DOCTORS URGE LEGALISING OF CANNABIS

A GROUP of doctors who specialise in public health are calling for cannabis
to be legalised for medicinal and recreational use.

The group has tabled a motion for debate at the British Medical
Association's annual conference next month calling for a change in the law
to help curb the spread of hard drugs.

The doctors are members of the Scottish committee for public health
medicine and community health, and they argue that classifying cannabis
alongside heroin and cocaine gives young people the idea that taking hard
drugs is no more dangerous than smoking a joint.

Their motion, that the BMA should "support the legalisation of cannabis for
medicinal and recreational use", was put before the BMA's public health
conference by the committee earlier this month but was defeated.

George Venters, the committee chairman, said: "I think more than half the
population would support legalisation if you laid out the evidence." The
BMA supports research into the development of the active ingredients of
cannabis for medical use but does not back smoking of the raw drug to
relieve pain as experts say it contains too many contaminants.

A spokeswoman for the BMA said: "The Board of Science looked at the issue
of recreational use last year and decided that the issue of legalisation
was outside their remit."

Dr Brian Potter, Scottish secretary of the BMA, said: "What [the committee
is] trying to say is that there are other dangerous drugs which are
legalised and cause a lot more deaths. Certainly in Scotland, 35 people a
day die from tobacco use. Maybe we should be focusing on that rather than
putting our energies on cannabis."