There’s been rather a lot of nonsense spoken about dope in the last day or so as some no-mark Labour MP calls on the PM to reclassify cannabis from Class C to Class B to “send the right signal”

Paddick gave a very brief answer on this subject in his Telegraph interview, but expands a bit further in a press statement today.

“If Gordon Brown were serious about preventing young people from smoking cannabis, he would turn his attention to educating and informing people of its harmful effects instead of messing around with reclassification.

“We need to see people with real credibility, like former drug addicts, going into schools in a supervised environment and telling young people how drugs wrecked their lives.

“No young person I know decides if they will smoke cannabis based on whether it’s a class B or class C drug. It’s time the government stopped playing politics with cannabis and started preventing people from using it in the first place.”

I’d agree it’s patently obvious that those using or considering using cannabis don’t give a monkeys what use class the drug is in. The only real function those classes serve is to determine maximum sentence length – and see halfway down this Wikipedia page to see just how little difference it makes whether a drug is in B or C.

So when no mark Labour MPs are showing up doing the rounds of the media calling on the PM to ignore the objective evidence and the informed experts for the purposes of “sending a message” what they are actually asking for is a monumental misdirection of police time into arresting people and to waste jam-packed prison cells to keep cannabis users at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for ever so slightly longer. All this to “send a message” to people who aren’t listening anyway! No, the only real reason for these absurd calls is dog-whistling to those elements of the middle-classes who aren’t smoking dope themselves.