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When right and left both push some ill-conceived public policy for entirely different reasons, the door to disaster usually opens wide. A classic example of this fatal combination in action is the move to make marijuana, as it is called in the US, or cannabis as it is called in the UK, more freely available.
On 18 December 2025, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order easing federal restrictions on marijuana after a vigorous year-long lobbying campaign by the $33bn US marijuana industry. Big donors, PR companies and friends of the President all played a part in persuading him to support a new measure reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug. “I’ve never been inundated by so many people as I have about this particular reclassification,” said Trump during the signing ceremony.
Some months earlier in the UK, the leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski said that he wanted to legalise all drugs including cannabis, believing that “the war on drugs has absolutely failed” and calling for an approach “led by public health experts”.
Paradoxically, this trend towards making cannabis more available, and downgrading the danger it poses, is taking place just as medical experts are warning that the huge surge in cannabis consumption in the US this century is proving far more harmful than expected.
The numbers involved are enormous. More Americans now use marijuana every day than drink alcohol every day. Habitual use has jumped hugely since 1992, when there were one million daily consumers compared to 18 million today. And these are only the hard core of those seeking a high. In 2024, some 44 million Americans told the National Survey on Drug Use and Health that they had used marijuana in the previous month, and 64 million had used it in the previous year.
As more Americans consume marijuana, they become vulnerable to its greatly enhanced toxicity compared to 30 years ago. In 1995, marijuana confiscated by the Drug Enforcement Agency contained just 4 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient which produces the “high”. Today the average THC level of seizures is at least four times higher at 16 per cent and it can be 90 per cent. Seizures by the UK Border Force and police tell the same story with the average THC levels of high potency cannabis, or “skunk”, at 10 to 15 per cent, and often higher still.
Prior to the 90s, cannabis was widely considered a “soft” drug, far less dangerous than “hard” drugs like heroin, cocaine and LSD. Smoking pot was for many a minor act of cultural rebellion against parental and state authority. Yet, even then, the benign nature of cannabis was over-stated. A psychiatrist treating patients for schizophrenia in a mental facility in London at that time told me that she noticed that patients, who had left hospital free of psychosis, “would celebrate their new-found freedom with a joint and come back psychotic a few hours later”. But when she sought to research why this happened, as well as the more general impact of cannabis on the brain, she found it impossible to get funding, such was the reputation of cannabis as harmless.
A psychiatrist leading an early intervention in psychosis team in London told me that “it was not fashionable to say so in the 1990s, but any practising mental health professional would agree that if you smoked a lot of cannabis, particularly in your teenage years, there is a risk of psychosis”.
This risk rose rapidly as high potency “skunk” became the norm. In 2012, Sir Robin Murray, then-Professor of psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, said that studies show that “if the risk of schizophrenia for the general population is about one per cent, the evidence is that, if you take ordinary cannabis, it is two per cent; if you smoke regularly you might push it up to four per cent; and if you smoke ‘skunk’ every day you push it up to eight per cent”.
A myriad of scientific studies worldwide have since confirmed his diagnosis. Data from 11 different locations in Europe found that regular users of cannabis containing 10 per cent THC were five times more likely than non-users to develop psychosis. Severe mental damage is age specific: cannabis-consuming teenagers, their brains still developing, were 11 times more likely to suffer a psychosis than non-users according to a study in Ontario. In Denmark, researchers estimated that of male patients between 21 and 30 who suffered from schizophrenia, up to 30 per cent of the cases were cannabis-related.
By 2012, the cannabis-schizophrenia link was so well-established scientifically that I wrote a piece with the title “Is this ‘the tobacco’ moment for cannabis?” I meant that evidence for the cannabis-psychosis connection was now as strong as that proving the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
I knew that the latter connection had been irrefutably established by scientists by 1950, but I was aware that this took decades to sink fully into public consciousness. Cigarette smoking had only begun to decline in the US in the mid-1960s, and in the UK in the mid-1970s. The tobacco companies fought back furiously and effectively, with vast expenditure on advertising showing smokers as cool and healthy.
I did not expect the tide to turn quickly against high-potency cannabis, but I did expect it to turn. I was largely right about this in the UK. Awareness of the danger of cannabis has risen. The number of cannabis users has been fairly steady at 2.3 million for a decade. But I was entirely mistaken about cannabis in America.
A powerful and unstoppable pincer movement developed from left and right. Progressives, mostly in Democratic-led states, saw the criminalisation of cannabis as unjustly targeting black, Hispanic and poor communities for doing something harmless to themselves and to others. The other arm of the pincer was that the corporate right yearned to profit from and expand the burgeoning cannabis market.
What happened next is well explained in an editorial mea culpa by the New York Times published this week. Once an influential advocate for cannabis legalisation, the paper explained that 13 years earlier no American lived in a state where marijuana was freely available for recreational use, but now they can legally buy and smoke a joint in half the states of the union. The newspaper confessed that once it had compared the federal ban on marijuana with the prohibition of alcohol in the US in the 1920s and 1930s. It had argued that the drug was not addictive, had few downsides and legalisation might not increase the number of users.
The paper now admits that it got this largely wrong, as did many others of goodwill. Above all, it underestimated “the power of Big Weed. For-profit marijuana companies, made possible by legalization, have a financial incentive to mislead the public about what they are selling.” These companies falsely claim that “their products can treat cancer and Alzheimer’s” while selling packages of cannabis “that mimic snacks for children”. As with the cigarette companies in an earlier era, they downplay the danger to the health of consumers.
The very fact that Trump is pushing to make marijuana more freely available ought to make Polanski and others hesitate before heading in the same lethal direction.
Further thoughts
Good to see that the Government’s proscription of Palestine Action has blown up in its face. Failed repression by the state is the lifeblood of activist groups. I recall seeing a lone woman standing in the rain on the grass verge near a traffic circle in Canterbury last July. She was holding up signs supportive of people in Gaza and denouncing genocide (72,000 dead, 172,000 injured so far). I felt that she was making a noble but ineffectual gesture.
I am glad to say I was wrong. A few minutes after I had driven past, two armed policemen appeared and threatened to arrest Laura Murton, 42, under the Terrorism Act because she was holding a Palestinian flag and holding signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide”.
The police officers told Murton that she was expressing views supportive of Palestine Action – though its name was not mentioned on any of her signs – and it was banned under terrorism legislation. Asked by the police if she supported any proscribed organisation, she replied: “I do not.”
Murton filmed a policeman telling her: “Mentioning freedom of Gaza, Israel, genocide, all of that all come under proscribed groups, which are terror groups that have been dictated [sic] by the government.”
He added that the words “Free Gaza” were “supportive of Palestine Action”, adding it was an offence “to express an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, namely Palestine Action”. She was told to move from where she was standing or face arrest, though they also said that she might be arrested wherever she stood in Canterbury. The police have since apologised to Murton.
This grotesque trampling on the right of protest and of freedom of expression was ultimately the work of former human rights lawyer Sir Keir Starmer. Three High Court judges now sensibly say that, while Palestine Action used criminality to promote its cause, its activities had not crossed the very high bar to make it a terrorist organisation.
A critical issue in the judgement was whether the ban impacted the rights of protesters expressing support for the Palestinians – as in the Laura Murton incident it so clearly did.
Beneath the Radar
“We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality,” wrote the great historian Lord Macaulay in 1830. “In general, elopements, divorces and family quarrels pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk about it for a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven years, our virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be violated.”
Something of the same is happening nearly 200 years later over the Peter Mandelson scandal. The stratospheric outrage of the British media over the Mandelson appointment is getting hard to take. Starmer clearly has terrible judgement about people, but so too had the media which lauded the choice of Mandelson at the time as an astute manoeuvre to penetrate the court of King Trump.
Cockburn’s Picks
Will Western leaders at the Munich Security Conference dare to openly express something of their detestation for Donald Trump? Simon Kuper has a perceptive piece in the Financial Times magazine about European identity.
“It’s an old tenet of political thought that to build a collective identity you need an enemy,” he writes. “An adversary can force your people to cohere. Hitler played that role for Britain, and the USSR for the US. After the Soviet enemy collapsed, so did American unity. But the EU only acquired external enemies in the past decade: first the Brexiters, then Vladimir Putin, with China lurking in the background, and now, at last, the perfect enemy, Donald Trump. He has probably done more to unite Europe than any European ever did.”
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