High Time We Legalised Weed in the UK

Weed has intimated itself in UK life. So why not give up the fight and make it legal?

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

My parrot, Coco Chanel*, is fond of a joint after work. She says it lets her take a break from drinking while helping her to ease into the evening. She would take a yoga class; but she works very hard at her parrot management consultancy and does not have that much time in the evening to spare. For her, a joint does just the trick. Of course, by having that joint, Coco is breaking the law. So are the thousands of (mostly young) people who do the same thing she does. This seems silly. Weed is so widely used that you smell it all the time if you live in a British city. It has ‘intimated’ itself, as Michael Oakeshott might put it. So why don’t our rulers pursue those intimations and make weed legal?

Surely the strongest case has to do with its therapeutic value. It is so well established that weed can help those with serious illnesses in various ways, from restoring your appetite to relieving pain to helping you to sleep, that the present difficulty that people have in accessing medical weed is something of a scandal. Medical weed is legal in England, but only for those with severe epilepsy, chemotherapy-induced sickness, and muscle stiffness caused by multiple sclerosis. I heard that it is still a nightmare getting hold of the stuff. It seems to me to be rather sadistic to prevent people from having access to an effective painkilling drug that is also non-addictive (by the way, opioid addiction has plunged in American states where weed has been made legal). And you might like to consider this in light of the current discussions around euthanasia.

It seems to me to be rather sadistic to prevent people from having access to an effective painkilling drug that is also non-addictive.

So by legalising weed, you can spare people unnecessary suffering one way. You can also do that in other ways. When I was about sixteen, two boys at my school were kicked out for dealing what turned out to be oregano — a solid herb for cooking purposes, but not weed. Whether these boys were ripping off their buyer, or whether they sincerely thought what they were selling was weed, remains a mystery. But it at least sheds light on the fact that unless you are an inveterate stoner, you might not notice the difference between something sticky and green (and good with roast potatoes) and weed. If you were to legalise weed, you could standardise all weed products, and prevent our friend and others like him not just from being ripped off, but from smoking something potentially much more harmful than weed.

And while we are on the subject of harm: have you considered that when you buy your Henry off that gaunt-looking kid who skulks about beneath the Edgware Road flyover, you do not really know where the money goes? I bet you it does not go towards that kid’s pension. Weed being illegal, those involved in the trade of it are liable to be involved in other things that are far less palatable. You may well be funding human trafficking or just putting money into the hands of proper villains every time you hand over a note and take back a little plastic bag. And that would not be the case if weed were made legal. You could buy it from a licensed seller (for a cheaper price) and one with no connection to all that nastiness and misery.

It is worth consider how much time the police spend policing weed. I can tell you that they spend a great deal of their time, and so a great deal of your money and mine, if you are from the UK at any rate, searching for and arresting people for smoking a bit of weed. Holding people who have smoked or dealt weed, prosecuting them and banging them up also costs money that might be better used placating junior doctors or fixing pot-holes. (I feel as if there are strikes every week at the moment.) We need the cash. Everyone needs cash, what with wars and cost-of-living crises and so on. And we are content to spend it policing teenagers who like to melt into their sofas while playing FIFA (or whatever it’s now called). That strikes me as silly.

Holding people who have smoked or dealt weed, prosecuting them and banging them up also costs money that might be better used placating junior doctors or fixing pot-holes.

Of course, there is also the money we would make if we were to make weed legal. There was a lovely study run by New Frontier Data that projected that by 2025, the federal legalisation of weed in America could make the country $105.6 billion in tax revenues. In the UK, the number is not so high, but it is high regardless. They say it is £3.5 billion in yearly tax revenue. That is not nothing. So by legalising weed, you win twice, financially speaking: you save money wasted on policing it and locking up dealers, and you make a small fortune from letting people sell it. You can also replace far more expensive pharmaceutical drugs that have to be made in a lab or imported from miles away. And, given that the UK is blessed with universities, hospitals and other research institutions, so you could push to become a world leader in weed research, and monetise that.

So you see, it is high time we legalised weed. We could do with the money, of course, but it is also senseless to turn thousands of kids into criminals for the minor sin of getting a bit silly in the evenings. Though context is crucial, it is still interesting to consider the cases of the Netherlands, Portugal, Canada and the United States, all culturally similar to the UK in important respects. There, legalising weed has reduced car accidents, violent crime and addiction to much stronger poisons while making everyone some money and giving a little more comfort to the sick. Let me, then, return to Oakeshott’s famous phrasing when I say that weed legalisation has already ‘intimated’ itself. Why not, you know, give up the struggle and make it legal?

*I have changed the name and species of this person to protect their identity.