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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I'D LIKE to commend the Sunday Herald on raising the need to debate our current drugs legislation. It has been clear for a long time that the so-called war on drugs is simply not working. Those at the top of the supply chain go unpunished and get rich while the vulnerable are criminalised for the violence and petty crime that surrounds the use of illegal substances. It appeared from your reports that interested parties who are in the know were not asking for immediate decriminalisation. They were just asking for a debate to be opened up in Scotland about the issue of decriminalisation. As was pointed out, Scotland is a progressive country and there is nothing to fear from a discussion, surely?

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IT SEEMS that there was a comma in the wrong place in Ian Bell's excellent article. The prison industrial complex in the USA has now provided more than two million customers for companies like the Corrections Corporation of America. Over 900,000 are in jail for drug related crimes, 10 times more than stated in the article. The Scottish government's response to the new Irish policy was predictably pathetic. A Celtic mouse?

Myles Cooney Cambuslang

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TWO things puzzle me about Ian Bell's article in last weekend's Sunday Herald (How to win the war on drugs? Legalise them, Comment, November 8). Firstly, his point that Portugal's decriminalisation has resulted in the decrease in the price of street drugs. Isn't an increase in the price of addictive substances (booze, fags) meant to reduce demand?

Then: "So legalise the lot." Okay, let's. Watch for a massive price war between the major supermarkets. Buy one get one free?

Sadly, there is no answer and no-one should pretend they have it; too much to lose when, inevitably, things turn out differently from the visionary's dream.

Hugh Burns Edinburgh

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Six years ago the Government's chief drugs adviser, David Nutt, alerted us to a frightening addiction called "equasy".

Equasy, as Nutt described it, was a pursuit that released adrenaline and pleasurable endorphins into the brain. It was also extremely dangerous, often fatal. Nutt reckoned that around one in every 350 usages of equasy resulted in acute physical harm. Worse still, this was an addiction that had in its grip tens of thousands of people across Britain, including small children.

Equasy was horse-riding. Nutt's point was that, objectively speaking, riding a horse is a far more dangerous hobby than taking little MDMA pills, or ecstasy, in nightclubs. While he calculated that 1 in 350 horseriding episodes resulted in harm, that was only the case with 1 in 10,000 episodes of ecstasy use. And yet ecstasy was a Class A banned drug and the object of great waves of concern from the media and politicians, while horse-riding was not.

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Amid a fragrant haze of hypocrisy, the line is that there will be no change, funding cuts aside, in UK drugs strategy. Meanwhile, police forces the length of these islands are improvising policies of their own

IT could be a pub quiz question. What do Armenia and Argentina have in common? The Czech Republic and Chile? Paraguay and Poland? The answer isn't football. Each has decided, in some fashion, that if you just say no to drugs, you say nothing useful at all. Depending on the definitions used, there are between 25 and 30 such countries. Their laws, methods, aims and ambitions vary. Some have legalised drugs. Some have "re-legalised". A few never got around to prohibition to begin with. Most have experimented - for personal use, you understand - - with a gateway policy, decriminalisation.

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There can be no doubt that the daft war on drugs is devastating many of the world's poorest countries, from Africa to Latin America. But this has been ignored by major charities that claim to campaign for international development, presumably for fear of upsetting their donors. Now one has broken ranks, with the release of an important report from Christian Aid condemning what it calls "a blind spot in development thinking".

Christian Aid deserves credit for taking a stand, one which has caused internal palpitations. The report itself highlights the hypocrisy of successive British governments that have poured money into aid yet supported the prohibition ripping apart poor communities. One day they will see that sanctimonious talk of saving the world is not a solution to complex problems.

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