There's an obvious flaw here though, cannabis is already illegal and the stronger stuff is already widespread, you risk not only normalising/popularising cannabis use but it doesn't necessarily mean the stronger stuff just goes away.
Do we have a problem with homemade illegal moonshine in the UK? Are there men out in the woods and on abandoned industrial estates across the country running moonshine stills to produce alcohol for the illegal local alcohol market? NO. Clearly not. Why is that? Because people in this country who drink alcohol prefer to have safe, legally-regulated, sophisticated (meaning a range of flavours/carbonation/ABVs etc), convenient to buy alcoholic products.
They don't want a crude unpleasant tasting high-ABV spirit which could contain toxic chemicals (like methanol, BPA, phthalates etc) and possession of which is ILLEGAL when there are far better and safer legal alternatives. Maybe a few alcoholics would buy locally produced >80% ABV illegal moonshine (because it's cheap) but the vast majority of people wouldn't touch it and certainly wouldn't want to associate with violent criminals to get it.
But during prohibition in the USA illegal locally produced moonshine was commonly drunk and distributed by the Mafia. Because most people who wanted to drink didn't have much of a choice if they had limited funds (smuggled alcoholic beverages were sometimes available) as alcohol was ILLEGAL. Notice a similarity?
If we had a LEGAL recreational cannabis market here it would take most of the customers away from the illegal market.
Most people who use cannabis are not problem users or addicts. They just enjoy using it in moderation/socially, (just like most people who drink alcohol use it sensibly). But in order to get cannabis they have to break the law and buy what is available on the black market (mostly Skunk - which is also the worst form of herbal cannabis from the point of view of causing mental illness).
As I showed with a reference in my last reply to you, people with a high genetic risk of schizophrenia, those in the prodromal phase of it and schizophrenics seem to have a high affinity for using cannabis. It turns out that this is not a coincidence, habitual cannabis use and addiction are now known to be inherited traits.
According to this genome-wide association study (published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Neuroscience) this subgroup of the population not only has an increased risk of developing schizophrenia from heavy use of cannabis, but they also have a genetic predisposition to being at high-risk of becoming habitual/addicted users of it. (Just like there is a genetic predisposition to being at high-risk of becoming an alcoholic.)
Given that illegal cannabis is widely available in this country (in its most risky form) then it is very likely that most people who are at risk from cannabis-induced schizophrenia are already using it. I mean pretty much everyone will come across it in their teenage years at school/uni now and if they have a genetic predisposition to becoming habitual users or addicts of it then they would probably have just continued using it.
Therefore, it's unlikely that legalising the safer forms of it would make much difference to this group. Few of them are likely to be cannabis-virgins who only start experimenting with it after it's legalised, (especially if there is an AIDS-style TV public education campaign in the run-up to legalisation to warn them).
Producing and selling Skunk will be a far less profitable business once the drug-dealers lose most of their customers. The customers who remain are likely to be the aforementioned genetically predisposed schizophrenics and people who cannot buy it legally (under-18s). But if drug-dealers target those two vulnerable groups then there will be much more support for aggressive Police efforts to crack down on them hard. (At the moment, many casual recreational cannabis users resent the Police for enforcing its prohibition, but if they could use it legally and their ex-drug-dealers started selling only to kids and the mentally ill then they would have no ethical qualms about reporting them to the Police.)
Secondary to that there are the health risks, both the fact it's often used alongside tobacco and also the previously mentioned mental health issues...
It is commonly smoked with tobacco in this country due to it mostly only being available in the form of crude plant material because it is ILLEGAL and drug-dealers have no interest in making it safer or the means to do it. In jurisdictions where it is legal it is available for vaping (which is known to be 20 times safer then smoking). If it's legalised, efforts can be made to find the safest methods of ingestion for it and those methods can be standardised and enforced by state-regulation.
I have discussed (above) the issue with people at high-risk of developing psychotic illness from heavy use of it.
while strong strains might have higher risk it's not like long-term use of controlled/legal cannabis which we say try to regulate to avoid the strongest strains won't also carry these risks to some extent too.
The risk of developing a psychotic illness from heavy long-term use is to a genetically susceptible subgroup of the population who are also genetically predisposed to having a high-risk of becoming habitual users or addicts. That group are likely to already be users and those that are cannabis-virgins before legalisation can be put-off using it by a public education campaign before legalisation.
People could also be offered genetic counselling before using it for the first time if they are worried because they have a history of mental illness in their family. (There is a DNA test which can detect the genetic susceptibility to having a high-risk of cannabis-induced schizophrenia.) If the government wanted another safeguard for this problem, they could even mandate that anyone who wants to buy legal recreational cannabis products must get signed off as not believed to be at high-risk by their GP first.
Medical use - fine, decriminalise small quantities used by individuals but legalisaiton doesn't seem like a good idea.
Decriminalisation stops naive youngsters having their futures ruined by getting a criminal record for cannabis possession, which is obviously desirable. But it doesn't do anything to stop the drug-dealers who are peddling the most dangerous forms of cannabis here (Skunk and Spice).
Cannabis has been illegal in this country for almost a century. It's gone from Class B, to Class C, then back up to Class B and now the right-wingers want it to go to Class A. It's about time we adopted a more sensible pragmatic approach to dealing with it. Clearly, the current prohibitionist policy is making it a very lucrative business for ruthless criminals and not protecting the most vulnerable people from it.
www.linkedin.com
journals.plos.org
covercannabis.com
thecannabisscientist.com
