Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, has called for the possession of cannabis to be decriminalised, because he believes that the police disproportionately target black Londoners when policing drug possession. This announcement by Khan is in response to a report by the ‘London Drugs Commission’ (LDC), a body set-up by City Hall, chaired by Tony Blair’s old flatmate, Lord Charlie Falconer, and with an ‘Expert Reference Group’ including David Gauke, whose Sentencing Review reported just last week. Amongst other topics, the lengthy report reviews cannabis policies across the world, and identifies that black people in London are more likely to be searched for cannabis, although those searches are no more likely to find cannabis than when white people are searched. Of course one reading of this is that the police are equally accurate at assessing the likelihood that someone has cannabis on them, whatever their ethnicity.
Cannabis, especially the potent kind, appears to play a major role in the higher rates of serious mental illness seen among black Caribbean Londoners
It is true that black Londoners, and black children in particular, are more likely to be stopped and searched under suspicion of possessing cannabis.
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