By Tara FitzGerald

LONDON (Reuter) Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney, promoted to the
British establishment this year with a knighthood, Thursday called for
the legalization of cannabis.

"I support decriminalization (of cannabis). People are smoking pot
anyway and to make them criminal is wrong," he told the New Statesman
magazine.

He said it was pointless to fill jails with people who smoked cannabis
because this was likely to turn them into criminals.

McCartney's comments angered antidrugs campaigners, who said he had
ignored the longterm risks involved in taking the drug.

"Cannabis is often billed as a relatively harmless drug which
compared to opiates it is but it's not without its risks," a
spokesman for the drug treatment agency Turning Point told the Daily
Mail.

"If you spent all day smoking it you'd never get out of bed." Medical
research shows that cannabis users can develop a psychological
dependence on the drug as well as a range of physical problems. A
spokeswoman for the British Home Office said McCartney's comments were
"unhelpful."

Citing his own experience of being arrested for possessing marijuana in
Japan in 1980, McCartney said he learned nothing from it. "When I was
jailed in Japan for having pot there was no attempt at rehabilitation.
They just stuck me in a box for nine days."

"Decriminalization would take the sting out of the issue," he added. The
Home Office spokeswoman said: "It's all very well to speak from a
personal point of view, but our position is that no drug is a safe drug.
There is not research yet to say that cannabis doesn't have a longterm
effect on people.

"There is also the issue of whether it is a 'gateway drug' which paves
the way toward taking hard drugs."

Better known nowadays for his cleanliving vegetarian lifestyle,
McCartney told his official biographer earlier this month he was "turned
on to pot" by Bob Dylan in 1964.

He also said it was he who introduced Rolling Stone Mick Jagger to the
drug two years later in London. Jagger denied the story.

In the New Statesman interview McCartney also criticized British pop
group Oasis for being "derivative" and too full of themselves. Oasis
have made no attempt to hide the influence the Beatles have had on their
music and their admiration for them, but McCartney said they meant
nothing to him.

McCartney's publicist Geoff Baker later issued a statement saying
reports that McCartney had "attacked" Oasis were incorrect. "Paul
McCartney also made it plain that he saw no rivalry between the Beatles
and Oasis and there was room for them all," Baker said.

REUTER