‘GROW your own and weed out the dealers’, was the message from cannabis activists pushing for legalisation at an event in the region this weekend.

The weekend saw hundreds of campaigners from across the UK descend on Redcar for the second annual pro-cannabis rally, organised by the Teesside Cannabis Club (TCC).

The event passed without trouble or police presence – a sign, say organisers, of changing attitudes towards use of the class-B drug.

Following the event, John Holiday – founder of TCC – called once again for the regulation and decriminalisation of cannabis.

Police should not count minor drugs possession when measuring their performance so they are not forced to unduly target drug users, a study has found.

The number of cannabis possession offences recorded by police almost doubled between 2004 and 2011, while reported use of the drug fell by a quarter, the London School of Economics study also found, while the number of police stop and searches for drugs more than doubled.

The study, by Dr Michael Shiner, also found stop and searches for stolen goods fell from two-fifths to one fifth of all stop and searches in the same period.

Drug possession should be removed from police performance measures, research claims.

The number of cannabis possession offences recorded by police almost doubled between 2004/5 and 2011/12

This would allow officers to concentrate on crimes that "cause most harm" rather than targeting low-level possession of cannabis, according to the study.

Controversy over police approaches to cannabis possession erupted recently after some crime commissioners suggested that personal users will no longer be actively pursued by their forces.

Dr Michael Shiner, of the London School of Economics (LSE), analysed official crime statistics in relation to the reclassification of cannabis.

Nearly 200,000 people have signed a petition to legalise cannabis.  It’s not just a simple click of a mouse button, it requires email verification. It is an enormous event. It is only the tip of the iceberg of the millions in the UK that want to see our archaic and harmful laws on cannabis changed.

Petition: Make the production, sale and use of cannabis legal.

Thanks to a young economics student, it looks like parliament is going to be debating the legalisation of cannabis in the UK before the end of the year. An online petition started by James Owen, a 25-year-old on his final year at Aberystwyth University, urging MPs to make the "production, sale and use of cannabis legal" picked up way over the 100,000 signatures (183,868 at the time of writing) it needed for MPs to consider debating the issue.

A policeman was sacked yesterday after being caught smoking cannabis in his marked patrol car.

PC Kirk Van Niekerk, who had been an officer for West Midlands Police for more than six years, was supposed to be searching for a missing person when he used the drug in the early hours.  

He was caught after a colleague noticed a pungent aroma wafting from the car and reported him.

Niekerk, a married father of one, denied smoking cannabis on duty but tests found traces in his system. Yesterday, a panel found him guilty of gross misconduct. 

PC Kirk Van Niekerk was caught after a colleague noticed a pungent aroma wafting from the car and reported him (file picture)

You don't have to wait for the psychoactive substances bill to become law for the absurd spectacle of its enforcement. If you want a quick preview of what happens when society truly loses its mind over drugs, pop down to Lambeth after August 17th, when they'll be imposing a 'public spaces protection order' banning…. well, pretty much everything.

People within the 'restricted area' will not be able to "ingest, inhale, inject, smoke, possess or otherwise use"… "substances with the capacity to stimulate or depress the central nervous system" according to the order.

On Saturday at exactly 3pm, hundreds of people will converge on Parliament Square in London, inhale nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas”, collectively giggle for 30 seconds, and then disperse. The Psychedelic Society insists “this is not a party” but a serious act of political dissent. “We’ll all inhale together in a sea of coloured rubber to send the message: My mind, my choice.”

Spicing up life behind bars

ALEX CAVENDISH first encountered Spice, a synthetic drug that imitates cannabis, in prison in 2012 when a sleepy looking Dutch man, serving a sentence for drug offences, started trading it. By 2014, Mr Cavendish says, half his fellow prisoners would “literally stagger” down the hall to roll-call each day, high on the drug, varying their routine only so far as to pass out in the grounds, be violently sick in a washroom, or urinate in a six-man dormitory.