“The big problem, as he sees it, is that while politicians love to be “tough” on classified drugs, their response to the far greater danger posed by the most dangerous drug of all, alcohol, has been “puny”.

“We are not taking the tidal wave of damage seriously enough. If we want to reduce deaths, alcohol and heroin are the issues. I have four children, now aged 18 to 26, and at almost every party they went to in their teenage years, a child was taken to hospital with alcohol poisoning.

“Liver disease will become a worse killer than heart disease within twenty years. Scotland already has the highest proportion of people with sclerosis of the liver in the world. There are hundreds of kids lying in hospital beds waiting for transplants that will never come. But when Sir Liam Donaldson [the Government's chief medical adviser] put forward a radical approach to reduce alcohol consumption by increasing the price, within seconds the government rejected his proposal.”

Nutt is not a puritan. He confesses to “liking” alcohol, to having binged occasionally when he was young, and to having tried some drugs as a student – but not cannabis, because he has never smoked. The worst problem with alcohol, he says, is that it is “insidious”: people develop a strong head and aren’t aware of its toxicity. But the main issue is that moderation doesn’t seem to be possible for many people, especially the young.

He has asked his own children why their friends set out to get wasted and break the windows of the Keynsham church. “They say it is the excitement of not knowing what will happen.”

His matrix isn’t going to stop them experimenting, so what would positive action should politicians take, short of sacking their advisers? “We cannot make alcohol illegal. We need a structural approach. The real price of alcohol has dropped by half since Labour came to power and the use has doubled. To bring consumption down, prices should be doubled, maybe tripled, and the drink-driving limit should be reduced. We could even change the age at which it is legal to start drinking. In the US, since most states switched back from 18 to 21 (in the late 1980s), 170,000 lives have been saved in road traffic accidents. A shifting of the starting age would also reduce the damage to brain and body and the likelihood of young people becoming dependent.”"

See the full article at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/6502750/Professor-Nutt-If-we-want-to-reduce-deaths-alcohol-and-heroin-are-the-issues.html. This guy (Professor Nutt) has become a popular national hero. Really – Forgive him for having never smoked (He could never have attained such an influential position if he had and it’s exactly because of his position that his views are doing so much for cannabis education.) and read the article.

I understand the notion of a tasty brew. But drinking beer is foremost about an intoxication effect, or else “near beers” that taste like beer but have little alcohol would sell better.

I’m not necessarily against microbrews – I live in Portland, Oregon, the microbrew capital of the world. I’m just tired of the hypocrisy that accepts more potent alcohol while demonizing more potent marijuana.

Russ I may have to disagree with you on this one. Whenever I drink beer (at most a couple times a month) I prefer to drink a great microbrew simply because I love the taste of a hoppy India Pale Ale. I don’t enjoy getting shit faced so I always cut my self off at 3 beers.

Just because we are strong supporters of marijuana legalization doesn’t mean we should attack small microbrews because they are getting better brakes. And microbrews aren’t the ones shelling out the money to fund the anti marijuana campaigns. It’s the big money making brewers like Budweiser that do that.

OMFG these prohibitionests, if they dont jump all over this and demand this stop or try to regulate it back down? Well that will only prove to the world that they are only fighting Marijuana to hold down a segment of citizens by discriminating against them/us.

Man this really shows they could care less about Cannabis(or getting High), its about who we are as a people, our livestyles and our safer, peaceful and greener view of life. Its Discrimination!