ABSTRACT
Benign people do benign things, nasty people do nasty things, but to make benign people do nasty things you don’t need religion … you need drugs and alcohol. The anecdotal evidence that cannabis is linked to mental illness has been screaming at us for years. In fact the link between them goes back centuries; one of the first references to cannabis as a psychoactive drug was in China during the first century: ‘If taken in excess will produce visions of the devil … If taken over a long time, it makes one communicate with the spirits and lightens one’s body’. Napoleon noticed the adverse effects cannabis had on the Egyptian lower class and declared a total prohibition. During the 1920s the Egyptian government was so concerned about the detrimental effects cannabis was having on the working population that it requested that cannabis be added to the ‘Geneva International Convention on Narcotics Control’. In the UK on 28 September 1925 the Dangerous Drugs Act became law and cannabis was made illegal.
