Those arrested with harder drugs have an easier time

Nick Clegg, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, is hoping for a global reform of drug laws, saying "we are losing the war on drugs".

With a campaign funded by Sir Richard Branson and Hungarian-American businessman George Soros, Clegg wants those caught in possession of drugs to be given health care rather than be punished, and will present his case at a United Nations meeting next year.

Preferring Portugal's approach, where drugs have been decriminalised and users are given treatment, Clegg hopes European leaders will challenge the strict approach currently employed by countries such as Russia.

Andre Gomes is a politics and economics student at the University of Bath and is currently undertaking an internship with CLEAR

"Smoking cannabis daily 'is safe when treating chronic pain – but only if you're an experienced user', study finds," says a Mail Online headline. It refers to a study done in Canada to see how safe medical cannabis is for treating chronic pain.

But the results of the study don't mean you should take cannabis if you have chronic pain. They don't show that cannabis helps to reduce pain, and the drug is also illegal in the UK.

In the study, more than 200 people with chronic (non-cancer) pain that had not got better with other treatments were given medical cannabis every day for one year. They were compared with a similar number of people who did not receive cannabis.

If David Cameron turned around tomorrow and said, 'you know what? We need money and austerity doesn't seem to be working. Why don't we legalise weed and see what happens?'. What would it be like? 

Well, Nick Chowdrey at Vice decided to find out exactly what would happen. How much would we make? How much would we save? Is it worth doing at all in the first place? (Spoiler: yes).

Why are ‘risky’ and ‘unpleasant’ new versions of cannabis replacing the real thing? Adam Winstock shares findings from the Global Drug Survey.

For the last decade much about harm reduction for cannabis was pretty straightforward. Nothing much had changed apart from the dominance of high potency herbal cannabis and its association with higher rates of paranoia, memory loss and dependence.

Scotland Yard is examining plans to monitor the electricity power supply network in an effort to identify the location of industrial cannabis farms.

Police hope that spikes in electricity usage could lead them to addresses being used by organised crime gangs to run skunk farms.

More than 650 cannabis farms - which use high powered growing lamps - are raided by police in England and Wales every month. Last month police in Kingston-upon-Thames found a cannabis “forest” larger than a football pitch that was hidden in suburban wasteland.

The Met had hoped to put forward a scheme to monitor the electricity network last year but the project failed to get Home Office funding.

David Cameron's drug policy hypocrisy has garnered reasonable attention in recent weeks, though just how progressive he was before becoming Conservative leader -- from favouring heroin prescribing to pushing for supervised injection sites -- has largely gone unnoticed. 

While Twitter was exploding with porcine puns and the Guardian was desperately trying to refocus public attention on Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status in the wake of snippets from his revelatory biography of Cameron, claims that the Prime Minister had once visited a so-called crack den to find a relative struggling with problematic drug use failed to grab headlines.