‘Rest of the world is laughing at us over cannabis use policy’
MP Paul Flynn is about to make his latest push to legalise the medical use of cannabis and ‘shatter the permafrost of ignorance’. Political editor David Williamson reports...
VETERAN Welsh MP Paul Flynn was elected for another five-year term last month at the age of 82 and he is about to make a new attempt to shatter the “permafrost of ignorance” and secure the legalisation of the medical use of cannabis.
Mr Flynn remains one of the fiercest critics of the country’s drugs laws and claims that “prohibition that is killing people”.
The Newport West Labour MP argues that the Commons has been guilty of “culpable cowardice” for nearly half a century and that “countless people have died or suffered as a result”.
In October he will present a Bill in a bid to put legalisation on the political agenda and he will ask MPs if they are ready to “join the world” in reform of laws that “kill more people than the drugs”.
Mr Flynn says he has “never taken an illegal drug” in his life but he considers the medical use of cannabis to be of “immense benefit”.
Arguing that Britain is out of step with the policy in other countries, he said: “I believe that the rest of the world will leave us behind; they are laughing at us now.”
As he begins his latest push to change the law, here are a selection of his recent observations about cannabis, the law, and the impact on ordinary people:
He sees no appetite for changing drugs laws in government...
Mr Flynn wrote in an article for Vice magazine: “There is no sign that a single brain cell in the civil service or government has been flickered into new thinking by the current global disillusionment with drugs law.”
He claimed: “The abiding ethos of the civil service is the unimportance of being right.” He blames Richard Nixon for Britain’s drug laws... He wrote: “Until 1973, before drugs policy as we know it was introduced, tinctures of cannabis had been medically available for over 100 years in the UK. In its natural form, it has been used for 5,000 years as a medicine in all continents. “Our country was swept along with the international hysteria provoked by President Nixon’s missionary zeal to eliminate all illegal drugs use.”
He says Britain is out of step with the rest of the world...
“Twenty-nine of the USA’s 50 states have provision for the supply of medicinal cannabis,” he wrote. “In Canada, it has also been legalised. In Europe, medicinal cannabis is produced in the Netherlands and is available in Italy, Finland, Switzerland and Germany.”
He fears today’s laws put people at the mercy of criminals...
“Our present law forces users onto the black market, where the most hazardous forms of the drugs are marketed by irresponsible dealers and consumed in the most dangerous ways,” he warned. “A female police officer forced into early retirement by MS had no choice but to buy her cannabis from the petty
criminals she once locked up.” He has encouraged people to ‘break the law’... Earlier this month he encouraged civil disobedience at Westminster.
Hansard records him telling MPs: “We have to call on those who put up with the barbaric stupidity and cruelty of a Government policy that denies seriously ill people their medicine of choice to perform acts of civil disobedience...
“I know that Members are not supposed to do this, but I call on people to break the law, to come here and use cannabis and see what happens – to challenge the authorities to arrest them.
“That is the only way to get through to the Government’s mind, which is set in concrete. The law is evidence free and prejudice rich.”
However, he said that reports he wanted people to “smoke cannabis on the parliamentary estate” were not accurate because “mixing cannabis with the deadly drug tobacco is unwise and unnecessary”. He also described cannabis tea-drinking on the Commons terrace... In the same debate he paid tribute to Elizabeth Brice, a campaigner who championed the medical use of cannabis. He said: “She suffered severely from multiple sclerosis, and she came to the House and collaborated with me in a terrible crime on the Terrace. I supplied her with a cup of hot water, with which she made and drank cannabis tea.
“According to the rules of the House, and the policy approved by the Government – and, sadly, the Opposition too – she would have been liable to go to prison for seven years, and I would probably have been accompanying her.”
He said ministers have kept their real views about drugs hidden...
He said: “Mo Mowlam would send me letters with a little handwritten note on the bottom saying, ‘See you in the Strangers tonight to tell you what I really think.’
“When we got together after she stood down, she intended to write a book urging the end of drug prohibition. She could not do it in office and, sadly, she died before the time came.”