Britain isn’t ready to legalise cannabis – believe me

Is this stuff basically legal now? Certainly, the police care less than ever

Someone who lives near the corner of west London parkland where I work out twice a week likes an early-morning spliff. I’ve never seen his face, but as he takes up his usual position against the park railings between 8.30 and 9am to enjoy a quiet smoke, I’ll be crunching, lunging, squatting and Russian twisting (don’t ask) in a haze of wake and bake – wondering all the while: is this stuff basically legal now?

Certainly the police care less than ever before. Maybe they think it’s only a matter of time now. Or maybe they just don’t recognise the smell. After all, the Met Commissioner, Cressida Dick, admitted on Desert Island Discs at the weekend that she “simply cannot smell, ever, the smell of cannabis” – whereas I’d know it in a heartbeat. Eight years in LA – where it’s been fully legal for 13 months and as common a street smell as coffee or bakeries for far longer – will do that to you.

It’ll also challenge your beliefs on a subject that I, for one, thought my mind was made up about.

Witnessing the marijuana-fuelled descent into schizophrenia of a family friend as a child had always made me question how it could be defined as a “soft drug”. After all, here was a once wide-smiled, bright-eyed boy who took to turning up dazed, confused and, on one occasion, suicidal at our house after years of use. And although I’ve since understood that the skunk he’d been scoring on the streets of London was as far removed from a cannabis plant as a rubberised, psychosis-inducing chunk of chemicals can be, the memory of that transformation was vivid enough to turn me against even the idea of medical marijuana use, for years.

Then I moved to LA, where I watched the release on the face of a friend’s 84-year-old arthritic mother as she drank her cannabis tea and heard from another how vaping had lessened her nausea after chemotherapy. It was explained how the THC – which causes the high and also helps relieve pain, inflammation and nausea – and CBD levels – which can help treat seizures and counteract that high – can be adjusted to target individual ailments in medication. And as soon as Billy Caldwell’s mother began campaigning for her 13-year-old epileptic son to be given cannabis oil, I was behind her.

Billy received his first legal dose in Britain on Saturday after that campaign, and the one waged by the family of six-year-old fellow epileptic Alfie Dingley, finally prompted a change in the law, making it legal on prescription by NHS specialists. And when Charlotte Caldwell described the moment as “a huge step forward for us

in the UK – and not only Billy”, I was inclined to agree with her. The fact that this new law places us among the most liberal countries in Europe doesn’t worry me. It feels like progress. But should further legalisation necessarily follow? I don’t think so.

Because although regulation undoubtedly makes cannabis – and all drugs – safer, and it has already been estimated that the legal marijuana industry in the US could generate more than $132billion in tax revenue, I’ve lived through that change in LA. I’ve watched Medmen stores – the Argos of the pot world, where flat screens embedded in sustainable wooden worktops take you through the edibles, smokables and lotions on offer – spring up on every high street.

I’ve laughed in disbelief as I witnessed a neighbour order individually wrapped joints from the “Eaze” marijuana delivery app on his phone – and a man at his front door hand him a “childproof ” ziplock bag, seven minutes later (a pizza would have taken at least five times that).

And I have been bored: eyewateringly, shiveringly bored, by stoned friends, casual acquaintances, celebrities at award ceremonies, shop workers, waiters and random women in the street who have stopped to ask if they could stroke my aura. Which, granted, LA folk probably would have done before they were all bouldered by breakfast time, but there’s a deadening quality about this drug that makes it particularly pernicious – and no amount of logic has been able to cancel out that concern.

Add to that the fact that even California – the first state to legalise medical marijuana in the US – took 22 years to take things a step further, and maybe this just isn’t the time for us to be thinking in those terms.

Since we’re not, I’m afraid, as naturally go-getting as Americans, we might not benefit from the blunting and dulling down that would be an immediate consequence.

Now more than ever, we need to keep our wits about us.