r/unitedkingdom • u/RandomUsername1604 • 26d ago

Police officers say cannabis is effectively ‘decriminalised’ in the UK .

https://www.leafie.co.uk/news/police-cannabis-decriminalised-survey/

6.0k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

u/MondeyMondey 26d ago

Good! It’s not a real crime like murder or whatever, mind your business!

-27

u/TwentyCharactersShor 26d ago

Because drugs dealers and growers are well known to be law abiding citizens that break no other laws such as trafficking, abduction or murder. Those Mexican cartels are just misunderstood

Obviously, everyone on reddit gets their weed from an ethically sourced eco-hippy.

57

u/Admiral_Eversor 26d ago

Fr the only reason weed coincides with criminality is because it's illegal. Make it legal and all that goes away instantly.

-16

u/BookmarksBrother 26d ago

except, they will sell it for cheaper by avoiding the taxes and regulation (see California) or sell other hard drugs like in Amsterdam.

6

u/Square-Competition48 26d ago

Okay but they’d switch to other hard drugs if we somehow eliminated it so should we not try and eliminate it?

-12

u/BookmarksBrother 26d ago

What I am saying is, if you want to make these guys to stop from dealing, legalizing it wont work. They will still deal for cheaper or deal other stuff.

If you want to legalize pot then fine, but do not pretend thats gonna sort out criminality, gov budget black holes and prison spaces.

3

u/Zealousideal_Day5001 26d ago

this bullshit is why it's still illegal. The fact that there are people like you out there arguing against its legalisation is why the government has not yet legalised it.

-2

u/BookmarksBrother 26d ago edited 26d ago

lol, its illegal in 99.9% of the globe and in the 0.1% of the globe where it was made legal other issues have popped up.

But I am sure nobody thought about this simple solution.

3

u/Zealousideal_Day5001 26d ago edited 26d ago

You do know that the reason it's illegal across so much of the world is due to US imperialism and the UN cajoling everyone along to join the US? It's not like a load of boffins got together and decided on the best public policy.

The US only got so het up about it because of lobbying from the alcohol and timber industry, which saw cannabis and hemp as a threat. It really wasn't because our intellectual superiors knew what was best for us.

It's like saying "wow 99% of oil is traded in the US dollar, this must mean that trading oil in Euros is a terrible idea."

oh and it's not 99% of the world anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map-of-world-cannabis-laws.svg

2

u/Square-Competition48 26d ago

Yes… but that argument could be applied to literally everything.

I’m pretty sure you can buy black market bananas and them being legal hasn’t fixed the budget or eased prison overcrowding.

Should bananas be illegal?

0

u/Zealousideal_Day5001 26d ago

the trade in coffee and cocoa is probably more immoral than the UK's cannabis market

2

u/schpamela 26d ago

Prohibitionists never seem to grasp that demand drives the black market, not supply.

If weed was fully legal, the vast majority of demand for black market weed would disappear once legal avenues were available. That would greatly reduce by far the largest source of income for organised crime. But the demand for hard drugs wouldn't magically increase to compensate - why would it? The same existing demand would continue to be there and organised crime would continue to supply it as they already do now.

Of course organised crime itself wouldn't disappear but it would suffer an enormous recession.

0

u/BookmarksBrother 26d ago

If weed was fully legal, the vast majority of demand for black market weed would disappear once legal avenues were available.

Go read about California. The illegal weed market has overtaken the legal market because they avoid regulation and taxes so the legal businesses cannot compete.

1

u/schpamela 26d ago edited 26d ago

That article is 3 years old. This more recent one has an estimated 61% of the sales still being black market. That means the state is still fucking up implementation enormously - they were famously the first state to legalise so their mistakes are there for everyone else to learn from. You've obviously focused on the first, worst instance of legalisation which doesn't represent what it would be like for the UK.

But regardless of that, the taxman gets a lot of revenue and the black market trade is considerably reduced. So you tell me, is that situation better or worse than criminalisation, where the taxman gets nothing and 100% of the demand goes to black market?

Edit: meanwhile in Canada:

'Almost three-quarters (73%) of people reported purchasing cannabis from a legal source (legal store or legal website), up from 2019 and 2022. Fifteen percent (15%) of people reported obtaining their cannabis from a social source (shared around a group of friends, from a friend, family member or acquaintance), and 5% reported growing their own cannabis or having it specifically grown for them; both represented a decrease from 2018 and 2022. Only 3% of people reported using an illegal purchase source (illegal store, illegal website or dealer), down from 2018'

-2

u/BookmarksBrother 26d ago

Canada has "legal supply" for all the drugs and its a mess. City centres look like its a zombie apocalypse.

So yes, I believe that stat you provided, however, as I said other issues have popped up and its far from the utopia people imagine.

2

u/schpamela 26d ago

I'm sure it isn't a pristine utopia.

Meanwhile in London and other inner cities, kids are stabbing and shooting eachother over weed sale territory every single week. Kids in poor areas are being lured in to criminal gangs because those gangs make enormous amounts of money, primarily selling weed. The one single biggest thing we could do to help is right there, with enormous upsides and relatively tiny downsides.

Politicians barely pretend to give a shit about organised crime and then propose that we do the exact same thing we've been doing for 50 years, which has made these issues and others continuously worse. All because they're spineless selfish cowards who don't want to incur the wrath of the reactionary, irrational, circular logic of our right-leaning press.

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u/Spare_Dig_7959 26d ago

Not if you come to formal agreements with suppliers including quality control.