A group of leading doctors have become the first British medical professionals to call for cannabis to be legalised for recreational use. The doctors of the British Medical Association's Scottish Committee for Public Health Medicine and Community Health argue that classifying cannabis alongside heroin and cocaine gives young people the idea that taking hard drugs is no more dangerous than smoking a joint.

The group has tabled a motion for debate at the British Medical Association's annual conference next month in Belfast calling for a change in the law to help curb the spread of hard drugs. Their motion, that the BMA should "support the legalisation of cannabis for medicinal and recreational use", was put before the BMA's public health conference by the committee earlier this month but was defeated.

George Venters, the committee chairman, said: "I think more than half the population would support legalisation if you laid out the evidence." The BMA supports research into the development of cannabinoids for medical use but does not back smoking of the raw drug to relieve pain because it contains too many contaminants.

A spokeswoman for the BMA said: "This is only one committee of the BMA. It is not the policy of the BMA as a whole. (...) The Board of Science looked at the issue of recreational use last year and decided that the issue of legalisation was outside their remit."

Dr Brian Potter, Scottish secretary of the BMA, said: "What [the committee is] trying to say is that there are other dangerous drugs which are legalised and cause a lot more deaths. Certainly in Scotland, 35 people a day die from tobacco use. Maybe we should be focusing on that rather than putting our energies on cannabis."

(Source: The Independent of 22 June 1999)