Gordon recently described skunk Cannabis as being “lethal” yet there is absolutely no data to substantiate this .

Merely a continuation of the trail of lies which caused Cannabis to be prohibited in the first place .

Legalise Cannabis and further restrict sales of alcohol and tobacco will result in a healthier population in this country .
It would also give us a good biofuel , better quality paper , a powerfull pain killer , good quality oil , a high protein food source and fabrics which last longer as they’d be made of hemp not cotton .

The Hemp/Cannabis ban over the years has been a disaster for the world .

What a complete and utter waste of resources, so Gordo is going to reclasify cannabis and have our over streched underpayed police force go round arresting people for possesion of the green herb. clogg up the court system with petty possesion cases, most of those tried will continue to use as they feel it is harmless.

fill up our jails even more whilst letting real criminals out.

another nonsensical headline grabbing policy on the hoof by Gordon clown.

Giving control of the cannabis market to criminals sounds like a great idea…

Will this be another Blair/Bush moment where ‘God’ told him to do it? Never mind what the drug experts say, Brown/god knows best?

Am i the only person in the country that finds this a very worrying situation? What will God tell brown to do next i wonder?..stop scientific research all together?

Gordon Brown has no idea what he’s talking about i’ve used cannabis daily for 30yrs and not once has it made me try another drug, aspertame which is found in a lot of food stuffs causes serious harm.

This debate is stupid.
People who smoke cannabis don’t really care if it’s a Class B or Class C, both are still illegal. Government reports show this.
At the moment both carry a 14yr imprisonment for dealing, with Class C it’s a max. of 2yrs for possession, Class B has 5yrs for possession. But in reality no one ever receives the max. 2yr penalty at the moment, so upgrading this max. prison time to 5yrs will do no difference as the max. is never implemented
The illegal status of cannabis still means that criminals run the growth and distribution and therefore make a very healthy profit, whilst at the same time the tax payers fork out billions each year trying to fight a futile ‘war on cannabis’. Lets face it since drugs became illegal, not only has the price of drugs plummeted, but the availability had rocketed. Well done prohibition!!!! Also due to the criminal stronghold over drugs there is no quality control over any illegal drug, making in some cases a perfectly harmless drug into a lethal drug. A good example of this is Ecstasy. On its own, it is a fairly safe drug, but when mixed with other contaminants to add weight, it can be turned into a very lethal drug.

Making cannabis a class B will not stop anything, all it will accomplish is to make the average person’s mother, father, son or daughter a criminal and in turn ruin their lives with regards to future travel and job prospects.

This is a very weak argument from an inept Prime Minister, who is going against science and a panel of experts in the belief he can salvage his campaign with this change of classification. It is a political stance, not a intellectual stance!

Let the voters send Gordon Brown a very clear message that he is totally wrong on this issue.

I’m glad to see that most people have sense on this issue. As it can be demonstrated by the american governement, Any sort of drug policy that would rely on prohabition fails miserabley…. I hope that the public would all understand the implications of the reclassification….Just a waste of tax payers money

The whole system needs an overhaul. There should be more categories. Ecstasy, for instance, should never be in the same class as heroin.

It should go like this:

A = Heroin and Crack
B = Cocaine
C = Ecstasy, Amphetamines, LSD
D = Ketamine, “Skunk” cannabis, other tranquillisers
E = Alcohol, weaker strains of cannabis

As a casual drug user I believe this to be the best system. It takes into account the social damage that crack, heroin and cocaine can cause, compared to other drugs such as ecstasy and ketamine, which can be used relatively safely at weekends by functioning members of society (some of whom probably work in YOUR office.)

THE EMPERORS NEW CLOTHES, VERY STYLISH, I ESPECIALLY LIKE THE CAPE, VERY POWERFUL

When over half the adult population uses canabis on a regular basis, i think it would be better to make it legal , tax it, remove the criminals from the distribution and put into place help for those people who get into madical trouble with it.

Look at everyone elses responses: facts, figures, sound reasoning and all you can say, max, is yes… good point!

Whoa! Hey guys lets all just chillax. I´m feeling a lot of negative energy being focused towards Max. Its not his fault he doesn´t understand our way of life. Now lets all skin up and explain it to him.

I happen to know that cannabis impairs a person’s judgement and affects his/her behaviour. A person under the influence of cannabis will, for example, be unfit to drive. It is why most large organisations have a D & A Policy to control the behaviour in the workplace of employees such as drivers or machinery operators whose impaired judgement or behaviour would be likely to cause damage or injury.

I suggest that the way to deal with cannabis is the same way that alcohol SHOULD be dealt with. Legalise it, regulate it, tax it and control the adverse effects of it. The message should be: Swill your beer or smoke your joint and so long as you don’t harm anyone but yourself no-one will bother you, but commit any type of offence while under the influence and you’ll be slammed up so fast your feet won’t touch the ground.

Everybody gets the choice and if they make the wrong choice they take the fall that goes with it. The message would soon get around. All it needs is the political and judicial will to get a grip of bad behaviour. The two things, of course, that we currently don’t have.

Well if he carries this ahead i hope you will all join me in london for a protest. I will be taking a fat ounce so they can watch me make a conscious decision to smoke it and NOT DIE!

Consider me there Shane! I shall also bring a fat oz, and some other ingredients to make the day a bit more interesting

This is just laughable, Gordon Brown is an absolute disgrace to humanity. The Gloomy Robot one has truly surpassed all previous depths of ignorance. Cannabis reclassification is an insult to our intelligence. To call Cannabis lethal is a joke, Cannabis lethal! seriously come on! This guy is running our country for gods sake, telling blatant lies and enforcing lies upon us. Democracy is dying in Gordon Browns authoritarian UK.

I think Gordon Brown is simply not listening to the people. Criminalizing everyone who uses cannabis to a greater extent then they already suffer is plain stupid. The war on cannabis and its users is totally immoral, we are all hard working tax payers aswell, and as adults do we not have the right to decide for ourselves what we choose to consume? Why should we be forced to buy from the tax-less, often import, black market where we can be exposed to much harder drugs by a government that thinks persucuting people over cannabis is better then quality control, safety and regulation of cannabis. Surely a government with the true well-being of its people at heart would see that these would be far better alternatives for all concerned. Lets just hope David Cameron is man enough for the job, as in my eyes its too late for Gordy..

Our police resources already cannot cope with the levels of drug culture in our country so I don’t see what they are going to achieve by spreading their resources even thinner.

There are far more people who die from alcohol and tobacco, so can’t see the argument for making less widely used drugs more legal.The impact of doing so is going to be almost zero (if there is an impact at all).

I’m not a drug user, but really feel the way forward is to legalise it and make a fortnue from taxes, not to mention a boost to tourism and the economy.

So Gord Almighty actually went and did it, the ****.

To “Heath Ledger” - its people like you that give cannabis a bad name. Why cane it ‘non-stop’ all day every day? It is the same as anything in life; you can have too much of a good thing. Moderation is the key, not criminalisation!

The plain fact is that NOBODY is going to be locked up for
5 years (if at all) for using cannabis. A law which people know is not going to be enforced simply encourages contempt for all laws. Another piece of nonsense from Labour? Or a calculated and cynical move in its tireless campaign to break down cohesion in society?

The idea that cannabis is, or could ever be, “fatal” is one of the most absurd things I’ve ever heard. IMO, the UK’s crackdown on Canabis is probably being strongly encouraged by the U.S.government, which, with more and more countries and its own States passing more liberal laws on this substance—which is illegal only due to politics (specifically the lobbying efforts of special interest groups such as the alcohol and pharm. companies)-and which is undermining their arguments that it is a dangerous drug. But if the U.S. can get countries to parrot their insane and absurd arguments, it lend them some credence, even if it is false.
Marijuana has no known toxic level; or, I should say, that the toxic level is so high that it would be impossible to reach, certainly through smoking. One would pass out from oxygen deprivation before they could reach a toxic level of THC within their bodies.
With vaporization, which burns only the cannabinoids, but none of the toxic smoke (such as that found in cigarettes) smoking is now even safer.
If there were a way to reach a toxic level of THC–and this may not still be possible–the surest way to do so would be to over-dose on the pharmaseutical drug Marinol, which is pure synthetic THC.
It’s also very hypocritical, since THC is the ingredient in marijuana which makes one “high” that the whole plant is a Schedule One substance in the U.S.–meaning that “it has no medical value and is highly prone to abuse.”
Yet Marinol, which is pure THC, much stronger psychoactively (because it has none ofthe other cannabinoids found in the natural plant which tend to slightly lessen, or smooth, the efects of THC), is classified as a Schedule 3 drug, which means: “it has many medical uses and is unlikely tobe abused”!!!
Total hypocrisy, and totally proving that marijuana’s Schedule (in America, I think the 1,2, and 3 Schedules correspond pretty much exactly to Britain’s A,B, and C schedules) has NOTHING to do with health effects or science, and everything to do with politics, based on the incorrect assumtions that legalizing cannabis would cause a surge in its use, and that it would cut into the profits of–to name the two most concerned–the alcohol and pharaseutical business.
This is not true. Some people like to drink, and do not like and would not smoke marijuana, legal or not. Regulation would get drug dealers off the street, and make it harder for minors to get their hands on–because drug dealers don’t card. But if it were legalized,taxed, and regulated, it would help allkinds of problems, from the arresting and imprisonment of otherwise law-abiding, tax-paying citizens, to regulating it in a maner similar to alcohol, and getting drug dealers off the street, as well as making it harder for minors to obtain.
Just because they legalize something, doesn’t mean people who don’t like its efects are going to start smoking it. The ‘drug war” has had almost no effect on the amount of people who smoke marijuana, and this number would not rise in any significant way. Finally, it would provide the failing U.S. economy with both tax revenue and an alternative source for bio-fuels that didn’t cause food prices to rise.
Finally, since oil is in such shortage, there hundreds of products that can be produced from marijuana’s brother hemp that would save this precious and declining resource for more important things. In fact, in some ways I wonder how much hemp has played a role in keeping marijuana illegal by also rallying textile companies and oil companies behind the alcohol and pharmaseutical companies in lobbying to keep it illegal…Plus, the government just doesn’t want to admit they were wrong (lying) to the American public for years.
Finally, recent scientific studies have also shown that marijuana can retard or actually stop the growth of several types of cancer cells, notable prostate and brain cell cancers.
It is time for the world to base its legislation on science, reason, and compassion, when it comes to this centures-old, completely natural, un-chemically processed substance, instead of the politics of fear and the desires of special interst groups. Prohibition does not work; we realized this long ago, and decided that to legalize a much more dangerous substance: alcohol. What makes sense for a far more dangerous drug, certainly makes sense for cannabis. Prohibition, and the imprisonment of otherwise law-abiding, tax-paying citizens does FAR more harm than this gentle, all natural substance could ever do. As far as stronger strains: when the marijuana is stronger, people smoke less, and it is only make stronger through traditional farming techniques. Just as one would eat less habanero peppers than jalapenos, so it is with higher grades of cannabis.