Dopes duped by cannabis kings

OBSERVE this trio of MPs got up like 1930s babies. All they need are dummies in their mouths and they would look like enormous infants waiting for their next bottle feed. And, indeed, this is not a wholly misleading idea.

The three are Lib Dem Sir Norman Lamb, knighted because of his concerns about mental illness (of which more later), Labour’s David Lammy, and the ‘Conservative’ Jonathan Djanogly.

All three are dressed in this daft way in case they contaminate the product at a huge, legal marijuana farm in Ontario. They allowed themselves to be observed by the BBC (this now stands for British Boosters of Cannabis, I think) on a ‘fact-finding’ mission to see how Canada’s legalisation of marijuana was going. Well, I could have told them. It’s going quite badly.

Big Dope campaigners always claimed the change would drive criminal gangs out of the trade, and pretended that legalisation, by allowing ‘regulation’, would somehow lead to controls on its terrifying strength. This has turned out to be untrue in Canada and the other testbed for this crazy idea, Colorado. In both places, legal shops have had to keep the strength of their product high because of competition from cheaper, untaxed criminal sellers.

And those criminals still prosper. Figures for the fourth quarter of 2018, from Canada’s state statistics bureau, show illegal sales totalled $4.7 billion – 80 per cent of the $5.9 billion spent on marijuana.

Even the BBC’s soppy and unbalanced programme filmed Canadians ordering, obtaining and smoking illegal marijuana with total ease. The individuals involved didn’t seem worried they would get into trouble. So how could the three MPs come back and say in all cases that similar legalisation was bound to come to Britain in ten years, and in two cases that it should do (Mr Djanogly wasn’t sure)?

Mr Lammy came out with the nonsensical ‘prohibition isn’t working’ claim as if the country wasn’t full of chief constables announcing they no longer act against marijuana possession. What ‘prohibition’, Mr Lammy?

The ignorance and complacency of these people about the mental illness and the violence that often accompanies it is astonishing. Even legalisers reluctantly admit its use is closely correlated with mental illness. Odd, then, isn’t it, that the knighted Norman Lamb seeks to legalise a drug whose users so often end up in the locked wards of mental hospitals, as their shattered families grieve for the people they used to be? Shouldn’t he give the knighthood back, in that case? And has the BBC ever highlighted any of these tragic cases on a major programme?

How can grown men be so gullible? Much of the urgent pressure to legalise marijuana for general use is based on the heartwrenching claims that it might be a useful medicine. Well, maybe it is, but what justification would that be for allowing its open sale on the streets, where it will make many of its users incurably ill?

I look for any major figures willing to oppose this dreadful, irreversible mistake before it is too late, and I find none. Are there no grown-ups left in our establishment? Are they all naive and brainwashed babies?