A FORMER member of the Nigeria High Commission is suing Scotland Yard for raiding his London home after police suspected it was a cannabis factory.

Ikechukwu Nwokike, the former minister and head of political affairs at the commission, and his family are suing the Met for UKP250,000, claiming that officers twice entered their home illegally, causing distress.

Scotland Yard has apologised for raiding the house in Barnet in 2010 after it was suspected of being a cannabis factory when a police helicopter's thermal camera picked up high heat levels coming from the roof.

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Scientists Excited by Trial Results

"We are looking forward to further findings from the trial as it extends to higher doses"

Scientists spearheading the use of a synthetic form of cannabis to treat patients with advanced cancer have said they are "excited" by their findings.

Dexanabinol has been used for the past two years to treat solid cancerous tumours in a groundbreaking trial led by the Bobby Robson Cancer Centre in Newcastle.

Professor Ruth Plummer, principal investigator, said results indicated that tumour growth had been halted in a number of patients exposed to higher levels of the drug.

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HOME SECRETARY Theresa May faced a revolt last night after one of her own Ministers refused to implement a drugs ban.

Liberal Democrat Drugs Minister Norman Baker is defying Mrs May's order to criminalise khat, a plant chewed to give users a high and used predominantly in East African immigrant communities.

Mr Baker - who once said cannabis was 'no more harmful than alcohol or tobacco' - has told Mrs May he disagrees with her plan to ban the substance, and flatly refused to act on it.

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Legal Highs Blow Yet Another Hole in Our Drugs Policy

Professor David Nutt is rocking the boat once again.The former chief drugs adviser to the Government, who was sacked in 2009 after saying that tobacco and alcohol are more harmful than some illicit substances, has now added his name to a letter to The Lancet raising questions about the perceived dangers of so-called legal highs. In fact, many of the recorded fatalities were caused by substances that were already illegal, Professor Nutt and Dr Leslie King claim.

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Sacked Government Adviser Claims the Official Figures Present a Misleading Picture on the Number of Deaths

The number of deaths from so-called legal highs is being overestimated with many of the fatalities due to substances either wrongly classified or already outlawed in the UK, a former government drugs advisor has claimed.

Official figures, including those from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), are giving a potentially misleading impression of the scale of the problem fuelling a media and political overreaction, according to Professor David Nutt.

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Kent could get its own Amsterdam-style cannabis cafe if an attempt launched by a Green councillor is successful.

Thanet councillor Ian Driver believes that popular opinion is moving in favour of the venue, which would allow users to smoke the class-B drug.

Last month, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, said that the UK should be at the heart of the debate about alternatives to prohibition.

Mr Driver, who has admitted to using cannabis, cocaine and Ecstasy in the past, wants to form a group to come up with a business case for the cafe and he is already looking at possible sites in Margate and Ramsgate.

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MOVES to liberalise drug laws around the world, including decriminalising cannabis use, posed a grave danger to public health, the United Nations said yesterday.

It attacked "misguided initiatives" on cannabis legalisation in the United States and Uruguay, saying they would not end underground markets.

The UN's defence of drug laws comes after Britain's Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said the UK should be at the heart of the debate about alternatives to prohibition.

In its annual report, the International Narcotics Control Board, the UN body monitoring drug treaties, said that the commercial sale of cannabis for medical reasons in Colorado had led to an increase in car accidents involving "drug drivers", and adolescent cannabis-related hospital admissions.

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Fears Over Liberalisation in Uruguay and US States

Fears That Moves Would Lead to More Addiction

The UN has launched a counter-offensive against moves to liberalise drug laws around the world, warning that cannabis legalisation poses a grave danger to public health.

The UN body for enforcing international drug treaties, the International Narcotics Control Board ( INCB), voiced concern over "misguided initiatives" on cannabis legalisation in Uruguay and the US states of Colorado and Washington that fail to comply with international conventions.

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LONDON (AP) - The United Nations' drug watchdog agency said the legalization of marijuana in the U.S. states of Colorado and Washington poses a threat to the international fight against drug abuse.

In a report published Tuesday, the International Narcotics Control Board said that it "deeply regrets" moves by those two states to lift restrictions on the sale and use of cannabis.

The board said the moves violate drug control conventions and called on national authorities to block the states' moves. The U.S. Justice Department has made clear it won't go after state-legal businesses even though federal law still bans marijuana consumption.

The INCB, which has no enforcement power, has previously voiced its opposition to legalization.

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CALLS have gone out for the legalisation of drugs and for testing stations to be set up in Scottish clubs.

It follows the death of 17-year-old Regane MacColl in the Arches nightclub in Glasgow earlier this month.

The teenager had taken what has been described as a "rogue" ecstasy pill. Police issued warnings about the red "mortal kombat tablets" after the schoolgirl's death. Four other clubbers were also taken to hospital after swallowing the pills.

Current club owners, former club owners and drug experts claim the "war on drugs" is not working and are now urging a rethink of the law, a move towards decriminalisation and the provision of testing facilities in clubs so drug users know pills they are taking are safe.

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I agree with your editorial ("Time for Britain and the rest of Europe to join the drugs debate", last week) that the call by Nick Clegg for the UK and the EU to engage in the debate about drug policy reform deserves strong cross-party support ("The lesson from Latin America: we need to rethink the drugs war").

This is the first time that a British minister in office has said what others have believed but waited until retirement to say. (Yes, I was one of the officials who also waited.) Nick Clegg has done so on returning from Colombia, and after conversations with President Juan Manuel Santos, who was the first president in office to call for debate on the UN drugs regime in an interview in the Observer in 2011.

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Never did I think I would find myself agreeing with Texas governor Rick Perry on drug policy. But when the darling of Tea Party Republicans argued in favour of reducing prison populations and against federal obstruction of Washington and Colorado's alternative marijuana policies, I found myself applauding the three-term governor.

"After 40 years of the war on drugs, I can't change what happened in the past," Perry said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "What I can do as the governor of the second largest state in the nation is to implement policies that start us toward a decriminalisation and keep people from going to prison and destroying their lives, and that's what we've done over the last decade."

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'If You Are Anti-Drugs, You Should Be Pro-Reform'

Deputy PM's Anger at Tory Silence on Issue

Nick Clegg today drags the case for reforming the drugs laws to the centre ground of British politics, saying that blanket prohibition has seen cocaine use triple in less than 20 years, a trend that has helped perpetuate conflict and violence in South America.

Writing in today's Observer, after a week in which he visited Colombia to learn first-hand the devastating effects that Europe's enthusiasm for cocaine has had on the country, Clegg said the UK needed to be at the heart of the debate about potential alternatives to blanket prohibition and that he wanted to see an end to "the tradition where politicians only talk about drugs reform when they have left office because they fear the political consequences".

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It was with great foresight that a Conservative backbench MP stood up during a parliamentary debate in the House of Commons in 2002 and pleaded with the then Labour government to rethink its commitment to the "war on drugs". "I ask the Labour government not to return to retribution and war on drugs. That has been tried and we all know that it does not work."

Contributions like this have been all too rare from British politicians, particularly at a time when the debate about the merits of prohibition has changed so radically in recent years. That is most evident in the Americas, both North and South.

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Last Week, Nick Clegg Was in Colombia, Where He Witnessed Dramatic Measures to Combat the Grip of Drug Lords.

Meanwhile, in the US, a Dramatic Shift in Public Opinion From Left and Right Is Creating Alternatives to Prohibition

I want to end the tradition where politicians only talk about drugs when they've left office because they fear the consequences

If Britain were fighting a war where 2,000 people died every year, where increasing numbers of our young people were recruited by the enemy and our opponents were always a step ahead, developing new weapons faster than we could combat them, there would be outcry and loud calls for change. Yet this is exactly the situation with the "war on drugs" and for far too long we have resisted a proper debate about the need for a different strategy.

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The Great Actor Was an Addict. and Thanks to the Extremely Stupid Policy of Prohibition, His Death Was Inevitable

Philip Seymour Hoffman's death was not on the bill. If it'd been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber, that we are invited to anticipate daily, we could delight in the Faustian justice of the righteous dispatch of a fast-living, sequin-spattered denizen of eMpTyV. We are tacitly instructed to await their demise with necrophilic sanctimony. When the end comes, they screech on Fox and TMZ, it will be deserved. The Mail provokes indignation, luridly baiting us with the sidebar that scrolls from the headline down to hell.

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AS the dust settles on the conclusion of Burton's biggest ever operation to tackle drug dealing, police chiefs are now moving to recover UKP700,000 worth of assets gained through criminal pursuits.

Chief inspector Steve Maskrey, East Staffordshire local policing team commander, spoke to the Mail after the final defendant, Mohammed Aziz, was sentenced to four years at Stafford Crown Court - meaning that a total of 41 criminals had been before judges and handed a total of 93 years and four months in jail for flooding the streets of the town with drugs.

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Gangs from London are increasingly "spreading their wings" to seek markets for drugs in other parts of the country, a Metropolitan Police officer has warned.

Officers believe as many as 54 of the capital's most dangerous gangs have "tentacles" in other towns and cities, operating in a similar way to business franchises.

The warning came a day after co-ordinated raids in the Thames Valley, Edinburgh, Essex, Bedfordshire and London in which 29 people were arrested in an operation targeting the south London-based GAS gang.

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A RECOVERY day in Dorset aims to celebrate the recovery process and raise awareness.

Dorset Recovery Day will take place on Saturday February 1 at the Corn Exchange in Dorchester from 10am to 4pm.

Organisers of the day say the aim is to help make recovery from drug and alcohol issues in Dorset visible to those people using the service and those in the wider community, to show the strength of service users and the Dorset treatment system.

The event involves treatment services across Dorset provided by Dorset Drug and Alcohol Action Team. The services offer help, support and treatment to people who suffer from drug or alcohol problems.

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A study of drug-related deaths in Scotland in the 1990s revealed that every single death where ecstasy was identified as cause, or partial cause, was reported in the media. A number of these deaths were splashed on front pages.

Deaths related to other drugs were much less likely to make the news. Only one-in-three of deaths related to use of amphetamine was covered at all. One-in-50 diazepam-related deaths was deemed worthy of ink.

Deaths from ecstasy were significantly lower than deaths from heroin, morphine, methadone, or cocaine, while alcohol and tobacco-related deaths were so common that not only were they unlikely to be reported, the fact that they were drug-related tended not to register at all.

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