Thank you for a good piece and fruitful dialogue.

One thing that does concern me is your comment:

“The Dutch experience undoubtedly increased marihuana use and at a time of change in the strength of the drug, far more people are harmed by the drug personally.”

There is as much, if not more, evidence to suggest usage of cannabis in Holland amongst locals went down after decriminalisation, and countries like Portugal can also boast the same. Usage amongst children reduced dramatically, and this after all is the result we are all after:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html

The mention of “stronger strains” is something that concerns me when it comes to educated debate. To suggest the west, and indeed, the UK has advanced the botanical traits of cannabis in ten years of mass domestic cultivation is simply harmful to our international relations and displays yet more western arrogance. Cannabis has not become super strength, it is simply bad quality product in the UK. The super strength ethos is simply media hype and should be remembered to be so. The argument to keep tighter (oxymoron with current law) grips on cannabis because we have stronger strains is tantamount to arguing a case for alcohol to be kept illicit due to the harms of moonshine and hooch in prohibition America. The state created the problem, and then argues a case based on its own platform of non control. The Wootton report from 1968 hinted that this would be the result of a prohibition model in the UK and cannabis policy. Some science on the cannabis potency:

http://www.badscience.net/2007/03/reefer-badness/
http://www.badscience.net/2007/07/blah-blah-cannabis-blah-blah-blah/

Taking all other queries out of the equation, and whether you believe we have super strength cannabis strains OR that it is simply a bad product cultivated by dealers, we agree that street cannabis is dire in quality and effect; then there truly is only one way to end this stream of bad quality cannabis, and that is regulation. Without regulation, product is set to worsen from this point on.

It still remains interesting; the figures on cannabis and health:- to suffer from cannabis abuse, you need contributing factors: profuse use, developing age, environmental factors. Once more, as the current law stands, a proper harm reduction programme cannot be initiated as it will be seen to condone an illicit substance. And when children have such easy and ready access to cannabis, we need to ensure that it is harder for them to obtain and make clear the harms associated with cannabis use in youngsters. Cannabis has become feral in the UK, we are now one of the worst countries for abuse and quality, it is prohibition that has created this problem as it has with all substances. The charity Rethink were instrumental in their stance with cannabis and harm reduction in youngsters, and yet, they were credited with the reclassification DESPITE the fact they were quite clear that this was not their intention and did not advocate this; the charity simply wanted more studies and further public education with regards to cannabis. All their recommendations have not been heeded and the organisation is also somewhat dismayed at the affair:

http://www.rethink.org/how_we_can_help/news_and_media/press_releases/rethink_cannabis_ed.html
http://www.rethink.org/how_we_can_help/news_and_media/briefing_notes/briefing_cannabis.html

Interestingly though, cannabis at its worst in society still cannot compare to alcohol run at its best, the pathways to problems report that the government tried to push under the radar addresses this issue, so when concern is added to the debate of higher prevalence in cannabis use, it shifts stance somewhat on outlooks. With alcohol abuse, we focus on the individual and do not set aside a campaign to demonise the substance, with cannabis, the substance draws the attention and not the abuse. We need to treat the symptoms of abuse and not focus on differing substances. Cannabis poses little threat to society, this is invariably the closing statement of the studies, but the news headlines don’t tend to print the full results instead focusing on the shock tactics of cannabis. The figures of cannabis harms are quite favourable, and any other substance it would probably be regarded as a success, but with the social compass slightly askew, these low figures of harms act as damning evidence.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6902240.ece

“To prevent one case of psychosis, it would be necessary to stop at least 2,800 men aged 20 to 24 from smoking the drug heavily, or 4,700 men aged 35 to 39. For women, it would be necessary to dissuade at least 5,470 smokers in the younger age group, or at least 10,870 in the older one.

For light cannabis use, a single case of psychosis would be prevented only if more than 10,000 young men or nearly 30,000 young women were to stop smoking the drug.”

I am thankful to noble house for addressing the issue of drugs and the current model, it is a much needed debate and one in which science needs to play a big part; faith within the scientific community and the public is very much on the wane after last years events. As this Freedom Of Information Act shows:-

http://www.drugequality.org/ico_press_release.htm

…the previous government had no basis for decision on drug classification other than “cultural” reasons, and this goes someway to show why such confusion, and dare I say it, anger is involved with regards to drugs in the UK.

Thank you Baroness Meacher for the debate, and thank you Baroness Murphy for allowing me to reply.

With Respect, Jason.

I would like you to read this item and raise this in the next PMQ’s if possible, this does not just cover the prohibition of a substance that is scientifically less damaging than alcohol but raises real questions about the mechanisms the government have used to suppress information that is in the public interest which also undermines the legitamacy of the current drug laws…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/opensecrets/2010/06/home_office_error_reveals_how_foi_request_handled.html

We could be saving up to £19 billion in prohibition costs and thousands wasted lives & un-deserved criminal records.

Dealers are the criminals, not people who use drugs, they should be helped if they require it.

We all know drugs legal, prescribed or illegal can cause untold harm and deaths.

But the current cost in money and wasted potential (Who will employ someone with a criminal record for drugs) to the UK ecomony cannot continue for much longer.

How the government can sanction alcohol (40,000 deaths) & tobacco (114,000 deaths) and still criminalise cannabis (1 death) when it could be a massive untapped tax revenue source to help clear the countries debts is beyond me.

I have been on strong prescription pain killers for most of the last two years and I know canabbis works just as well but I cannot risk using it as a full time alternative medication as I would loose my very well paid job if I got a criminal record for possession or growing my own for personal consumption.

So from a purely selfish point of view I would love to see decrimilisation and a 5 plant permit for personal use grows to be implemented – then I wouldn’t have to deal with criminals to obtain pain relief (or some social smoke) or look over my shoulder every time I want to smoke a joint. Afterall I’m paying for it with my tax-paid salary.

If I’m not hurting anyone else & I’m personally responsible for what I am doing to my body I should be allowed to what I want to, isn’t that true empowerment?

Feel free to contact me on this subject.

‘Sex’ even without the Drugs is generally still a lightly-volatile subject, with violent subsidiary levels mainly ‘Propagation through Pregnancy’ on the one hand versus ‘Prostitution for Profit’ on the other.

A propos the Sex-Industry (still without the Drugs), by women-workers for normal heterosexual men;
those women-workers should be legally required to show a sex-microskills- qualifications ID card.
This ID card should give the last dates of attendance and qualification at specific training courses, i.e. in the several knacks of the ‘business’; which each such worker, even when totally ham-fisted, unfeeling, rushed and robot-like, professes to have (but does not).

Then there’s an inter-industrial ‘value for money’ issue, too:
I could go to a ‘massage club’ and pay £50 to be ‘massaged’ for twenty minutes by a naked young woman (who is forbidden to let me kiss her or touch any of her erogenous zones);
or
I could go to a Shiatsu practitioner, pay £25 and receive a whole hour of highly-skilled gentle and understanding full-body touching and energy-balancing, and go away feeling I’d received many more times satisfaction than £25 worth, and a whole happy worldful of better results than the £2.50 per minute ‘Sex-Industry’ ‘worker’ could or was allowed to ‘provide’. [The one was doubly-beautiful (‘education’) the other doubly-dumb (‘sex’)].

{Well! That might have happened only to an old friend of mine.
(Nevertheless, Lords, Ladies and Public; some-one has to start telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, wouldn’t you think ? ) }.

“There’s no gain without pain”.
There are sliding-scales of ‘pain’, and of ‘discomfort’, and of ‘pleasure’.

Some ‘pain’ is enjoyable; take for instance the discomfort making you stretch ever so slowly and gently after you’ve been sitting at the computer for three hours (NB which should have been no more than one hour at a time, but let’s not be red-herring’d); back-pain slowly transforms through ‘discomfort’ and into ‘gentle stretchability’.

A leg-wound healing, but driving you mad with a new need to scratch it.
Carefully (but as quickly and strongly as bearable) you have a strong urge to scratch it, until it is bordering on painful from the scratching alone.

There are ‘bad’ pains, that are telling you ‘Stop! this is torn flesh we’re into here !, this is an injury, Stop!;
And there are ‘good’ pains that simply say ‘that’s far enough’ or ‘tricky but on-the-mend.
A parallel is in learning a new skill, which always feels ‘awkward’ or ‘wrong’, until you’ve achieved some progress.

And here, I think, is where formal-argumentation’s ‘mind-microskills’ can help:
whilst learning a new skill feels awkward, feeling awkward does not necessarily mean you are learning a new skill.

Not ‘preaching at you’; simply passing the time-of-day in your obviously drug-free company.
Most of these thoughts are truisms; but like The Lord’s Prayer they can be frequently remindful.
Thank you.

jsdm.

Each body-movement ‘function’ has an equivalent brain-mind ‘function’, and divides ‘see-saw-like’ into two elements thus:
Weight (‘Sensation’ & ‘Attention’) into Firm or Gentle (stipulative synonyms Strong or Light);
Space (‘Thinking’& ‘Intention’) into Direct or Flexible;
Time (‘Intuition’ & ”Decision’) into Sustained or Quick;
Flow (‘Feeling’ & ‘Progression’) into Bound or Free-flowing.

Other leaders than Rudolf Laban, in this arguably most essential of all human areas of know-how and knowledge, have provided subsidiary advices, such as
(“)To truly succeed (at piano-playing)you need to practice slowly; and then more-slowly; and finally very-slowly” (Hanon, or perhaps Czerny).

So I tutored my home-organ and piano pupils to keep halving the speed until they felt competent, then double the speed and if that is still too fast (namely to retain all the qualities and accuracies of the passage)to lower the metronome a fraction and half that playing-speed; and so on backwards and forwards.
In Brisbane I attended English & Ethnic dancing classes under a New Zealand choreographer (I was always the only man present) wherein she too was using the ‘half-the-speed’…’now double it’ technique, with later public-audition-winning success.

What we all seem to be wanting here is a sufficiency of human-movement support services such that no matter what your present fitness and abilities level(s)* you can find and enjoy an holistic-body-movement programme tailored especially and affordably for you.

It has proved useless leaving that to the ‘The Health Sector’, ‘The Education System’, ‘The Market’ and ‘The People’.

I can think of no more appropriate Place for this to be started, nurtured, and guided down to Earth than our very own House of Lords; my lady.

* Every – one has some bodyparts as fit as fleas, fiddles or Mallee-bulls; but has at least one bodypart that’s impaired, sick, architecturally-altered, ‘crippled’ or ‘been removed’; hence one’s contrasting levels of movement-ability, and the subsequent categorical need for an holistic movement-plan ‘tailor-made’.

‘Meaning’ refers to (mere)verbal-mind-words in dictionaries and encyclopaedias; whereas ‘sense’ refers to the sensory-experience of actually doing or having-done the thing (I think the Scandinavian thinker Wittgenstein made a strong point of this).

In formal-argumentation there are set-rules & symbols: and distinctions between different kinds of language. To be brief, ‘and’ means ‘also’, whereas ‘&’ means ‘both are true’; ‘≡’ means ‘both are the same’ whilst ‘≡ with a / through the middle of it’ means both are not/never the same (my Microsoft Word 7 does not include this latter symbol, I can not apologise).

T.O.N. quotes a sub-topic then offers five sentences four of which should be given some life-experience feedback: the fifth of which invites a rather more robust little ‘summary’ critique.
1 “…with both sex and drugs you get nothing for something”. [That’s a fair sort of snapshot; but }
With unloving and unskilful industrial-market-sex-for-pleasure you get something bad for something good; and with unloving and unskilful market-drugs…you get something bad for something good.
With ‘drugs’ some tight definiens are needed, such as ‘dangerous’, ‘social’, ‘class A, B, C, or D’;
and I venture to suggest that some tight & different definiens be overtly included in ‘sex’.

2 “That is why
the two industries work so well together” ? surely there are more reasons.

3 and 4: “It does not (really) matter whether (somebody) is selling sex or (selling) drugs;
“the punter (consumer) still gets nothing good (? The Discontinuous-mind could make a fortune
out of this ‘nothing’ in a court of law)(‘from’ otherwise with a mere ‘for’ the sentence ‘dangles’
at one end)) it”.

I have to go now; but very quickly

5. “If you got something for nothing then it just would not matter” I am replacing, whilst I am out returning an overdue ‘how to protect your computer’ book to the municipal library, with
“If you got something good for something equally good then it just wouldn’t matter”.

Alcohol is an intoxicant, rendering one unable to drive. Cigarettes cause cancer and death. Marijuana by any standard is comparitively harmless, yet one faces jail and worse for posession of even a small amount. Teenagers are criminalised as are the sick and peaceful folk who would simply like to unwind and escape the horros, that succesive governments cause our lives in the first place.

Not to mention the fact that in order to acquire such materials, one may encounter all sorts of unsavoury characters (willing to sell to all and sundry, including children). When will this new politics we are promised emerge, whereby we are able to police our own bodies without the hypocrisy of goverment intervention emerge I wonder?

Never I fear. I’m sure the coalition government will repeat the failings of it’s predecessors and ignore expert advice. The Portugese are more in tune with the 21st century the English. How much longer can the country actually afford this awful, draconian, fasistic war on drugs? or should I say War on certain types of drugs!!!

I was interested by JDSM’s comment about Laban and the 8 basic postulated positions. This is surely totally outmoded by now by the exemplary
use of Yoga and its multiple positions of bending just as far as you possibly can, and there being no (health) gain without pain.

At the Science universities which also instructed Physical eucation they seem to have moved across to Bio-physics, the analysis of body movements in a variety of ways.

That brings us back to the Noble, and very learned ,baroness’ loathing for sport, since much of that analysis which is helpful to
movers, and jumpers and runners, and the like, is used by sportsmen and women to improve their own performance, to see exactly how they may improve their movements.

If only it were used by the orthopaedic departments of hospitals who still believe
in wear and tear of the body as the main excuse for getting out the knives to tear apart vast numbers of people for hip replacement and knee replacement, whereas in fact their real need is for biophysical analysis.

How many really,really fat men say that their knee replacement surgery is due to “wear and Tear” and an “old sporting injury”, whereas in fact it is entirely due to the changed centre of gravity of the body due to a disgustingly fat stomach????!!!

The number of excuses the orthopaedic dept is very happy indeed to provide, beggars belief, in order to maintain a constant flow of customers through their “free clinical surgery” doors.

If they all had to pay, there would not be a third as many, although if we all drank coca cola we might still be as fat.

There is an answer to that too.