findings! As far as I can tell, most likely seems to be that gang/organized crime goes down, but non-gang property and violent crime goes up. But there have been confounding factors which might account for at least some of the changes in crime rates.

Most places that legalize cannabis don’t target cannabis dealing for years before legalization, so you wouldn’t expect to see arrests for large scale drug smuggling go down after legalization.

Yawn o rama. Legalise it. Tax it.

I don't see how they can legalise it when they are talking about making cigarettes illegal for people born after a certain date.

At a minimum we need to analyse what has happened in all the countries that have recently legalised it. I don't see the rush - why not wait until there is a few years of data to look at?

If they do legalise it then I just hope it doesn't become mainstream culture like I've seen in the US. After it was legalised there I went to visit family and was shocked. Massive billboard signs advertising cannabis, shops all over the place, the horrible smell when you're walking down the street as people are smoking it everywhere. Worst of all though were friends and family just using it openly expecting that everyone was ok with it. It's one thing if people use it privately in their own homes, but I don't particularly want it to become a social activity that I'm regularly exposed to or expected to be ok with.

I smoked it when young.felt out of it after for a few days. If legalised surely. More chance to drive look after DC while stoned.i think it's a bad idea .the poor little girl who fell 6 storeys to her death while her mum smoked weed. Enough drugs already

I live in Canada, where cannabis has been federally legal now for several years. One of the good things about this is that you can just walk into the cannabis store and buy whatever strength, strain, smell or form factor you like. They have sodas, chocolate bars, sweets, all sorts. If you don't want to ingest something crazily strong, you don't have to - you can buy something more mild and choose how much of it you use. Buying from street dealers, you often have no clue what you're getting and that just isn't the case when buying from a store. They also have a return policy if it you don't like it or you have problems. Can you imagine trying to do that with a street dealer?!

I used to be a fairly prolific weed smoker when I was at university. I have close to zero interest in it now, but if I ever do feel like enjoying a gummy or a joint at a weekend or in the evening, it's really easy to go and get one.

I think people assume that availability always results in an increase in consumption - it doesn't.

Both of which society is trying together people to cut down on if not give up.

Cannabis is also not a uk drug ( like tobacco). It’s an import. Unlike alcohol which the northern hemisphere has had for millennia. Cancel it as being part of our colonial past ( I too really dislike it)

The quality and selection of cannabis products from dealers is far lower than you can buy from the store in countries where it's legalised. Even if you're saving money, it isn't always that appealing because you're not getting exactly what you want, and you can't be sure of the dosage or the freshness, etc. The dealers here in Canada don't sell cannabis which is stronger than that you can buy in the store.

Of course there will still be some black market activity but on the whole, legalisation reduces the ability of dealers and organised crime to profit from cannabis sales, and collects large amounts of tax revenue for the government instead - all money which can be spent on things like policing, medical research or on healthcare itself.

I dislike the smell, but not liking things doesn't make me support banning them.

Why has it become so prolific through ?
I don’t think police prosecute anymore so people walk around blatantly smoking & in their gardens & homes
it’s a blight on people who hate the smell , it’s vile .

The UK is actually the biggest producer and exporter of cannabis

Yes. If it wasn't they wouldn't give it to women during childbirth.

Do they?? They gave me fentanyl

No. It’s not a gateway drug .