When Straw compared pot to Thalidomide

THE Home Secretary, Jack Straw, is refusing to allow doctors to prescribe
cannabis to their patients because he fears that it could be as dangerous
as Thalidomide, writes Graham Ball.

Thalidomide was a medicinal drug given to pregnant women in the 1960s as a
remedy for morning sickness and nausea but was later found to be the agent
responsible for widespread defects and abnormalities in babies. Mr Straw
made this remarkable comparison in a televised confrontation with the
satirist, Mark Thomas, which was broadcast on Channel 4 last Wednesday.

The Home Secretary said: "It does not follow that because there are no
deaths from a drug, it is therefore not harmful. There was a drug which was
quite good for its original purpose in the 1960s, called Thalidomide but it
turned out to have terrible side-effects. It is said that the continual use
of cannabis can cause personality disorder and many other serious side
effects."

The programme makers had surprised Mr Straw by arriving at his constituency
surgery at the Ivy Road Community Centre in Blackburn with three men who
confessed to using cannabis for medical reasons.

"You could see he looked worried when we turned up but I told him we wanted
a serious discussion and after about an hour, when he had seen all of his
other constituents, he decided to go for it," said Thomas, a new-wave
satirist who has established a reputation for what he calls direct comedy
action.

The interview was calm and cordial until Thomas challenged Mr Straw to say
whether or not he was happy that people who were sick risked arrest and
criminal conviction for taking a substance that relieved their symptoms.
"If any of these men were now to produce cannabis in this office they would
be arrested. Are you happy with that?" he said.

At this point Hamish Crisp, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, produced a
hand-rolled cigarette and lit it within a few feet of the Home Secretary.

Mr Straw became agitated and stood up to indicate that the interview was
over.

"It is not a question of happiness, it is whether or not we should obey the
law, which we all should. I thought this was to be a serious discussion not
some sort of stunt."

A few seconds later a uniformed police officer entered the room and
officially cautioned 43-year-old Mr Crisp. "I have been led to believe that
cannabis has been smoked," said the officer somewhat apologetically.
"Unfortunately cannabis is illegal and we must obey the letter of the law,".

Mr Crisp was then searched but cannabis was not found on him. The Home
Secretary had mistaken the hand- rolled cigarette for a cannabis joint.
Afterwards a defiant Mr Crisp, who uses crutches to walk, said: "I did it
deliberately to see how he reacted under pressure. I was not very impressed.

"Jack Straw was absurd when he compared cannabis to Thalidomide. People
have been using cannabis all over the world for thousands of years without
serious side-effects."

Geoff Atkinson, the producer of The Mark Thomas Comedy Product, asked
Channel 4 to extend the programme to include more of the interview with the
Home Secretary.

"We had no intention of getting involved with the police but I believe that
if people had been able to see more of the scenes where police made a
crippled man get on to his feet so they could search him it would have made
a very telling point about how absurd our current laws are. It was
humiliating," he said.

The Independent on Sunday has seen the full, un-cut interview in which the
Home Secretary challenges the newspaper, among others, to prove to him that
cannabis is harmless.

"It is open to any group like the Independent on Sunday to put money into
research to show that there really is a therapeutic medicinal use for
cannabis and that the side-effects are not such as to require it to be
generally banned. The ball is in the court of the people who make these
claims for it," he said.

Mr Straw said that only when he was presented with overwhelming evidence
would he be prepared to go to the House of Commons to change the current
law.