When people claim that cannabis doesn’t kill anyone, what they seem to be suggesting is that people don’t die from overdosing on the drug. In this limited sense, they may be right. But, make no mistake, cannabis is a killer.
For a start, smoking pot is a really good way of delivering a variety of toxic substances directly into your lungs. Then there’s the well-documented impact on mental health – especially among the young – triggering psychotic episodes, some of which result in suicide or violence to others. To these tragedies you can add various lower-level impacts on mental and physical functioning and the consequent toll of accidental deaths.
Determining the extent of cannabis-related deaths is difficult – it took decades of research to establish the facts for alcohol and tobacco. But the fact that conclusive studies exist for one set of substances and not another says nothing about their relative harm.
In any case, the comparison of harm done to individuals is not the only issue – one also has to consider the harm that different drugs do to entire cultures. Writing for the Telegraph blogs, Colin Freeman thinks through the impact of decriminalisation on British society:
The mind boggles, but there’s a serious point here. Criminalisation rarely succeeds in eliminating a drug altogether, but it does limit its availability and therefore contains its use. Freeman explains why this external constraint is important:
Mr Freeman knows Somalia well – not only as a foreign correspondent, but also as a former hostage of Somali pirates – he has therefore seen what happens when drugs take hold of an entire culture:
Yemen is indeed a very different place to Britain, but imagine what would happen to our culture if alcohol could be consumed in, say, pill form – and without causing hangovers. Do you think that, in such circumstances – and in the absence of legal prohibition – there’d be less drunkenness or a great deal more?