Everyone from the chief inspector of prisons to prisoners themselves is now expressing concerns about the impact that new psychoactive substances are having on prisoners, prison officers and the efficacy of the prison system (Prisoners reveal regular 'spice' habit has tripled, 1 June). Current approaches to addressing their use are not working, and the situation is getting worse.

HMP Forest Bank, however, is taking a fresh approach. Using the principles of restorative justice, it is encouraging those prisoners who are using spice and other so-called "legal highs" to face up to the impact of their behaviour on their fellow prisoners and on prison staff.

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Prison should not be regarded as a punishment (Letters, 2 June). It is place of restraint where those who are incorrigibly violent - such as terrorists and incurable psychopaths - must be kept.

Punishment is a consequence of this restraint, but it should not be its aim. Punishment can be achieved by much more effective means, eg ill-gotten gains can be sequestered and subsequent earnings mulcted. The aim must be restitution, reform and rehabilitation, not one-size-fits-all punishment.

Magistrates, who can only award useless short sentences, should have this power removed completely. Crown court judges should have their sentencing audited, and where it has proved ineffective they should be held to account. If all drugs were legally regulated imprisonment would reduce by about 65%.

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This Act Drives Users Back Towards Illegal Drugs and Alcohol, the Most Dangerous Substance of Them All

With the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, ministers last week banned the sale or procurement of any substance that has psychoactive activity, regardless of whether it is harmless or even useful. The sole exceptions are alcohol, nicotine products and caffeine.

The main justification for this draconian piece of legislation is to make it easy for the police and local authorities to close down "head shops", or at least to stop them selling so-called legal highs: drugs such as nitrous oxide; some synthetic cannabinoids, salvia, and some weak stimulants known as bubbles or sparkle. The act is based on the false premise that legal highs are responsible for up to 100 deaths a year, when in fact the true number is fewer than 10. Media hysteria about the use of nitrous oxide by a few footballers and a dislike of young people doing something different from their parents has also played a part.

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THE trumpeted 'ban on legal highs' is a fiction, like the rest of our drug laws. The new Act imposes no penalties at all for possessing these dangerous poisons - except for people who are already in jail.

This is an amazing giveaway of the Government's real drugs policy, which is to look the other way while pretending to be 'tough'.

In fact, simple possession of cannabis, heroin or cocaine is now hardly punished at all, even though it is illegal.

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The new law (Legal high ban risks creating fresh crisis, 28 May), which criminalises the selling of so-called legal highs, but crucially does not criminalise the user, is the right thing to do. It came out of an independent study into these substances which I set up when drugs minister.

A wide range of experts produced a unanimous report and that forms the basis of the law. I was clear that so-called legal highs presented more of a danger to users than many long-prohibited drugs, especially cannabis.

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Critics of Law Say Trade Will Simply Shift Underground

Whipped Cream Chargers May Come Under Suspicion

The blanket ban on the trade in legal highs which comes into force today is expected to end their sale through high street "head shops" and UK-based websites almost overnight, police and trading standards officers have said.

But there are fears that the trade in new psychoactive substances (NPS) as they are officially known will move underground to illegal street markets and the darknet, the network of untraceable and hidden websites.

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I AGREE wholeheartedly with David J Crawford in his exhortation to government it should decriminalise cannabis (Letters, May 23).

What did the war on drugs achieve? In the US the prison population has increased by 500 per cent in the last 30 years due almost entirely to drug convictions. In the UK a large number of people now have a criminal record for merely possessing a very small amount of the drug. Vast amounts of money and violence have been the result as the criminal element took control of the supply chain.

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Critics Say Antisocial Behaviour Powers Are Already Criminalising Vulnerable People, Ahead of All-Out Ban

It's just before 11.30am on a Friday morning and I'm standing in Lincoln's city square. With me are police officers Andy Balding and Joel Dowse, an antisocial behaviour officer at Lincoln council. We're on the lookout for socalled legal highs synthetic substances that have similar effects to illegal drugs but have not yet been banned by legislation.

We scan the square for anything suspicious. Everything looks in order, but I'm assured it hasn't always been this way. Balding points to a line of benches overlooking the river. "Along here used to be really bad," he tells me. I hear stories about groups of people on legal highs terrorising shopkeepers and falling unconscious in the street. Right now, all I can see is an elderly man peacefully contemplating the river.

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Lib Dem's Norman Lamb Urges MPs to Pass the Bill to Create a Regulated Market for the Drug

Parliament will be failing in its duty to reflect the will of the people if it continues to resist calls to introduce a regulated cannabis market, a former coalition minister has warned.

A 10-minute rule bill proposing the introduction of a legal cannabis market in the UK, something that would constitute the biggest shakeup of the drugs laws in the past half-century, will end its passage through the Commons on Friday. It was tabled by Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrats' health spokesman, and supported by MPs from all parties, as well as experts including a serving chief constable.

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First Minister Makes Controversial Health Announcement As She Confirms Dundee Will Get Its Own Trauma Centre

Nicola Sturgeon would back decriminalising cannabis for medicinal use.

The First Minister said there was a "specific case" for relaxing laws to treat people with conditions such as multiple sclerosis but reaction to her announcement split the audience of around 150 activists in Dundee's Queen's Hotel.

A wide range of topics were covered in the hour long question and answer session, with the SNP leader committing to building a trauma centre in Dundee and said she would "love" to implement Frank's Law but stopped short of committing herself to a fairer care system.

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Synthetic Cannabis Has 'Devastating Impact' On Jails, Says Chief Inspector

Synthetic cannabis is having a "devastating impact" in British prisons and making it difficult for normal life to continue in some facilities, the chief inspector of prisons has warned.

Sold as "spice" and "black mamba", synthetic cannabis has been blamed for deaths, serious illness and episodes of self-harm among prisoners. Some prison officers have reported falling ill from exposure to the fumes.

High demand for the compound has fuelled more severe problems in the prison system than officers have faced from any other drug, with prisoners racking up greater debts and suffering worse bullying and violence, Peter Clarke told the Guardian. "Prison staff have told me that the effect on individuals and prisons as a whole is unlike anything they have seen before," said Clarke, who took up the post in February.

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SOME things are unsayable in British politics. One such is the truth that cannabis has been, for many years, a decriminalised drug. The police, the CPS and the courts have given up any serious effort to arrest and prosecute users, just as evidence starts to pour in that it is extremely dangerous.

Instead our elite moan about 'prohibition', which does not exist, and the cruel 'criminalisation' of dope-smokers, which would be their own fault if it happened, but actually doesn't. Arrests for this offence are rarer every week, and some police forces openly say they don't do it any more.

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Laws on Tobacco Smoking Should Extend to Marijuana

It's time to legalise marijuana, then ban it again. Here's why. The Canadian government chose April 20 to make the announcement that cannabis will be legalised next spring, in the latest progressive move by the new Liberal government. The news had been coming for a while, because it was an election pledge last year but the date was significant because it was "4-20", when weed enthusiasts get together to call for changes in the law. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government beat them to it with a morning announcement.

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Nick Clegg has accused the home secretary, Theresa May, of attempting to delete sentences from a Whitehall report after it concluded that there was no link between tough laws and levels of illegal drug use.

The former deputy prime minister also said senior Conservatives, such as David Cameron and George Osborne, have failed to act on drug reform because they see the issue as a "naughty recreational secret" at Notting Hill dinner parties instead of a public health crisis.

In an interview with the Guardian before a major UN conference on the global drug problem, Clegg said the Tories were failing to listen to warnings that the war on drugs had failed.

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Drugs policy in the UK is not actually made in smoke-filled rooms but it might as well be. The mixture of befuddled optimism with a lack of urgency that characterises official thinking about cannabis has had dangerous results.

Getting on for 50 years of prohibition, vigorously defended in principle but lackadaisically enforced in practice, have produced a situation that combines the disadvantages of tolerance and criminalisation. Two generations of parents now know that it is not as dangerous as official propaganda told them, but this leads to a reluctance to admit that the habit has any real dangers at all. That in itself is dangerous to their children.

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HOW on earth did I end up on friendly terms with Howard Marks, the drug smuggler and pro-cannabis propagandist who died last week? Yet I did. You might think we would loathe each other. He stood for almost everything I am against. But not quite. He was a fierce and instinctive defender of free speech, a rare and precious quality.

I learned this one long-ago evening in Blackpool, when a squawking rabble of ignorant, intolerant students succeeded in having me driven off the stage at a debate.

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The president of Colombia will this week present a plan for the complete and radical overhaul of global policy towards drug trafficking and organised crime at a special session of the United Nations general assembly. Unveiling his proposals in the Observer today, Juan Manuel Santos said urgent measures were needed to bring about "a more effective, lasting and human solution" to the misery and crisis of narco-traffic.

The most sensational element in Santos's presentation is the announcement that his government will - as a result of a four-year peace process soon to bear fruit as a peace treaty be implementing its own domestic struggle against narco-traffic alongside its bitter enemies, the Marxist guerillas of Farc. The group admits to having funded its war by what it calls "taxation" of narco-profits.

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Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia, argues that his country's narco-related violent history illustrates exactly why a global rethink on prohibition should be the key discussion at this week's UN general assembly special session on drugs

How does one explain to a Colombian peasant in a rural community in the south-west of the country that he will be prosecuted under criminal charges for growing marijuana plants, while a young entrepreneur in Colorado finds his or her legal recreational marijuana business booming?

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Colombia's president, Juan Manuel Santos, arrives in New York this week with a clear message to the UN general assembly special session on drugs: the failure of the "war on drugs" to deal with the human cost of narco traffic and drug abuse. Santos's message will be: the whole policy needs to be rethought, with a different set of priorities.

President Santos first called for an overhaul in policy towards drugs in an interview with this newspaper in 2011, urging that "a new approach should try and take away the violent profit that comes with drug trafficking". He has continued to drive that conversation forward with the moral authority bestowed by leading a country that was nearly destroyed by the violence and corrupting influence of cartel money on the police, judiciary and the body politic. It was close to a failed state in the late 90s and it was drugs that did that damage.

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UN Meeting to Discuss Growing Drugs Problem

Up to Quarter of Psychosis Cases Could Be Prevented

The risks of heavy cannabis use for mental health are serious enough to warrant global public health campaigns, according to international drugs experts who said young people were particularly vulnerable.

The warning from scientists in the UK, US, Europe and Australia reflects a growing consensus that frequent use of the drug can increase the risk of psychosis in vulnerable people, and comes as the UN prepares to convene the first special session on the global drugs problem since 1998. The meeting in New York next week aims to unify countries in their efforts to tackle issues around illicit drug use.

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