Cannabis ruins lives and legalising it won’t help

The papers last week were filled with photos of Sadiq Khan peering stony-faced at rows of large plants. No, he was not enjoying a surprisingly solemn trip to Kew Gardens — he was visiting a legal cannabis farm in California. The experience has inspired him to announce a new commission tasked with assessing the legal status of cannabis back home.

It seems unlikely that anything will come from this. The Home Secretary Priti Patel reminded him that he “has no powers to legalise drugs”, and the Labour Party has distanced themselves from his statements. Nevertheless, Khan has been widely praised as brave and bold by those convinced of the need to legalise cannabis.

Possession of cannabis has already been de facto decriminalised in this country. It is rare for police officers to seek out cannabis possession offences — rather, when cannabis is accidentally found during a search, it is typically confiscated and a cannabis warning is issued. I’d be happy to see this formalised, with the possession of small amounts of cannabis made legal.

But legalisation of the cannabis industry, as Khan is proposing, is another matter entirely. Industries employ lobbyists and lobbyists are paid to disguise the harmful effects of the products they sell. This has happened many times before. By the early Fifties, the scientific evidence was clear: tobacco was killing people. And yet it would be 20 years until warning signs appeared on the side of cigarette packets sold in the UK. This tardiness was the result of lobbying by the tobacco industry, which opposed health authorities every step of the way.

Big Tobacco is already investing in cannabis, with the chief marketing officer for British American Tobacco telling the BBC last year that her organisation predicts a “wave of future growth”. In those American states that have experimented with legalisation, permitting a legal cannabis industry does increase use of the drug, particularly among the heaviest users.

Which is bad news for those users’ health and sanity. We know that there are links between heavy cannabis use and, for instance, schizophrenia. We also know that Big Cannabis, if it ever arrives on our shores, will do its very best to push back against efforts to discover and publicise these harmful effects. After all, a profit-making business exists to generate profits.

Louise Perry is a New Statesman columnist