Cannabis Fun Club in Russia

President Putin's response to a question about the legalization of marijuana during an Internet conference on July 6:

"Now on the issue of legalizing so-called soft drugs, light drugs, including marijuana. Firstly, Russia is a party to international agreements according to which marijuana is one of those drugs that are officially prohibited from distribution. And Russia will adhere to all its international obligations. That is the first thing.

And secondly. The experience of legalizing soft drugs in some countries shows that their legalization does not lead to a decrease in the use of so-called hard drugs, primarily heroin. On the contrary, it only prepares young people to use these hard drugs."

Statement by Nikolai Khramov, Secretary of the Russian Radicals movement

President Putin's response to a question about the legalization of marijuana during his Internet conference took 10 lines, totaled 85 words and contained four statements. Of these, only one – that Russia is a party to international conventions prohibiting marijuana – was true. The rest are nothing more than banal lies.

Lie number one . Marijuana supposedly "prepares young people for the use of hard drugs." In fact, this is the only argument that opponents of maintaining the ban on cannabis and its derivatives can cite. It seems that even its creators believed in this myth. This is a simple, completely thimble-rigged substitution of concepts. Indeed, according to available statistics, the majority of those currently using hard drugs previously used marijuana. However, there is no data indicating what percentage of cannabis users subsequently switched to hard drugs. The assertion that marijuana use leads to hard drug use is as indisputable as the assertion that beer leads to hard drugs ("precedes" does not mean "leads". For example, before someone began using heroin, the event of his birth preceded this person. This does not mean that birth leads to becoming a heroin addict. - editorial note ).

Lie number two , an outright lie, based on the conviction that no one will grab their tongue right during a press conference: that there is supposedly experience in legalizing soft drugs in certain countries. There is not a single country in the world where soft drugs are legalized - i.e. their production, sale and taxation would be fully regulated by law. Even in the Netherlands, which the president is obviously referring to - the only country in the world where the use of cannabis derivatives and retail sale of them in coffee shops is legalized, there remains a black market in which coffee shop owners are forced to purchase goods for their establishments, since the cultivation hemp and its wholesale trade continue to be prohibited and, therefore, in the hands of the drug mafia.

And finally, lie number three : that the experience of this “legalization” supposedly does not lead to a decrease in heroin use. The experience of more than twenty years of liberal drug policy in the Netherlands, characterized primarily by the social separation of soft and hard drugs, shows that this policy achieves its goals. This has been obvious for quite some time: back in 1994, only 0.3% of Dutch people aged 12 to 19 had tried cocaine, while in America with its “war on drugs” the proportion of such people was 1.7%. Another evidence is the mortality rate from overdose of hard drugs (mainly heroin): in the Netherlands with a population of 16 million it is about 20 people per year, while in the USA (297 million inhabitants) the same figure corresponds to the daily mortality rate for this reason, and in Russia (145 million) last year 100 thousand people died from an overdose! But the most important evidence that the Dutch policy has justified itself is that it continues to be supported by Dutch society, the Dutch government, and the Dutch legislator.

Three false statements out of four in ten lines of text, isn't that too much? It would have been better, Mr. President, if you had really gone into more detail about the awakening of Cthulhu...

radikaly.ru