In pre-independence India, Cannabis was a part of daily life. According to local legend, when amrit, which is the elixir of life was produced from the churning of the ocean by the gods and the anti-gods, the Hindu Lord Shiva created cannabis from his own body to purify the elixir and is therefore consumed by sages due to association with elixir and Shiva. In 1893, the British government established the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, to investigate the use of cannabis in India.
The report the Commission finally produced was no less than 3,281 pages long, and included testimony from almost 1,200 doctors, coolies, yogis, fakirs, heads of lunatic asylums, bhang peasants, tax gatherers, smugglers, army officers, hemp dealers, ganja palace operators and the clergy and concluded that moderate use of Cannabis did not cause any physical, mental or moral damage.
The report stated "Absolute prohibition is, in the opinion of the Commission, entirely out of the question ", yet that was what happened.The roots of why that happened lie in the 1930's United States, Harry J Anslinger who was director for newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics campaigned extensively against Cannabis using mass media as his tool. It is still not known what his true motivation was, it could have been the alarming increase of reports about smoking of marijuana or to eliminate hemp as an industrial competitor, he used every means possible to criminalize it.
"With such campaigning, people obviously got psyched and demanded a law that would protect them and their kids from marijuana abuse. So one by one the States passed a bill for making marijuana illegal." said Akshay Balraj, in a Quora post. At the end of his career Anslinger urged the countries in the UN to adopt a similar policy on narcotics and finally in 1988 what he wanted finally happened, The United Nations Convention against illicit traffic in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances made all UN nations ban a multitude of substances. So it was banned in India.
Years have passed and new research has come to light, Cannabis has medicinal and relaxing properties, Dr Peter McCormick, from UEA's school of Pharmacy, said: "THC, the major active component of marijuana, has anti-cancer properties. This compound is known to act through a specific family of cell receptors called cannabinoid receptors."According to Haaretz, Miri Ziv, the director of the Israel Cancer Association said "Medical marijuana has become one of the treatments available to cancer patients in Israel in recent years [and therefore] the association believes that the issue should be regulated by the professionals in the field."
Investigators at the Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem assessed the safety and efficacy of oral THC as an adjunct treatment in ten subjects with chronic PTSD (Posttraumatic stress disorder) .Researchers reported, "The intervention caused a statistically significant improvement in global symptom severity, sleep quality, frequency of nightmares, and PTSD hyperarousal symptoms."
With the passing of NDPS (Amendment) Bill 2014, Parliament has adopted a new category of "essential narcotic drugs" in section 2 of the Act – a list, which the Central Government can notify on the basis of expediency in medical practice . This is just one of the ways Cannabis can be decriminalized, the question now is, do you believe it should be done ?
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