NO CHANGE

Your special on cannabis contained a great deal of fascinating material, but
in the end failed to convince me that the government is wrong in its view
that the current illegal status of this drug should remain (Marijuana
Special Report, 21 February, p 23). Nor did it undermine the credibility of
the conclusion of the WHO report on the health effects of cannabis.

In response to your news item (p 4), the WHO has explained that the
prepublication changes to its report were part of the normal editorial
process: there is nothing sinister about removing an off-the-cuff comparison
between cannabis and tobacco when the report is not about tobacco in the
first place.

That the consumption of dangerous drugs such as tobacco and alcohol remains
lawful does not undermine the government's case against the legalisation of
cannabis. Suffice to say that both the WHO report and your own analysis
demonstrate abundantly the many reasons for believing that cannabis has
harmful physical and mental effects, both in the short and long term.

The British Crime Survey suggests that there are about 15 million people in
Britain who have used cannabis in the last month, compared with an estimated
12 million people who smoke cigarettes every day, and 42 million who drink
alcohol to a greater or lesser extent. The illegality of cannabis is one of
the main reasons why we don't have a cannabis problem which is just as big.

And that brings me to your interpretation of the Dutch experience, and your
statement that the leading researchers on this subject, Robert MacCoun and
Peter Reuter, "have concluded that 'reductions in criminal penalties have
little effect on drug use, at least for marijuana"'. That is a seriously
misleading quotation from the editorial summary of their article in Science
which appeared on 3 October last year (vol 278, p 47).

The article itself, in the critical passage (p 50) says that "there is no
evidence that the depenalisation component of the 1976 policy, per se,
increased levels of cannabis use. On the other hand, the later growth in
commercial access to cannabis, after de facto legalisation, was accompanied
by steep increases in use, even among youth." We have no intention of
conducting a similar experiment on the young people of the UK.

George Howarth, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, The Home Office,
London

New Scientist replies:

The MacCoun and Reuter article does indeed conclude that there was an
increase in cannabis use in the Netherlands during the 1980s. But as the
authors go on to say, the link with coffee shops "may not be causal; we have
already seen that recent increases occurred in the US and Oslo despite very
different policies. Second...throughout most of the first two decades of the
1976 policy, Dutch use levels remained at or below those of the US."
Throughout the 1980s, the prevalence of cannabis use in the Netherlands was
comparable to that in Germany, Sweden, Britain, France and Austria. To imply
that the Dutch policy backfired is therefore misleading.