This article only raises the issues of negative effects of cannabis upon human health.
Article 2 (from the Guardian newspaper) focuses almost entirely on “hard” drug abuse and the issues of crime surrounding them (Cannabis only gets a minor mention).
This article focuses on how the police are using results of a survey showing a high percentage of street crime is committed by people under the influence of drugs, as evidence to support their strategy for tackling street crime.
(3) There is obviously a strong bias in each of the two articles; one focuses on just one drug (cannabis) and makes a number of strong points highlighting the real danger to health by using cannabis. The other focuses on the problems of increased crime caused by a number of “hard” drugs and general drug abuse. Also how police strategy for tackling this sort of crime is changing.
The health article only focuses on the negative effects cannabis on health; it doesn’t mention any positive effects, e.g. medical research has proved it to help relieve the pain from sufferers of multiple sclerosis. It doesn’t say anything about crime issues related to the drug and it doesn’t give anything on legal drugs, e.g. alcohol and tobacco, which are much bigger killers and have much more to do with crime. This article doesn’t mention cultural issues i.e. for Rastafarians cannabis is used as part of their religion.
The article about crime and legal issues implies that if you start on “soft” lower classed drugs then you will progress to “harder” class A drugs and be more involved in crime which is not always the case. The survey that was used as evidence (crimes in Hackney) was relatively small as it only covered one area of London and may not have represented the statistics for the whole of the UK.
(4) I think that, even though the points in article 1 are most likely to be valid, they are all from one source (The British Lung Foundation) and are probably one sided and do not cover all aspects of the use of cannabis. I think that the article should focus more widely on the negative and positive effects of the drug as this would give appeal to a wider range of society which would get their point across more easily.
Having thought about article 2, I think that it makes good sense for police to tackle the problem of drugs leading to crime from both ends; preventing or dissuading people using drugs in the first place will be more cost effective and generally efficient. Treating addicts rather than locking them up and ‘criminalising’ them is a good example of this as it costs a lot of money to lock someone up in prison and often they are released and go straight back into drug use and crime to feed their drug habits because they will have a criminal record and will find it very hard to get any sort of job, so to treat them and get them off a vicious circle of drugs and crime would be much more cost effective, for the government, in the long run.
(5) I think that the issues discussed in both these articles have very important sides to them, but, I think that these reviews aren’t really looking at the biggest killers and the most widely used drugs that lead to crime. These are tobacco and alcohol. They are legal (from certain ages) and are widely accepted, but, have awful effects on society and are the two biggest killing drugs found in the UK. From reading a useful leaflet on drugs I have found that, every year, there are more than 25,000 deaths in the UK which are alcohol related and tobacco causes/contributes to at least 2000 limb amputations and 111,000 premature deaths in the UK each year.
I think that the government needs to keep on tackling illegal drug problems but needs to focus much more on general and underage use of tobacco and alcohol.
