Home Office must wake up and smell the coffee - cannabis is NOT harmless

Did you know that Sweden once got extremely tough on drugs? Yup - liberal, laid-back, anything-goes old Sweden. They abolished the distinction between so-called "soft" drugs such as cannabis, and "hard" stuff like heroin. It was all equally illegal.

And guess what? Almost at once the country saw a clear drop in drug use of all kinds and an accompanying fall in crime. Mental health improved too. For reasons best known to the Swedes, they ended up reversing this sensible, results-delivering policy and they're back in the same boat as us again - i.e. a mess.

Cannabis is in the spotlight this week after three of Britain's police chiefs publicly called for a crackdown on the class B drug.

They agreed that it's time to stop turning a blind eye to cannabis use and possession, because far from being a "harmless" recreational drug on a par with our old friend alcohol, cannabis - particularly in its strong version, "skunk" - is overwhelmingly linked to crime, disorder and mental illness such as psychosis.

Sir Andy Marsh, head of the College of Policing, says that in his community children are frightened of using bus stops because "they always stink of cannabis" and that whenever he smells it on the streets, he feels distinctly unsafe.

Backing comes from David Sidwick, police and crime commissioner for Dorset. He says the reason we smell cannabis pretty much wherever we go is because "we've had 30 years of people telling us it's not dangerous".

Well, it is. In SO many ways. The notion cannabis is harmless is a lie that has somehow persisted since the Swinging Sixties. Sidwick, who worked in pharmaceuticals for three decades, says: "This drug has long-term, chronic side-effects.

"It's associated with more birth defects than thalidomide... linked to at least 20 cancers, psychosis, and drug-driving. It's a chronically dangerous drug and the whole world has been subjected to a PR campaign in the other direction."

The Home Office says is has no intention of changing the status of cannabis. That's a 1960s mindset in a 21st century nightmare. The Home Office needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

Thank God for the wisdom and mercy of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the UAE - and that's not a sentence you get to read very often.

The Sheikh this week pardoned and freed Tottenham schoolboy Marcus Fakana, the 19-year-old who has been languishing in Dubai's notorious Al Awir prison for months. Marcus, you'll remember, had sex with a British girl when they were both on holiday in Dubai with their parents. He was 18, she was 17 - and sex with anyone under 18, even consensual sex - is a heinous crime in Dubai.

Once the girl was back in the UK, a member of her family, to put it bluntly, ratted on Marcus to the UAE authorities and the teenager, who was still there, was promptly arrested and jailed. He's been locked up since last December. Lord knows what he's been through.

The moral of this story? If you're planning a holiday to Dubai, make sure you go through UAE law with a toothcomb first.

Or fly somewhere else for your winter sunshine.

Some of you reading this, by the law of averages, will share my birth year - 1948. Well apologies to the rest of you, but apparently 1948 was the luckiest year this past century to be born in. Why? Because according to a study published this week, everything fell onto our plate at once. We were the first babies born under the NHS. We timed our arrival so that when we reached our teens, we'd have more freedom than any teenagers in history (plus the best rock and pop music ever made).

We'd get free education and the first means-tested university grants (no crippling student loans for us). Yup: 1948 - that was THE date.