So here we are in a country where free speech is protected, yet people are warned to think carefully about what they say — while cannabis remains illegal and its distinctive smell seems to be everywhere.
Possessing the pungent drug is still against the law. In theory, the offence carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, along with an unlimited fine.
In practice, however, enforcement is rare. Even when police intervene, cases can end in “out-of-court disposals”, meaning the offender avoids prosecution. In many instances, officers appear reluctant to spend time pursuing an offence that the courts seldom treat as a priority.
Our News Outlet found several examples. In Middlesbrough, a young woman openly rolled a spliff as passers-by walked past, seemingly unconcerned about arrest or punishment.
In Birmingham, we saw a man rolling a cannabis joint on a train while police officers nearby did nothing. Other passengers watched without intervening. Who could blame them? Cannabis may once have enjoyed a reputation as a harmless, peaceful drug, but that image is increasingly being challenged.
Confronting someone over public drug use can also be risky. In New York, where cannabis is legal but smoking on trains is prohibited, commuters have reportedly been stabbed after challenging people who were smoking weed.
Britain is not necessarily insulated from such violence. Author Ross Grainger has spent years collecting court cases from across the country involving serious violent crimes committed by cannabis users. He brought together some of those cases in the grimly titled book Attacker Smoked Cannabis. Grainger argues that “the law against cannabis possession is barely enforced in Britain” and says the influence of “Big Cannabis” resembles that of the tobacco industry.
Campaigns to relax marijuana laws, sometimes supported by billionaires, routinely present cannabis as safe, mild and beneficial. Critics argue that countries which have loosened their drug rules have instead suffered serious consequences. In Britain, they say, warning signs are being ignored.
A man smokes an oversized spliff at a pro-cannabis rally in Hyde Park, London, surrounded by onlookers
A young man rolls a cannabis joint on a public train. In New York, where cannabis is legal but smoking it on trains is banned, commuters have reportedly been stabbed after challenging weed smokers
Few people, for example, have highlighted claims that the men who murdered soldier Lee Rigby were long-term marijuana users, or that neighbours said the Nottingham home of killer Valdo Calocane “stank of weed”.
In the United States, doubts about cannabis are also growing. Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has described a conversation with his wife, Jackie, a psychiatrist, that changed his view. Jackie once worked at the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center, a heavily secured hospital for criminally mentally ill patients that resembles a prison from the outside, complete with barbed wire. Berenson wrote that many patients had been found not guilty by reason of insanity and included killers and arsonists, while most had been diagnosed with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia linked to violence against relatives or strangers.
Berenson recalled the conversation that proved decisive. His wife was discussing a patient when she remarked, in passing: “Of course he’d been smoking pot his whole life.”
“‘Of course?’ I said. ‘Yes, they all smoke.’”
She was referring to cannabis, not tobacco.
Berenson later wrote Tell Your Children, a book attacking the rapid legalisation of marijuana across North America over the past 15 years. He argues that attitudes are now beginning to shift, driven in part by concerns that cannabis can contribute to severe mental illness in some users.
Even the traditionally liberal New York Times, which backed legalisation in 2014, has begun reassessing its position. In February, it acknowledged what it called a mistake and declared: “It’s time for America to admit that it has a marijuana problem.”
The Washington Post has likewise reported on what it described as the failure of Portugal’s 2001 experiment in decriminalising marijuana and other drugs. For years, Portugal was held up as evidence that a more lenient approach could work. Critics now point to rising crime and deteriorating conditions in some areas, with police attributing the problems to drug use.
In Britain, much of the media and political establishment remains attached to what critics call the “Hippy Dream” of cannabis decriminalisation. Nigel Farage has even publicly entertained the idea. Alongside that debate is the medical marijuana campaign, whose supporters make sweeping claims about cannabis treating disease and pain. Opponents say those claims have long been used to advance wider legalisation.
Keith Stroup, a leading figure in America’s pro-cannabis movement, acknowledged in a 1979 interview that he intended to use medical marijuana as a “red herring” to improve the drug’s public image. It was, critics argue, an exceptionally effective strategy.
Even if the claims made for it are true, there is one small problem – anyone who takes it may well end up with lifelong severe mental illness. That is quite a side effect. Can regulators really permit its use, knowing that danger?
Until remarkably recently, fashionable opinion pretended that marijuana users were subject to a harsh, even Draconian prohibition. Yet marijuana is now probably slightly easier to buy than full-fat cow’s milk, especially on university campuses. Almost any sane person with eyes to see, and a nose to smell, nowadays admits that the drug’s use is widespread and unchecked by the law.
The offence – on paper – carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison plus an unlimited fine. But if you think this is enforced you must be joking, writes Peter Hitchens
Efforts to halt supply have failed, as they always do. Nearly 200 tons of imported marijuana, much of it from the US, was seized on its way to Britain in the year to March. This is probably a tiny proportion of the actual flow. Meanwhile, marijuana farms, perhaps the most profitable sector of British agriculture, thrive everywhere, run by criminal gangs using illegal migrants as slave labour.
These farms are not like the ones in the rural soap operas The Archers or Emmerdale. They occupy suburban houses and abandoned shops and warehouses, probably near you. They are heated and lit with stolen electricity, and entirely free of tax and regulation.
Figures are vague but it is likely that while hundreds are discovered, thousands go undiscovered, every year. Our News Outlet’s Tom Kelly recently reported that there are at least 450 Albanian cannabis farms known to be operating across Britain.
Nobody doubts there are many more that are undetected. They bring with them illegal migrants, to toil in them, and vicious criminal behaviour, to exclude rivals from their territory.
It makes me nostalgic for the days, not long ago, when liberal campaigners such as Sir Simon Jenkins, former editor of The Times, would claim that the laws against the drug were strictly enforced. Back in 1997 he said the marijuana law ‘has led more young people into prison and a life of crime than any other Act’. In 2000, he said: ‘Thousands of young people are criminalised each year for using a substance that most people feel should be legal.’
Was this right? Even then a tiny number of offences were being prosecuted, compared with the number being committed, and the police response to marijuana possession was to ignore it if possible. It was hard to find any example of anyone who had been sent to prison for simple marijuana possession.
A dozen years ago, I used to take part in a lot of debates on the subject on university campuses. I would always ask everyone in the audience to raise their hands if they had smoked marijuana.
Invariably, almost every hand went up. They weren’t afraid of admitting it, or of doing so in public. They were obviously unafraid of the law. As far back as 1994, the former head of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, John O’ Connor, said: ‘Cannabis has been a decriminalised drug for some time now’. Enforcement, as we shall see, has been diminishing for decades.
This ended up with the police themselves making their own law, introducing a procedure called a Cannabis Warning, which was not recorded and had no effect on the person to whom it was issued. Increasingly they don’t even bother with that and it is likely to be dropped soon.
In the year ended March 2025, police in England and Wales recorded 95,274 possession of cannabis offences, ludicrous when you consider the millions of such offences actually taking place. Fewer than 17 per cent were even charged. Just over half were written off with so-called Community Resolutions, otherwise known as Slaps On The Wrist. Many were just closed for various reasons.
As the truth became clear, the liberalisers subtly changed their tune. As the facts and the smell showed that the ‘draconian prohibition’ claims were piffle, we were told: ‘It’s too late to do anything about it, so let’s give in totally.’
In 2018, the supposed conservative William Hague wrote in a national newspaper: ‘As far as marijuana, or cannabis, is concerned, any war has been comprehensively and irreversibly lost. The idea that the drug can be driven off the streets and out of people’s lives by the state is nothing short of deluded… this battle is effectively over.’
This is untrue. Japan and South Korea continue to enforce their laws against cannabis possession and, as a result, have much lower levels of cannabis use.
A Japanese celebrity caught with marijuana can also generally expect to experience public shame and career damage, unlike here. The decriminalisers really do not want to know this, just as they do not want to know that this country, too, had serious anti-marijuana laws and enforcement of them until the late 1960s. It was then that the powerful establishment campaign to dilute and eventually destroy Britain’s marijuana laws began.
On July 24, 1967, much of the establishment were beguiled by a full-page advert in The Times, paid for and signed by all four Beatles, plus the novelist Graham Greene, the broadcaster David Dimbleby and various clerics, psychiatrists and artists. It proclaimed, untruly: ‘The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice.’
Soon afterwards a government report, by the liberal battleaxe Barbara Wootton, more or less backed the campaign. And in 1971, a Tory Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, steered through the tricky, deceptive legislation that has ever since given marijuana possession a special status in English law. This status was openly recognised by another apparently crusty but in fact rather soft Tory, Lord Hailsham. In October 1973, as Lord Chancellor, he urged the magistrates of England to go easy on marijuana smokers.
He said: ‘Users of “soft drugs” should… be treated with “becoming moderation”.’ And they were, with increasing generosity. That is why your hometown’s streets now smell the way they do. One of the few who opposed this at the time was the journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, who said it had all happened before. He had witnessed, while teaching in Cairo in the 1920s, the horrible effect of mass use of what was then called hashish. After describing the drug-affected students as ‘stupefied zombies incapable of learning or thinking or talking,’ he said that no one in 1920s Egypt would have claimed marijuana was harmless. In fact, it was the Egyptian government’s concern about the effect of the drug that led to the League of Nations putting cannabis on its banned list back in 1924, the basis of the UN’s international drug laws to this day.
Muggeridge jeered in 1968 that he had had to wait 40 years to hear the claim made that dope was harmless – not just by ‘crackpots and wild libertarians’ but by ‘respected citizens, clergymen, purported scientific investigators, and other ostensibly informed and enlightened persons’.
He called the 1960s push to legalise marijuana an example of ‘the death wish at the heart of our way of life’.
Would anybody now like to say that he was wrong, and that the legalisers were right?
