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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

The EU chemicals directive (REACH) actually goes the other way: you have to at least perform a safety assessment on everything you want to sell or include in a product.

The problem is that cannabis was never shown to be more harmful than tobacco scientifically in the first place, but the public and politicians were led to believe that it was. By the 1950s equivalents of "fake news".

You can see a similar "manufacture of risk" process going on with vaccines at the moment, which is very dangerous. It's also routine for the UK press to engage in ridiculously exaggerated anti-drugs campaigning, as it fits their sensational moralistic worldview.

Arguably more of a problem is the "we know this has risks but we can't feasibly ban it" category: alcohol.

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The situation in the UK with regards to cannabis is ridiculous - politicians and hate-spewing rags such as the Daily Mail have people believing all sorts of falsehoods that harm campaigns for legality. The nonsensical reclassification of cannabis as a class B drug - despite expert recommendations - has also done a lot of harm.

There are some recent signs that expensive, synthetic cannabinoid-based drugs may get licensed here for an extremely limited set of medical circumstances, but I can't see British politicians going any further than that within my lifetime. The pace of change with regards to drug policy is maddeningly slow.

I often think about what would have happened if the Lib Dems didn't commit political suicide by going back on their single biggest campaign promise (by tripling tuition fees)

They're pro-legalisation, and if they still had 60+ seats in parliament they could be making real progress towards at least decriminalisation (probably under a labour coalition)

They are not pro-legalisation. They had a drug minister who did nothing to ease prohibition. I don't believe anything they say, they have lost any credibility they had.

They may have no credibility, but they are officially pro-legalisation

After re-classification as class B it is worth mentioning that the press engaged in a smear campaign against the scientists, to make sure no scientist will ever dare to recommend something like decriminalisation.

The question pro-legalisers have to address is the very clear evidence we now have that cannabis use causes psychosis in some users.

Every time people say "It doesn't" that sets back legalisation another 5 years.

Link? Everything I've read cannot prove causality, just correlation.

It's very hard to prove causality, especially when marijuana's scheduling does not allow for proper scientific research.

> The problem is that cannabis was never shown to be more harmful than tobacco scientifically in the first place,

Comparing anything to tobacco is weird because we spend considerable amounts of money trying to get people to stop smoking.

And we now have very good evidence that cannabis causes psychosis. That's pretty harmful.

I just did a cursory review of some papers, and it seems like cannabis can induce psychosis. It looks like there's somewhere around 1.5-2.5x increased chance of psychosis diagnosis for cannabis consumers, although age and family history of schizophrenia matter.

From the NIH site on psychosis[0], about 3% of the US population in their lifetime[1]. About 100k adolescents annually have an episode.

For comparison, alcohol induced psychosis is common. Dependent alcoholics men face an 8x increase in risk; women see a 3x increase.[2]

[0] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/schizophrenia/raise/r...

[1] worth noting that psychosis is not a "permanent" condition.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance-induced_psychosis

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