The Liberal Democrats have announced a proposal for cannabis law reform in the UK. It is not without precedent, coming at a time of global change in how governments respond to cannabis use, and is not a niche issue. Government figures show over 6% of the UK population used cannabis in 2014-2015 alone.

AS THE drug war has rumbled on, with little to show for all the money and violence, its critics have become a more diverse bunch than the hippies and libertarians who first backed drug reform. The latest broadside against prohibition was fired on March 24th by a group of former heads of state and businesspeople, who put forward a sober case for rethinking the international approach to drug control.

US

The hardline drug policies adopted during the 1980s in the “war on drugs”, including mandatory minimum sentences for some drug-related crimes, has led to extremely high levels of incarceration in the country. The US has more than 2 million people in its jails – the second highest rate of incarceration per capita in the world – about half of whom were convicted of drugs-related crimes.

The 79-year old is running to be London Mayor for the Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol party.

Lee Harris mentions so many jobs in the course of our interview that it becomes hard to keep up. “Once I told my children I’ve done about 40 jobs”, he laughs. That list includes: actor, washing machine salesman, freelance journalist, playwright, house father for delinquent boys, market researcher, mortuary attendant, youth theatre group leader, dishwasher and supply teacher at a secondary modern girls’ school. To denizens of London’s counter-culture, Harris is best known as a spoken word performer, the publisher of Europe’s first cannabis magazine, and the owner of Alchemy, Britain's oldest head shop.

Six months. It has been barely six months since legalisation of cannabis was debated in parliament – in a side room, with fewer than 20 MPs in attendance. That debate was the result of an online petition that collected more than 200,000 signatures, and yet at the time the vast majority of our MPs did not care enough about the issue to even turn up. One of those few MPs that were at the debate, however, was Liberal Democrat Norman Lamb, and he is now at it again.

I sit in a brightly lit doctors surgery in central Amsterdam. It’s clean, modern and pristine. A team of receptionists see to patients sitting waiting to my left. Sitting to my right is a UK pain patient who, for the sake of anonymity, we’re going to call Mr X. 

Mr X uses cannabis for his pain caused by spinal damage due to injuries sustained whilst working in the armed forces. He’s a UK citizen and he’s here to get a prescription he can’t get from his doctor at home in London.

Mr X is young, talkative and passionate about what he’s doing. He’s not just in it for himself either:

If approved by the Food and Drug Administration, GW Pharmaceuticals PLC’s cannabis-derived drug, which treats child epilepsy, would be the first of its kind in the U.S.

And while FDA approval is by no means a sure thing, U.K.-based GW GWP, -10.08% announced positive phase-three trial results for the drug, Epidiolex, Monday morning, sending its shares ballooning over 130%.

Designed to treat a rare type of child epilepsy called Dravet Syndrome, Epidiolex reduced children's’ seizure frequency by almost 40% over 14 weeks of treatment, a statistically significant finding.

You really would think that in 2016 we’d be long past weed legalisation opinion pieces.

The financial, social and medical benefits of cannabis legalisation have been exhaustively documented, and a host of other liberal democracies are either legalising or decriminalising weed or at the very least discussing its legalisation or decriminalisation.

And yet, the marijuana legalisation argument really gets scant attention here in Britain. Why so? It as if the public have lost the will to stamp their feet.

Follow the money. In politics, money can tell you more than opinion polls or prime ministerial speeches or newspaper columns. And beneath the skin of the drugs debate, the money is saying something interesting.

Saturday 12th March – It feels like the first day of spring in York today. After a recent cold snap, the Sun is now shining in a cloudless eggshell sky, raising the temperature to a seasonably pleasant 15 degrees Celsius. Around the York Barbican, the old city walls are sprinkled with cheerful yellow daffodils, their colour mirrored by the bright lanyards worn by the delegates inside. It is day two of the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference, and the atmosphere in the auditorium can also be said to reflect that of the flowers outside. This is a party for whom smiling in the face of adversity comes naturally, a fortunate characteristic in their present political predicament.