WGP Leader to speak at evening event on the issue
The Wales Green Party Leader, Pippa Bartolotti will be speaking at a special event being held this Thursday at the Large Shandon Lecture Theatre at Cardiff University entitled ‘Medical Cannabis: Update 2015’.
Bartolotti will be joining a strong line-up of experts including: Nicolas R. Wagener - a former Police Inspector, Farid Ghehioueche - a Senior Drug Policy Advocate at UN & EU Level, Dr Beth Fisher - an educator in Senior Medical Cannabis, Sarah Godfrey – a terminal Crohns disease survivor and trustee for Hemp Works Charity UK & Prof Val Curran – Pyschopharmacology – UCL.
The WGP has long been an advocate of a responsible approach to the legalisation of Cannabis, and believes that the recent attitude of successive UK Governments has been archaic almost medieval in its stance towards a medicinal plant that has been scientifically and clinically proven to have numerous and impressive health benefits.
With countries like Portugal recently decriminalizing many formerly illegal substances of both natural plant origin and some more synthetic based as well – there is now a change of approach from many countries in how to tackle both the so-called ‘war on drugs’, and also allowing important and valuable research work to be done into those substances – like Cannabis, LSD and MDMA which are known to have therapeutic and healing qualities if administered in the right dosages and setting by qualified therapists and doctors.
Pippa Bartolotti, Wales Green party Leader said, “It is time to separate out the use of cannabis from hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. No one has yet died from using Cannabis, in fact the health benefits of cannabis in the treatment of epilepsy and cancer are already well documented. Commercial organisations in the UK are already allowed to patent and sell cannabis extracts, whilst the population as a whole is criminalised for using it – even if it saves their life. This simply has to be changed.”
Cannabis has been legalised for recreational use in 4 states in the US with a further twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia having either legalised medical marijuana or decriminalized marijuana possession - or both.
This change in approach would seemingly acknowledge that the USA’s long-standing approach to drug enforcement laws was both ill thought out and ultimately not working.
The WGP believes that we should be looking to countries like Portugal and the USA and following their example in taking a much more informed and responsible attitude to the legalisation of Cannabis.
Bartolotti concluded that “Cannabis has been wrongly labelled as a gateway drug. It is not. It is the criminalisation of it which is the gateway to harder drugs. If we remove cannabis from the black market there will be many benefits for society – not least in taxation.
In Colorado, one of the sates where the commercial sale of cannabis is now legal, the state collected $700 million in taxes in 2014 alone. In a time of austerity and in a country like the UK where a recent survey showed that nearly 1 in 3 adults has taken some kind of illegal substance it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the legalisation of Cannabis in the right framework would benefit the country hugely financially.
It would also allow the possibility of much greater research into all its effects to be done more effectively so that the public in general can then make informed decisions about whether this is a plant they want to use without fear of legal recriminations.”