CANNABIS PROHIBITION MORE HARMFUL THAN USE

EVAN BLACKIE (28.9.00) is mistaken in believing that the medicinal and
industrial uses of cannabis are separate issues to the debate about its use
as a recreational drug. The 1937 Marijuana Tax Act in the United States was
designed to sabotage a resurgent hemp industry, and its
environmentally-friendly science called chemurgy, using bureaucracy under
the guise of protecting society from the newly fabricated "marijuana
menace". The medical profession protested against this vociferously until
the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (a tax department no less) prosecuted
thousands of doctors for prescribing cannabis.

Mr Blackie is also mistaken for thinking that hemp crops could be to
camouflage the growing of the "real thing". Industrial cannabis is planted
at a density of 400 plants per square metre whereas only two marijuana
plants are grown per square metre. Hemp is stalky and grows tall whereas
marijuana is bushy and shorter. Marijuana growers would not grow their
plants near hemp, anyway, because of the risk that pollination would ruin
their seedless sinsemella (the seeds are very nutritious but non-psychoactive).

Mr Blackie is not mistaken, however, for alluding that the debate should
not progress to examining what form of decriminalisation should be
employed, as every major study into cannabis and its use, from the Indian
Hemp Commission's in 1894, to the New Zealand Health Committee's in 1998,
has found that cannabis prohibition is far more harmful than cannabis use.

J. Kearney, Dalmore