Cannabis Seeds (Prohibition)

Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Prime Minister – in the House of Commons at 1:37 pm on 9 July 2008.

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Photo of Paul Flynn Paul Flynn Labour, Newport West 1:37, 9 July 2008

The Bill will appeal to most Members, and it is certainly well intentioned, but I suggest to Tom Brake that it would have many unintended consequences for a group of people that he has not mentioned: the thousands in this country who use cannabis for medicinal purposes. There have been Bills before the House that would have allowed cannabis to be prescribed. Frequently when I speak on the subject, some newspapers link the fact that I have arthritis to my enthusiasm for legalising medicinal cannabis. There is no connection. I have never in my life used an illegal drug, and I have no intention of using one.

One drug that was recommended to me, and which many people used, was Vioxx. It was a COX-2 inhibitor and pain reliever that was prescribed more than 1 million times in this country before it was discovered to have caused 150,000 heart attacks and strokes in another country. The merit of cannabis, which has been used as a medicine for more than 5,000 years on every continent, is that all its side effects and problems were discovered through experience many years ago.

Thousands of people in this country choose to grow their own cannabis. I am happy to reflect on the fact that only 12 ten-minute Bills, I think, have become law in the past 25 years, so it is unlikely that this one will, but the Government might be persuaded to go down a similar path. If it were to become law, those people would have to move to the criminal market. At the moment, they are doing something perfectly legal. They can buy their seeds on the internet, in other countries or in shops such as the one that the hon. Gentleman mentioned, which are fairly rare. If they do so and grow their own, they know the quality and strength of the cannabis that they take when they engage in a perfectly harmless activity that gives pain relief to people, particularly those suffering from multiple sclerosis, who find that the chemical drugs that are available to them cause terrible problems, including nausea and all kinds of serious side effects. People have come to demonstrate at Parliament in the past 12 months, showing that they want the law to be changed. If the law is changed, and a simple Bill is introduced to differentiate between the recreational and medicinal use of cannabis, the hon. Gentleman's Bill might be appropriate. However, this Bill would plunge people into fear, in the knowledge that the only way in which they will be able to continue to use cannabis—their medicine of choice—will be to move into the illegal market.

The hon. Gentleman rightly said that he was against the irrational proposal to move cannabis from class C to class B, but I am sure that that will happen. As a result, the maximum sentence for possessing cannabis—and, presumably, for possessing seeds—will go up from two to five years. We would be doing that in the knowledge that we do not have a single prison that is free of the open use of heroin and cocaine to which to send anyone who is convicted. They could go to prison as an MS sufferer using their medicine of choice—as a cannabis user—and come out in five years' time as a heroin addict.

As a result of the hon. Gentleman's well-intentioned Bill, major injustices will be done, and the anxiety that it and any proposal from the Government will cause is not worth its suggested benefits. He did not give any evidence of harm—certainly, people will be understandably anxious if such a shop is set up in the neighbourhood—but there is harm from other temptations for young people, particularly from tobacco. Virtually everyone's first use of cannabis as a drug of abuse is when it is mixed with tobacco, which is an addictive or killer drug. It kills 120,000 people a year, whereas deaths from cannabis are probably non-existent and certainly extremely rare. There is concern about the side-effects, and no one would advocate its greater use, but I urge the hon. Gentleman to think deeply about the unintended consequences of his Bill.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Tom Brake, Keith Vaz, Mr. Gary Streeter, Mr. Nigel Evans, Mrs. Janet Dean and Bob Russell.

Annotations

John Leeson
Posted on 10 Jul 2008 7:00 pm (Report this annotation)

well done Paul you have the honour of one of the few MP's talking sense on this Cannabis issue. TOm Brake is just vote catching. this is quite alarming from a Lib/dem maybe he should join the Tories