Cannabis has never been a more controversial substance in Britain.
Over the last decade it has been reclassified twice, has been the
subject of a range of official investigations and scientific
studies, and has provoked media campaigns and all manner of
political gesturing. Cannabis Nation seeks to understand this
period by placing it back into the historical context of the
long-term story of cannabis and the British. It takes up where its
predecessor, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition,
1800-1928 (2003) left off. James Mills traces the story back into
the last days of the Empire, when Britain controlled
cannabis-consuming societies in Asia and Africa even while there
was little taste for the drug back home. He shows that cannabis was
caught up in control regimes established to deal with opium and
cocaine consumption, while it fell out of favour as a medicine. As
such, when migration after the Second World War brought the
Empire's cannabis-consumers to the UK, they faced hostile attitudes
towards their favourite intoxicant. From that time on a growing
number of groups and agencies took an interest in cannabis.
Ambitious bureaucrats in the Home Office saw in it an opportunity
to draw resources in to the Drugs Branch, while the police began to
use laws related to it for a number of other purposes. Experts
ranging from pharmacologists to sociologists formed committees on
the subject, and its association with colonial migrants lent it an
exotic aura to the politically-minded of the 1960s counter-culture
and the working-class youth of Britain's inner cities. Since the
1970s governments were content to devolve responsibility to the
police for working out the best legal approach to the substance,
and efforts to wrestle this back from them proved difficult a
decade ago. Cannabis Nation considers all of these trends, details
the often eccentric characters that have shaped them, and concludes
that current positions and arguments on cannabis can only be
properly assessed if their historical origins are clearly
understood.
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