Legalising the sale of cannabis in specialist shops would generate UKP1bn a year in tax revenue and reduce the harm done to users and society, according to the most detailed plans ever drawn up for the liberalisation of UK drug laws.

The study, which was carried out by a panel of experts including scientists, academics and police chiefs, calls for the UK to follow the lead of some US states and allow the sale of cannabis to over-18s in licensed retail stores.

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Cannabis should be sold over the counter in plain packaging in specialist, licensed shops to over-18s only, according to an expert panel set up by the Liberal Democrats to examine what a regulated cannabis market in Britain should look like.

They suggest cannabis should be sold in three strengths - lower, medium and higher - in prescription medicine-style resealable childproof containers with a health warning.

The panel also recommends that smallscale licensed "cannabis social clubs" should be set up, and that home-grown cultivation of up to four plants for personal use should be allowed.

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PEOPLE caught with drugs for personal use would be referred for health treatment rather than sent to jail under proposals unveiled by the Scottish Liberal Democrats.

Leader Willie Rennie said Scotland's current drugs policy "is costly and fails to work for everyone".

Drugs misuse costs society UKP3.5 billion a year amounting to around UKP900 for every adult in Scotland, he said.

The LibDems will call for drug users to be "referred for treatment, education or civil penalties, ending the use of i mpr i s on ment " , in a ma n i fe sto p ol ic y put forward for discussion at its Scottish spring conference this week.

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Under Scottish LibDem proposals, possession of small amounts of heroin for personal use would mean a police warning rather than a court appearance

HEROIN, cocaine and ecstasy users should face police warnings instead of prison if found with small amounts of drugs for personal use, the Scottish LibDems will argue this week. The party will use its spring conference to advocate decriminalising drug use - as opposed to drug dealing in a fundamental reform of how addiction is dealt with by the authorities.

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IT'S time for Scotland to change its approach to drug abuse. The current policy towards it is costly and fails to work for everyone. Drugs misuse costs society UKP3.5 billion a year. That's around UKP900 for every adult in Scotland. We're not winning the so-called war on drugs and we have to consider the alternatives.

This week, at the Scottish Liberal Democrats' Spring Conference, our manifesto commitment to promote a change in drug policy will be set out. We are proposing a fundamental reform of the way drug users are prosecuted and sentenced. Not drug dealers. We think it is right that they can face up to life in prison. But we do not believe vulnerable people struggling with addiction should be imprisoned simply for possessing drugs for personal use.

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Parliament Should Allow Doctors to Prescribe Cannabis

Those responsible for the Government's drug policies could not be accused of any exaggerated deference to the world of scientific papers, double-blind trials and laboratory-bound research. The Psychoactive Substances Bill - which outlaws anything likely to alter a user's mindset - was described in the New Scientist as one of the "stupidest, most dangerous and unscientific pieces of legislation ever conceived". It demonstrates Parliament moving in the opposite direction to the tonnage of evidence showing that draconian approaches to recreational drug use have failed.

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A campaign to legalise the medical use of cannabis is launched today amid warnings that up to 1.1 million people across Britain are currently breaking the law by taking the drug to combat the pain of chronic conditions.

The drive, which coincides with a Coronation Street storyline focusing on the issue, is being supported by the former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and senior politicians from all parties.

Campaigners hope to attract hundreds of thousands of signatures for a petition backing the move, with the aim of forcing a Commons debate on legalising medicinal cannabis. They are pressing for ministers to follow the lead of several Western European countries and US states in allowing doctors to prescribe marijuana to alleviate the painful symptoms of disorders such as multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

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Billionaire warlords, who started as small-time weed smugglers, have swathes of Latin America under their bloody rule, and the chaos is creeping north. But, says IOAN GRILLO, they owe their power to white-collar crooks from the States, who first set up their deadly networks

A chain of crime wars is currently strangling Latin America and the Caribbean, drenching it in blood. And the first link in the chain is found in the US. Specifically, in a Barnes and Noble bookshop in a mall in El Paso, Texas.

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A YOUNG man with an inoperable form of bone cancer, who was told he only had a year left to live, claims cannabis oil has given him new hope.

Last August, 23-year-old George Blakemore from Torfaen was diagnosed with Stage 2 Chondrosarcoma a rare form of bone cancer arising from the left pubic ramus bone.

By October it had spread to his lungs and after undergoing one of the strongest forms of chemotherapy, George was told surgery was no longer an option and he may only have around a year left to live.

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Nick Clegg and Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka Set Out Their Vision Before a Forthcoming UN Summit

Standing on the podium at the United Nations in New York in June 1998, Kofi Annan declared: "It is time for all nations to say 'yes' to the challenge of working towards a drug-free world!" The leaders assembled at that meeting agreed: illegal drugs were to be eradicated from the face of the planet. They even set a deadline: 10 years to rid the globe of this scourge. A drug-free world by 2008.

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The Conservative MP Crispin Blunt has admitted using the party drug "poppers", while speaking out in parliament against proposed legislation to ban legal highs.

The chair of parliament's foreign affairs select committee was speaking during a debate on the government's psychoactive substances bill, which seeks to outlaw certain legal recreational drugs. The legislation would ban alkyl (or amyl) nitrate or "poppers" which can be bought in shops.

"There are some times, Madam Deputy Speaker, when something is proposed which becomes personal to you and you realise that the government is about to do something fantastically stupid and I think in those circumstances one has a duty to speak up," said Blunt, who has been MP for Reigate since 1997.

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The UK taxpayer has given millions of pounds to help Pakistan's counternarcotics force target and arrest drug traffickers, at least five of whom have been sentenced to death.

The revelation has raised questions about the UK's commitment to opposing the death penalty in other countries. Last year Sir Simon McDonald, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, said that human rights no longer had the profile within his department that they had in the past.

The UK's UKP5.6m donation was made to Pakistan's anti-narcotics force, through a five-year UN Office on Drugs and Crime project, despite the fact that the Pakistan government insisted donors could not demand that it be linked to human rights considerations.

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A CONSERVATIVE MP has revealed he uses amyl nitrate known by the slang name "poppers" during a speech in the House of Commons and criticised the Government's "manifestly stupid" plan to ban sale of the drug.

Crispin Blunt, who is gay, warned the proposals would force homosexual men to deal with criminals if selling the drug was outlawed.

Poppers is a recreational drug popular in the gay community. In Parliament, Mr Blunt said he was "astonished" at government plans. During a debate about the Psychoactive Substances Bill, the former minister said: "Sometimes when something is proposed which becomes personal to you, you realise the Government is about to do something fantastically stupid.

"I use poppers, I out myself as a popper user and would be directly affected by this legislation. I'm astonished to find it's proposing to be banned and frankly so would I think many other gay men."

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Roberto Saviano is determined to uncover capitalism's complicity with the narcolords of South America, writes Ed Vulliamy

Pablo Escobar was "the first to understand that it's not the world of cocaine that must orbit around the markets, but the markets that must rotate around cocaine".

Of course, Escobar didn't put it that way: this heretical truth was posited by Roberto Saviano in his latest book Zero Zero Zero , the most important of the year and the most cogent ever written on how narco-traffic works. It speaks what must be told at the end of another year of drug war spreading further and deeper, that tells what you will not learn from Narcos , Breaking Bad or the countless official reports.

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Rethink

MacAskill Wants Change

FORMER justice secretary Kenny MacAskill has called on the SNP Government to stop treating drug users as criminals.

MacAskill, who served for seven years under Alex Salmond, claimed the war on drugs had failed across the world and said that police would be better targeting criminal gangs instead of low-level users.

The Scottish Government rejected the call and Labour branded his proposals "potentially dangerous".

MacAskill, justice secretary from 2007 to 2014, said the "winds of change are blowing" across the world.

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Change in Approach to Petty Offending to Ensure Major Crimes Are the Priority

PEOPLE caught with small quantities of cannabis will face on-the-spot warnings from police rather than prosecution.

The change in enforcing drug laws is part of a major overhaul of how officers handle petty offending to free up the time of police and prosecutors.

Scottish officers will next month start issuing new "Recorded Police Warnings" to many of the tens of thousands of people a year found committing minor offences, such as carrying cannabis, urinating in the street or petty shoplifting.

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AS officers know well, it is not for the police to shape laws on drugs. There might be a ready audience for another debate over the decriminalisation of cannabis, but that is not, strictly speaking, the business of Police Scotland. Instead, the force is preparing to ask important questions of its own.

Where petty offences are concerned, those could be summarised as what, how and why? If the offence involves an individual caught in possession of a small amount of cannabis for personal consumption, what should an officer do? As things stand, the issue of "how" follows, given the high chance of a report to the Crown Office leading to no action.

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REGARDING the commentary by Howard Wooldridge, there is a middle ground between drug prohibition and blanket legalisation (The lives and trillions of dollars sacrificed on the altar of futile modern prohibition, Comment, November 15). Switzerland's heroin maintenance programme has been shown to reduce disease, death and crime by providing addicts with standardised doses in a clinical setting. Its success has inspired heroin maintenance pilot projects in Canada, Germany, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Expanding prescription heroin maintenance would deprive organised crime of a core client base. This would render illegal heroin trafficking unprofitable and spare future generations addiction. Cannabis should be taxed and regulated like alcohol, only without the advertising. As long as criminals control cannabis distribution, consumers will come into contact with sellers of hard drugs. Cannabis prohibition is a gateway drug policy.

Robert Sharpe, MPA Policy analyst Common Sense for Drug Policy Washington, DC

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SINCE the official beginning of the drug war in 1971, the law-enforcement community in the United States has spent just over $1 trillion. Tens of thousands of citizens have died, sacrificed on the altar of this modern prohibition. Millions have suffered from a drug arrest, which haunts them forever - and the difference on the streets? Federal research shows drugs are cheaper, stronger and more "readily available" to America's youth.

As a street cop and detective in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, I had a ringside seat to this unfolding social disaster.

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Scotland's war on drugs amounts to a war on the poor, according one of the country's leading authorities on substance abuse.

In a new paper, Dr Iain McPhee, from the University of the West of Scotland's Centre for Alcohol and Drugs Studies, calls the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, "unjust, unfair and unworkable." McPhee was Project Leader of the National Drugs Helpline and the National AIDS Helpline, and has worked as a drugs specialist with social work and Scottish police.

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