Two Northeastern University academics argue that current U.K. criminal penalties for cannabis outweigh its harms. But that does not mean legalization solves all its issues.
LONDON — The United Kingdom and the state of Massachusetts have very different stances when it comes to cannabis possession.
Massachusetts law allows a person to carry up to 1 ounce of marijuana on them. In Britain, the same act could land someone in prison for up to five years, present them with an unlimited fine — or even both.
A report by the London Drugs Commission wants to soften that approach, calling for personal use of cannabis to be decriminalized. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, says the commission’s study makes for a “compelling, evidence-based case” for decriminalizing possession.
Leo Beletsky, professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, says regulating cannabis use in a similar way to how alcohol is treated in society would allow it to be more effectively managed.
“There is definitely reason to be cautious about cannabis, especially when it comes to people who consume compulsively and are not able to moderate their use,” he says.
“And there are a range of health concerns related to that — it’s not a risk-free substance, just like any other psychoactive substance, including alcohol and nicotine. There’s lots of things that are already on the market that are psychoactive and that we tolerate having a certain level of risk.
“With alcohol, it is deeply ingrained in British culture and British life. Do its harms mean that alcohol should be prohibited? No. Does it mean that we can find ways to reduce the harms while maximizing its benefits? Yes — and I think they should apply to cannabis.”
Decriminalizing personal possession would allow health practitioners to speak more openly about managing its effects, Beletsky argues.
“When you bring a substance out of the shadows,” he says, “it creates all kinds of opportunities for risk reduction, whether it is with education, managing dosage and doing more research. When something is prohibited and illegal, it really limits the public health work that you can do.”
Beletsky says the regulation of cannabis in the U.K. compared to alcohol, particularly when it comes to criminal penalties, “doesn’t make sense.”
One of the five main recommendations by the London Drugs Commission is that cannabis should no longer be considered under the Misuse of Drugs Act, where it is listed as a Class B drug — the same category as the likes of ketamine — and instead moved to be regulated under the Psychoactive Substances Act. Doing so would allow it to be possessed in small quantities for personal use, but it ensures it remains a criminal act to import, manufacture and distribute cannabis.
Charlie Falconer, a member of the House of Lords who chaired the independent commission, said: “The criminal justice system response needs to focus only on the dealers and not the users.”
Hossein Dabbagh, Northeastern assistant professor of philosophy, says it is possible for decriminalization to be the “more ethical choice when we look closely at the wider picture.”
The London-based academic says the evidence is increasingly pointing to the harms of criminalization outweighing the harms caused by cannabis use.
“Criminal penalties for possession don’t just fail to deter use — they actively cause additional harm,” he says.
“Criminalization comes with criminal records, reduced life chances, racial disparities in policing, and the stigmatization of people who often pose no real threat to others. These are serious consequences for something that, while not risk-free, is relatively moderate in its harms compared to legal substances like alcohol or tobacco.
“If we shift our goal from punishment to harm reduction — focusing on education, treatment and regulated access — we stand a much better chance of addressing real risks without producing new ones through the criminal justice system.”
The harm caused by cannabis was reflected in the London Drugs Commission’s final report. It stopped short of calling for the sale of cannabis to become legal due to around 10% of users developing difficulties as a result.
It is a different picture in most of the U.S., where the legalization of cannabis is becoming normalized. Almost half of the 50 states have legalized cannabis use recreationally, with even more permitting it for medical reasons.
Beletsky says the U.S. represents a “cautionary tale” for the U.K., where he says the reforms have failed to deliver on the original social justice aims and instead produced a lucrative commercial market for marijuana sales.
In London, the drugs commission found that police were regularly using cannabis possession as a pretext for exercising their stop-and-search powers. Falconer’s review claims this practice is “damaging” relations between police and communities.
Beletsky points out that, while states like Massachusetts have legalized the sale and possession of cannabis, it is not permitted to be used in public. This has caused its own inequalities.
In some states where cannabis sale is permitted, Beletsky says arrests of people from ethnic minorities for cannabis possession are no longer an issue. But police intervention for other alleged misdemeanours — including public consumption of cannabis — has gone up, he says.
“One way to say it is that the diagnosis was correct, in the sense of identifying that this was a problem that needed to be fixed, but simply changing the status of cannabis didn’t address this social injustice issue,” he adds.
“More needs to be done to actually address it, whether it is police training or creating social consumption venues where people of lower socioeconomic status can consume in a safe environment.
“I don’t know what the rules would be in lower-income social housing in the U.K., but I can’t imagine that cannabis consumption is going to be OK there. People who live in those properties will need a place to safely consume cannabis [if it is decriminalized]. Otherwise, they are going to be forced outside and exposed to police surveillance and some of the prohibitions around public consumption, which in the U.S. has proven to be an issue.”