{"id":183711,"date":"2009-03-18T18:09:14","date_gmt":"2009-03-18T17:09:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=5339"},"modified":"2015-09-20T04:52:43","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T04:52:43","slug":"majority-disagree-with-cannabis-reclassification-35","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/contributions\/majority-disagree-with-cannabis-reclassification-35\/","title":{"rendered":"Majority disagree with cannabis reclassification"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a substantial amount of anger over the government’s decision to reclassify cannabis, a new poll suggests.<\/p>\n

The politics.co.uk<\/a> poll, which comes as government ministers from across the world meet in Vienna for the UN’s summit on drugs, shows a deep split in public opinion over how to proceed with narcotics legislation.<\/p>\n

Asked if drugs should be legalised, just under 50 per cent of respondents answered ‘yes’, while 37 per cent said ‘no’.<\/p>\n

But opinions on the reclassification of cannabis were far clearer.<\/p>\n

Thirteen per cent of users agreed with the decision, compared with 87 per cent who said they ‘disagreed’ or ‘strongly disagreed’.<\/p>\n

The government recently implemented the change to cannabis, bringing it back up to class B after former home secretary David Blunkett expended considerable political capital downgrading it to class C in 2003.<\/p>\n

But the poll showed considerably less sympathy towards calls from the government’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to downgrade ecstasy.<\/p>\n

Over 50 per cent of users said they disagreed with the decision, while 37 per cent agreed.<\/p>\n

Asked what they thought of current UK drugs policy, politics.co.uk users appeared to take a liberal stance. Sixty-two per cent of users said current policy was too authoritarian. That compared with 25 per cent who said it was too lenient.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a substantial amount of anger over the government’s decision to reclassify cannabis, a new poll suggests. The politics.co.uk poll, which comes as government ministers from across the world meet in Vienna for the UN’s summit on drugs, shows a deep split in public opinion over how to proceed with narcotics legislation. Asked if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1615],"tags":[86,103,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-183711","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-contributions","7":"category-uk-news","8":"tag-drugs","9":"tag-health-news","10":"tag-uk-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}