The Independent has covered last week’s news of the potential launch of cannabis clubs in four Swiss cities, including Zurich, Basel, Bern and Geneva.

Representatives from the cities met in Bern on Thursday to discuss how to regulate the sale of cannabis, which is illegal to possess in Switzerland.

The 500,000 estimated people who smoke marijuana in Switzerland face serious fines and up to three years in prison.

This system prevents the state from taxing the cannabis sold on the ‘black market’, and creates difficulty for the implementation of proper prevention programs.

In a bid to reassess outdated drug policy, Switzerland is moving to trial cannabis clubs, providing a safe environment for the growth and distribution of marijuana.

There are certain countries here in Europe that are known to be a little more liberal when it comes to cannabis use; one such country is Switzerland. Although illegal in Switzerland, many police forces will turn a blind eye to cannabis, as long as it for personal use and not being used in a blatant manner. Well, things are going one step further, as four cities agree to take part in a project that will see cannabis clubs set up within their borders.

Legal marijuana has been having banner year after banner year since various states havelegalized the sale and consumption of the plant and its derivatives starting back in 2012 within Colorado and Washington. It should be noted that the process of marijuana’s status as a demonized drug has been slipping for much longer than the past 4 years.

The prohibition of cannabis will surely be consigned to the history books, just like the prohibition of alcohol.

Tim Farron MP, the leader of the Liberal Democrats party is the first party political leader to publicly call for the legalisation of cannabis for recreational users.

“The War on Drugs is Over”

For a week, seizures and arrests follow one another to try to stem the traffic. But France remains one of the largest consumers of cannabis in Europe. Regular smokers are becoming more numerous, 1.4 million in 2014, a market worth over a billion euros and very difficult to control.

A British man in Paphos has been taken into custody after police discovered that he had ordered illegal drugs online with the use of the bitcoin digital currency to pay for mail delivery.

The 23-year-old expart had visited an underground social forum where he was able to use bitcoin credit to pay for his order, said to be 30 grams of cannabis.

The order was processed in Canada where the illegal drugs were sealed in an envelope and were delivered to the suspect in Konia community in Cyprus.

Local police had been informed about the delivery and were on the lookout for the man picking up the package. It is believed that the sealed envelope was protected in such a way that it would not have been easy for someone to know its contents inside.

The city of Haarlem will not be experimenting with regulated cannabis cultivation with its own cannabis garden, Mayor Bernt Schneiders wrote to the city council. According to him, there is no room for such experimentation in the political climate in The Hague, AD reports.

Schneiders, like many other mayors in the Netherlands, supports regulated cannabis cultivation, believing that it will be a good weapon against drug crime in the city. He thinks a system of permits for the sale and production of marijuana, license holders also providing information on soft drugs, is a good idea.

NINE out of ten people have backed calls for cannabis to be legalised for recreational use in an Evening Mail poll.

Westmorland and Lonsdale MP and Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, is expected to become the first leader of a major political party to call for the class B drug to be made legal for social use at the party's spring conference next month.

And it appears plenty of people support his view in south Cumbria as 90 per cent of respondents to a survey on www.nwemail.co.uk agree it should be made legal.

The news has attracted debate across social media and local politicians have voiced their views for and against the idea.

A pilot project for creation of cannabis clubs, where members can use the soft drug without fear of being punished, is being launched in four Swiss cities – Zurich, Basel, Bern and Geneva, local media report.

"The four cities have agreed to include pilot projects on their territory," Sandro Cattacin, sociology professor at the University of Geneva, and Geneva representative in the discussions of the cannabis clubs issue, told broadcaster SRF.