QUEEN VICTORIA ON CANNABIS

The nineteenth century was a time before prohibition and drugs which are banned today have been put into the hands of local growers, smugglers and dealers. Nowadays, all illegal drugs are demonized to the extent that a national debate is denied because of the fear of a political backlash.
 
With psychotropic drugs the issue of their legality or illegality is left mostly undiscussed.  What do they actually do?  They enter the brain and change the way we think, sometimes radically and sometimes subtly, like coffee, the most widely consumed psychoactive drug in the world.

With legal drugs - tobacco, tea and alcohol - there is no problem in the context of possession.  There is a range of prescriptive drugs - tranquilizers, anti-depressants and anti-psychotics - which are legal when prescribed by a doctor.  But the illegal drugs are the ones that are deemed by the law-makers to be beyond the pale - prepared mushrooms, opium, heroin, LSD and MDMA.

I remember more than forty-years ago reading De Quincey's book Confessions of an English Opium Eater, I think it was called, and there seemed to be a naturalness about his experiences.  He first consumed the drug because of neuralgia.

De Qincey

Nowadays, the governments in most "modern" countries have discredited drugs which are illegal, assigning scientists to denounce the substances and who come back with advice to legalise as the only sensible way to control imbibing only to have the government ministers denouncing the scientists because they have not come to a conclusion which supports their anti-drug policies.

The nineteenth century law-makers were much more rational and it was Queen Victoria who was prescribed tincture of cannabis.  She must have been amused, of course.

Now Uruguay has legalised cannabis, representing a move towards decriminalising the drug. 

Sensibly speaking, it is hard, surely, to criminalise the taking of a plant growing in fields and at the side of the road.  How can this be controlled?

A bush at the side of the road in Kathmandu

And it must be admitted that some drugs do have a pleasant effect despite the fact that there are individuals who have a bent towards an addiction to coffee, tobacco, gambling and alcohol, the last of which is a anti-convulsant, a sedative that produces hypnotic effects.  Nicotine and caffeine promote cognition; and of course, opium controls pain.

During the 60s people became infatuated with drugs, especially the psychedelic variety; and there were drugs that were used around this time that were used to treat schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

How were these drugs discovered, the natural ones contained in the tobacco and cannabis plant for example?  My theory is that in prehistoric times, when evolution was still in its primary stages, people observed animals, how they foraged, and the effects the food had on them. 

It is quite possible that other drugs were discovered accidentally with people simply trying them out or taking them by accident.  It is said that in some way, drugs, like cocaine and tobacco, mimic our own brain receptors - the neuro transmitters.  How these plants trick our receptors might find a parallel in the natural world:  the chameleon's camouflage; the tiger's stripes: a stick insect in the branches of a tree; a flower's way of attracting insects for cross pollination in the colours and scent. 

Now designer drugs are keeping one step ahead of the law and nobody really knows how they work, only that they do.  And there must be many plants that contain substances which could be beneficial in the certain types of mental illnesses.

Maybe, to hark back to pre-prohibition days and let people take natural substances is the answer.  After all, what we do to our own bodies is ultimately our own responsibility.

Whose life is it anyway!

In Pashupatinath, Lord of the Beasts

The Agony and the Ecstacy

OR

It's happening again! Drugs are being classified according to the whims of government ministers, deeming the public unable to choose intelligently what kind of recreational medicament to imbibe.

As far back as 2003 MPs have argued that the drug should be downgraded and on par with amphetamines and cannabis regarding the law. They rightly recognised that taking ecstasy is an ephemeral activity and soon passed over by most people as they grow older.

At that time, research erroneously proved that ecstasy was extremely bad for humans after some monkeys died when fed a substance mistakenly thought to be the drug. In fact, it was a much more potent substance that had a poisonous effect on the primates.

Now, in 2009, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is intent on moving e's from a class B drug to a class A, on par with cocaine and heroin, despite the evidence that e's are quite harmless from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), appointed by the government to report directly to Jacqui Smith. Soon, for possession of this recreational drug, a user can face up to seven-years in prison.

JS is now listening to a po-faced advisor from the University of Swansea aptly named Parrot who tells us hourly on BBC24 that ecstasy is a "gateway" drug for people who readily move on to alcohol, tobacco and cannabis. One would think that being smokers, drinkers and/or cannabis abusers before or after taking e's was irrelevant here. And what e's are a "gateway" to, would be difficult to determine as those who move on to harder drugs may have been driven underground by legislation to buy from dealers who were pushing substances much more dangerous than e's.

He also tries to frighten the public with "memory deficits, sleep disturbances, depression, weakened immunity and sexual dysfunction" disorders, according to New Scientist. Well, there are a thousand other causes for these universal afflictions.

There are a couple of things to consider here. Firstly, should people be left to their own discretion when taking substances to change their consciousness, whether legal or illegal? And are the public and the politicians too gullible and naive in responding to media sensationalism? (There's no tautology here: gullible in the sense of accepting without question what the media is publishing; and naive in the context of being unable to consider the matter objectively.)

One response from a young lad was eloquently offered thus: "I'd just like to know where she gets the impression that 'young people' could give a fuck about her opinions either way."

Doesn't that kind of sum it up? As with the American attempt at prohibition, people, mostly kids, will experiment with ecstasy anyway, and I would guess, without a notion of who JS is anyway.

Another comment may have hit the mark more directly: "I'm beginning to think young Jacqui is taking substances far worse than ecstasy. Perhaps she drinks and maybe even smokes. How can alcohol and tobacco be legal when they kill thousands in this country and yet ecstasy that kills a few is made illegal?"

[Usually the deaths (about 30 a year) are caused by overheating or water intoxication.]

So, the AMDC's results will be ignored by JS and young people will be criminalised if caught through making a choice to take a drug that has been deemed safe by a commission that JS had herself appointed. There is a clear irony here that indicates a political rather than a rational judgement being made.

And the media! A professor with the curiously appropriate name of David Nutt of the University of Bristol jokingly compares the taking of ecstasy with "equasy" or Equine Addiction Syndrome. Horse riding, he maintains, is the cause of 350-accidents resulting in serious physical harm while those being acutely harmed by taking ecstasy is once in 10,000 hits. The obvious question is why is a relatively harmless drug banned when dangerous sports are not? The reason could lie in the reporting by the media.

According to the BBC website, "Nutt said a ten year study of media reporting found the likelihood of a newspaper reporting a death from paracetamol was one in 250, versus one in 50 for diazepam and every single death from ecstasy was reported."

More tangentially, more people are killed by bees, die on the seat in a loo, expire from alcohol poisoning, are crippled by an array of diseases by smoking, and commit suicide.
In 2005, a troupe from Edmonton in Canada were staying in my home. They were putting on a production of Irvine Welsh's Ecstacy for the Edinburgh Festival. At the end of the two-week run, one of the cast turned up with a bag of e's. As IW had attended the performance that evening I kind of felt obliged to try a tab. Guess what? I had a great night, fell in love with everyone, remembered to drink water to avoid dehydration, and I'm still here. Jacqui should pay attention to the experts she appoints to advise her office. Taking e's does not make people too stupid to see her phony gambit.