13 Jun Gordon Brown Admits He Bullied The Cabinet To Reclassify Cannabis Against Scientific Advice
“Were policies such as the u-turn on casinos, reclassification
of cannabis and the retreat on 24-hour drinking attempts to
appease the Daily Mail in your view?”
“No. If you look at each one of these individual issues — and I
don’t want to bore you with them— I personally have strong
opinions, as an individual, about the evil of excessive gambling.
I thought that the 24-hour licensing was causing us problems,
and on cannabis, you know, I don’t hold what is probably the
more conventional view about the effects of soft drugs, so I was
against the reclassification of cannabis and in fact we reclassified
it back. These are views that I hold personally and I hold them
quite strongly and I may say that probably I used my position
to persuade members of the government who were not as keen
on that policy as I was.”
Source: The Leveson Inquiry transcript