In a recent interview Yury Fedatov, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), made an outlandish statement about cannabis leading to “irreparable brain damage.” Hilarious if it wasn’t frightening.

This followed on from the heavy focus on cannabis and mental health in the World Drug Report with references to psychosis and dependency. Great efforts are made in the report to make it appear that cannabis is dangerous.

The UNODC 2010 Afghan Cannabis Survey published this week paints a picture of knowledge and control, an informed organisation that can ‘do’ something about Afghan farmer’s ‘subsistence farming’ because ‘cannabis cultivation has long been associated with opium cultivation and insecurity and in 2010 that connection persisted.’

Yury Fedatov and his team in Vienna clearly feel they need to ensure that cannabis is viewed negatively. As the vast bulk of the world’s illicit drug users are cannabis users, according to the UNODC’s figures 75% to 84% of the world’s drug users are cannabis users, the world’s problem with illicit drugs would vastly shrink if cannabis was taken out of the equation.

Perhaps the UNODC has been rattled by how cannabis use is increasingly being accepted and decriminalised and how close efforts to create a regulated market in the drug have come to fruition. Perhaps a paranoid apparatchik at the UNODC believe that the Bill introduced by Ron Paul and Barney Frank in the United States Congress has the potential to completely collapse the UN Conventions, as arguably the key state in supporting the 1961 Convention for the last fifty year unilaterally decides to throw in the towel.

The popular political debate on cannabis in the United States appears to pay very little attention to the issue of psychosis, this is true of the debate in many countries. General health effects and the old slander of a gateway drug are universals, but the idea that cannabis sends you completely mad is no longer that common.

The great exception to this is the United Kingdom. The UK has perhaps the most hostile space for cannabis activists in high income countries. Cannabis and psychosis is central to the mainstream political debate regarding the drug in the UK. Any activism in the UK needs to tackle the issue of psychosis as its primary goal in changing public opinion and it is clearly an uphill struggle.

A good example of the media space in the United Kingdom are articles like these:

One spliff can mean lifelong mental illness

Doctor's son jumped to his death after 'just one puff of powerful cannabis joint'

Is Yury licking his lips at the prospects of exporting the UK’s own brand of reefer madness? We will have to wait and see who he manages to suck in through his own hysterical gateway.