Gordon Brown’s much anticipated decision to reclassify cannabis to Class B put tinder to the media powder keg last week - setting off a series of less than dispassionate responses from the great and the good. In a particularly lengthy and scathing dismissal in the Guardian, Simons Jenkins described this forecast move as ‘pseudo tough’, one that flew in the face of science and even as one that would even deliver a boost to the illicit drugs market. Professor Colin Blakemore, the country’s arbiter of what is science, weighed in on Sunday with the accusation that this would be Gordon Brown’s hamburger moment and that hysteria was getting in the way of science.

But in their thousands plus words of argument they avoided engaging with the issue that lies behind public demands for reclassification – that cannabis is very bad news indeed for young people and for parents’ ability to bring them up.  Both ignored the most interesting thing about the evidence invited by the ACMD: the total agreement from all sides that first and foremost cannabis is a harmful substance and that more needs to be done to educate the public - especially the young - of the danger to the mental, physical, and emotional health of users. Yet Blakemore did not view cannabis as being of particular concern – not beyond alcohol and glue sniffing – selecting the fact that only one 11-year-old in 150 has tried cannabis in the last year. He ignored other statistics which make his general argument about cannabis use being on the decline, less than sufficient to discount the significance of the concerns voiced. 

These are that:

• Britain is unique in Europe in the extent of cannabis use by young people. In Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Turkey the prevalence of first cannabis use by the age of 13 is 0 – 4%. In all other European countries it is 5% – 8 % except the United Kingdom.  Here the figure is 13 %.[1]  
• A large representative survey of 17-year-olds in France has shown that two thirds of respondents who smoked cannabis for the first time before the age of 12 were daily cannabis users by the time they were 17, whereas those who did not start smoking cannabis until the age of 16–17 were mostly occasional smokers.[2] 
• While the numbers of children using cannabis between the ages of 11–12 and 15–16 increases just twofold in other European countries in England the increase  is 15 fold - an order not seen in anywhere else.[3]

These are not facts to make either Gordon Brown or any other sensible British parent sanguine.

The debate about what is ‘science’ and what counts ‘evidence’ when trying to make policy ‘evidence based’ can go on for ever.  Few would pretend that the scientific base of the British drugs classification system is itself scientifically adequate let alone relevant in light of the complex realities of multiple substance abuse and mental health co-morbidity.  Many would find the restriction of the notion of drug ‘harm’ to a narrow pharmacological interpretation, primarily adjudged by mortality, insufficient. Where for example would schizophrenia risk and mental illness fit into this system? The fact is they won’t and can’t.  Where are probabilities of the negative social, educational and health outcomes and later drug dependence of early drug taking to be placed in this classification?  The fact is they can’t be.    Yet it is these that are the concerns of the parents, families and friends of those affected.   Does one obsolete pharmacological classification system mean these concerns are to be ignored in overall thinking about drug use risk?

Sadly while the ACMD remains wedded to a narrow interpretation of drugs harms debate is unlikely to progress.  Appealing to this official view of science makes it all too easy to sidestep the social and moral issues and the destructive repercussions of drug using behaviour. It allows one drug to be weighed against another when the reality is for those who use, ‘if you can’t get the drug you love, you get the drug you are near’ – alcohol included.

Instead of denying the problems caused by cannabis use or indeed any other drug journalists and academics would do well to give their thinking powers over to the most enlightened and effective ways to enforce the law, protect the young and support parents at their wits end.  They must recognize that the end goal of drug policy is to establish the most effective way of restricting drug use, particularly to children and   that, unpopular it may be, the evidence would seem to point in the way of prohibition, not legalisation, of being tough, not of being liberal.