Forde supports Sacramental Cannabis Bill, 2019

Marijuana is the safest psychoactive drug available in Barbados, according to Minister of Youth and Community Empowerment Adrian Forde.

In his presentation on the Sacramental Cannabis Bill, 2019, Minister Forde told the Lower House yesterday, that many well-known and widely used medications were more potent than marijuana.

“Whether it is the narcotics we would speak of, whether the codeines, the morphine, fentanyl – which is 50 000 times stronger than marijuana, so when we look to enact legislation like this we are speaking of a drug, which is considered the safest of all psychoactive drugs in the world. You are talking about a drug that is safer than aspirin, an over-the-counter medicine which kills hundreds of people a year – not so with marijuana,” he said.

Speaking on a report from the National Council of Substance Abuse, which attributed several psychiatric hospital admissions to marijuana use, the pharmacist by profession said further investigations proved that these episodes were caused because marijuana had been used in combination with other drugs.

“Whether it was combination with alcohol, combination with other narcotics – you would have heard about ‘blackies’ and now it is being mixed with codeine linctus. So when you make certain submissions and you look at the details, you would recognise that it’s combinations are what cause the problem,” he stressed.

“The drug marijuana is a safe product and it has a lot of medical benefits,” he added.

Commenting on the wide use of alcohol in the island, even though it too was a psychoactive drug, he insisted the maladaptive patterns of behaviour exhibited by alcohol usage, were higher than that of persons smoking marijuana.

“It is a fact. There are less inhibitions with alcohol use than with marijuana use,” Forde asserted.

He therefore insisted that it was “high time” the country had respect for other persons’ religions, culture and norms and gave his support to the bill. (JMB)