A police and crime commissioner says cannabis should be made into a class A drug, in line with substances such as cocaine and heroin. And Alison Hernandez says the drug should never be legalised.
She made the suggestion after a large police operation in her south Devon area, which involved a specialist team of officers from Merseyside, as they tried to crack down on drug users and dealers allegedly involved in County Lines operations. These 'County Lines' operations often involve drugs being ferried from larger areas to smaller ones.
The south Devon operation say police using dog handlers and dogs, drones, and volunteer special officers, as well as response crews, neighbourhood police and detectives, reports PlymouthLive. They linked up with the Merseyside Police 'Operation Medusa' team that uses specially trained officers to clampdown on drugs being ferried into the South West from Liverpool.
The operation resulted in a number of arrests. And Ms Hernandez has now called for cannabis to see its classification increased, with many claiming law enforcement take a softer stance on the substance, when compared to 'hard' drugs like heroin and cocaine.
She said: "Cannabis, potentially, should probably be a class A, not a class B drug. The level of psychosis and actual harm to individuals by taking these drugs is so great that I would never look to legalise it.
"You could talk about the legalisation of alcohol and tobacco, but hey, we’ve still got an illicit industry in the sale of those as well. So it doesn’t even take away the black market."
Cannabis was downgraded from Class B to Class C in 2004 by the Government primarily to free police to focus on 'more serious' and harmful drugs such as heroin, cocaine and crack cocaine. As a result of the reclassification, within the first year, arrests for cannabis possession fell by around a third, saving an estimated 199,000 hours of police time, as well as court time.
However, in the years that followed there was increasing concerns over the modifications being made to cannabis by criminals, making it stronger and more harmful. A study by King's College of London study, based on a study of 780 people in South London, suggested the risk of psychosis was three times higher for users of the more potent ‘skunk’ cannabis than for non-users.
The study found the use of hash, the milder form of the drug, was not associated with increased risk of psychosis. Cannabis was reclassified as a Class B drug in January 2009. It has remained, for many years, the most widely used illegal drug in the UK.
Ms Hernandez admits some residents have lost faith in the police’s ability to deal with drugs and says she hopes to restore confidence in the service.
She said: "I think our communities have stopped reporting drug dealing where they see it because they think the police aren’t going to act. I think that they assume that it will never go away.
"I’m in Torquay, my home town. Twenty years I’ve been around where we’ve been trying to tackle drug dealing and anti-social drug taking, and we’ve not cracked it yet. So this is why this Operation Medusa, of actually bringing specialist officers down, really cracking down hard on the enforcement side and then working with the communities to improve drug treatment, is the way forward."
