Thursday, June 30, 2011 -

    Another Anti-Cannabis Campaigner Appointed To The ACMD

    I have today written to Baroness Browning protesting at the appointment of Dr Linda Harris to the ACMD.   See here for the Home Office announcement.

     

    Dear Baroness Browning,

    Appointment of Dr Linda Harris to ACMD

    We strongly object to the appointment of Dr Harris to the ACMD.  She is well known as having extremist and unbalanced views on cannabis.  There is also a direct conflict of interest as she is chief executive of Spectrum Community Health CIC which receives government funding for substance misuse services.  In 2007 she was quoted as making the absurd statement:

    “From a mental health perspective we do need to look at the reasons behind a society that’s drifting towards depression and anxiety – cannabis could be a factor in this.”

    This is absolute nonsense and has no basis in facts or evidence at all.  It is in Dr Harris’ personal financial interest to promote and sustain the myth of cannabis “misuse”.

    It seems that as well as removing the requirement for scientists on the ACMD, the Home Office is also determined to pack it with “yes men“.  Every day that goes past reinforces the evidence that the ACMD is now a rubber stamping exercise intended to post-rationalise and justify policy that is based on nothing but prejudice.  The attempt to appoint the anti-cannabis campaigner Dr Hans Christian Raabe only failed because his views about homosexuality are politically incorrect.   Why can’t you see that Dr Harris’ views on cannabis, like Dr Raabe’s are just as bigoted and discriminatory?

    There are other scientists whose views are based on evidence and who are not from the corrupt and self-serving drug support industry which has a vested interest in promoting hysteria about cannabis:

    “Cannabis has been used safely for many thousands of years…there have been concerted efforts to demonise the drug’s use.” Professor Tim Kirkham, psychologist, Liverpool University

    “I don’t think it causes mental illness. I have never seen a case of so-called cannabis psychosis.” Dr Trevor Turner, former vice president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists

    This is an outrageous appointment which suggests a very worrying and improper direction.  Please think again before your own reputation is called into doubt.

    Yours sincerely,

    Peter Reynolds

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    Related news:

    1. “MS Patients Denied Licensed Cannabis Drug By NHS”, The Guardian, 30th May 2011
    2. Baroness Browning On Cannabis Part 2
    3. Does Cannabis Make You Mad?
    4. ADHD And Medicinal Cannabis
    5. PCC Complaint. The Mail On Sunday, 23rd January 2011
    • http://profiles.google.com/freemantomspeed Thomas Speed

      Get the corrupt bastards out Peter!

    • Maxwood

      “… we do need to look at the reasons behind a society that’s drifting towards
      depression and anxiety”

      I have taken a look, and it’s a deliberate use of the media to promote depression and anxiety because suckers can then be induced to buy products to self-medicate themselves with,  starting with alcohol and especially tobacco. 

      Tv and movie drama is mostly “rape, murder, threat and fear” ingraining negative attitudes or sense of “illness” and at the same time desensitizing the audiences to the worse-than-the-disease features of the all-purpose $igarette $moking “cure”.

      Under the influence of “crime and punishment” screenplays they have passively ingested while relaxing with junk food on the couch, victims misinterpret their own “real life” personal psychoproblems and plunge into “solutions” like “social (binge) drinking” which produces a hangover one might next be advised/teased/tempted to selfmedicate away with a $igarette, etc.  Sooner than they know– hooked for life!  Then after decades of coffin nail addiction, Big pHARMa finally inherits customers for Lipitor ($4 billion a year sales, mostly from $ig addicts).

      If the above description is correct, isn’t it logical that Big Alcohol, Big 2WackGo and Big pHARMa all support politicians that are willing to defend them against the threat of cannabis displacing those drugs from presentday profitable overdose use?  Note: the taxes collected by government on $igarettes are a bribe, in exchange for which the government allows the immoral practice of advertising entrapment of youth into nicotine (drug) addiction to continue, and fights against the potential arrival of cannabis as an alternative.   Pakistan government runs 10% on $igarette taxes; Russia 8%; China 7-1/2%– there the government actually owns the $igarette factories.

      The attitude of the Nicotine Hegemony today is similar to that of the former Negro-Slave Owners of the American South: just as there were Fugitive Slave Laws which defined liberation as “stealing”, today’s companies regard each $igarette addict as Their Property, not to be taken from them via the victim switching to cannabis, or the victim learning from cannabis use how to microsize their dosage (25 mg single hit in a mini-utensil, compared to lighting up a whole 700 mg $igarette every time you want “a smoke”).

      I hope these points will clarify the problem with “depression and anxiety” which Dr Harris, in the quote above,  wants to attribute to cannabis rather than to causes she may have some political stake in doing nothing about. 

    • anon

      Wow!  So the reasons behind society drifting towards depression isn’t that most people are living in poverty, fed lies of dream futures at school, prohibition, materialism, too much concrete, lack of jobs, no (truly) affordable housing, depressing daily news and living with unjust laws then? 
      Depression (certainly in my case) is lifted by cannabis, it definitely doesn’t cause it.

    • Guest

      Seconded.