Show me where you can get 1/8th (3.5g)for a score as at the moment it's anything between 1g - 0.85g for £10 making it more valuable then gold (9ct the last i see was £8 per gramme).

Market Control - The production of drugs, recreational of all kind in the UK is controlled through license to produce for market. Under any system of production the capacity to produce is driven by the ability to produce in bulk, at low cost.

Under the licence and laws of the production of alcohol the supply of bootleg illegally produced alcohol in the UK is largely non-existent - Simply because production on a sufficient scale to compete with legal production is not financially viable.

Supply - Slightly harder to control, however, the capacity for the control of price, makes the possibility of competition non-existent. The price of even common recreational drugs is driven by the illegal market. Cannabis is a remarkably cheap drug to produce, and yet the retail price on a 1/8th is around twenty quid, simply because of the mark up, of around 500% that occurs in the supply model.

The simple fact is that the illegal market simply couldn't compete with a legal one (exactly the same way it couldn't with prohibition). Organised crime gangs would simply be priced out of the production and supply, because they can't compete in production, distribution or supply.

This applies to all recreational drugs, which when produced legally (for research and medical use) retail to the end supplier at 1/35th of the price of the black market, unadulterated). Simply put organised crime can't operate at that competition level, other than to sell very low quality product. That leaves plenty of room for revenue generation through taxation and profit.

Criminal element - Essentially why would you buy from a criminal source, when you can obtain from a legal source for less and at better quality? You wouldn't. That wouldn't end crime, it would however mean that certain very lucrative avenues of crime were unavailable. Ending prohibition didn't end the American Mafia, but it did massively reduce the violence and how that crime impacted general society.

Similarly, the same could be said of the UK. The drug market is worth a fortune to organised crime and it generates a huge amount of crime to firstly control it, and then secondly through the cost of drugs (ie of addicts to obtain drugs through shoplifting, burglary, prostution).

A legal market could sell the same gram of heroin that costs 80 quid on the street, at profit, for the price of a packet of cigerettes, unadulterated. Meaning that an addict with a two gram a day habit, is having to find 12 quid, rather than 160 quid a day to maintain their habit.

In order to obtain that 160 quid through crime, generally you'll need to commit at least 480 worth of crime. Where as finding 12 quid could be as simple as working a part time job, or at worst committing 36 pounds worth of crime.

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Awful piece.

Give a 70 year old non smoker, two hits of strong, pure dose of weed, stick him in a giant vibrating coffin and expect him not to be distressed.

Are people with serious mental health issues the best judge of when they became 'insane' though? It may be that they were self medicating problems that were already on their way to getting out of control. If you're implying that weed caused the majority of people in psych wards to go insane, I'd say there is no support for that.

As others have highlighted the illegality of the drug makes it much more likely that people will indulge in stronger strains and other drugs too. I'd much rather people have a pint, than buy random concoctions from some random guy on a street corner. That's the equivilent of current policy.