Today, May 28th 2025, the London Drug Commission’s report on cannabis law and policy has finally been published. It has been an extremely interesting project to be involved in, as co-lead with my UCL colleague Ben Bradford on the reviewing of the international evidence base (although we had no direct involvement in the writing of the report itself). Charlie Falconer and his team have done an admirably thorough job in navigating the difficult terrain they describe as the ‘cannabis conundrum’ and it is likely to become a landmark report and a key reference point.
For my own views on how societies should regulate cannabis, interested readers are directed to the book, Regulating Cannabis, I co-wrote with Will Floodgate, and my historical paper on cannabis law reform in the 1960s. Both are also the subject of episodes of my podcast, Drug Talk, available here and here. In this post, however, I want to reflect briefly on the phenomenon of official inquiries into cannabis policy.
When the office for the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced the establishment of a London Drugs Commission in May 2022, this was widely reported in the British media as a potential step towards the decriminalisation or legalisation of cannabis. It was greeted with enthusiasm by reform advocacy groups. The announcement coincided with a four-day trip by Khan to the United States which included a visit to a cannabis dispensary in Los Angeles. Photographs of him walking through a long line of cannabis plants at a nearby cultivation facility presented a potent image for people back in London. The belief that there might be a willingness to consider radical new approaches to cannabis control in a major global city in Europe was palpable in the newspaper reports and across social media.
For those acquainted with the history of drug policy, the announcement may have looked a little less novel. The phenomenon of official reports on cannabis has in fact been a recurring one over the last century and longer. There have been multiple examples. Perhaps the closest precursor to Khan’s Commission is the 1944 LaGuardia report, instigated by the then Mayor of New York City in 1939, which investigated in exhaustive detail the ‘sociological, medical, psychological and pharmacological’ aspects of cannabis use in the city. Notably, it was published in 1944 just seven years after federal prohibition had been enacted in the United States. In the British context, probably the most significant is the 1968 Wootton report which emerged against a backdrop of a vibrant youth counter-cultural movement and on a broader wave of optimism at that time about the potential for progressive social change. Both these reports called for reform of the drug laws and recommended different configurations of depenalisation and decriminalisation.
In fact, the history of official reports critiquing the prohibition of cannabis is at least as long as the history of cannabis prohibition. It seems this long-running recurrence of cannabis inquiries is itself an historical phenomenon. There is a parallel here with prison reform. Back in the 1970s, in his famous book on prisons, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault observed that ‘for the past 150 years the proclamation of the failure of the prison has always been accompanied by its maintenance’. We have not quite had 150 years of proclaiming the failure of cannabis prohibition but even when the first international controls on cannabis were agreed in Geneva a century ago in 1925 there was already a significant degree of ambivalence about their necessity. This ought to prompt us to ask more searching questions than we typically do. Why is it that all these reports that have so comprehensively dismantled the case for cannabis prohibition seem not to disturb its continuation?
Keen students of Foucault will remember, of course, that there is an even more pessimistic narrative in Discipline and Punish. Indeed, its central thesis is that developments labelled as ‘penal reform’ invariably turn out to be just new methods for tightening the screw of social control. The sociologist Stan Cohen picked up this idea to dazzling effect in his 1985 book Visions of Social Control which tried to unpick what was happening in these recurring stories of reform efforts turning sour. This might seem excessively negative and nihilistic. But arguably we have some good examples of the phenomenon in the context of cannabis policy. The 1968 Wootton report, for example, was received at the time as liberal and progressive (Wootton was denounced by the Home Secretary as unduly influenced by the ‘legalisation lobby’!) yet it directly led to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 which has been the principal tool of punitive prohibition in the UK for the last 50 years. The cannabis conundrum indeed! Only time will tell what kind of ‘landmark’ the London Drug Commission’s report will end up being.
Toby Seddon 