This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

When right and left both push some ill-conceived public policy for entirely different reasons, the door to disaster usually opens wide. A classic example of this fatal combination in action is the move to make marijuana, as it is called in the US, or cannabis as it is called in the UK, more freely available.

On 18 December 2025, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order easing federal restrictions on marijuana after a vigorous year-long lobbying campaign by the $33bn US marijuana industry. Big donors, PR companies and friends of the President all played a part in persuading him to support a new measure reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug. “I’ve never been inundated by so many people as I have about this particular reclassification,” said Trump during the signing ceremony.

Some months earlier in the UK, the leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski said that he wanted to legalise all drugs including cannabis, believing that “the war on drugs has absolutely failed” and calling for an approach “led by public health experts”.

Paradoxically, this trend towards making cannabis more available, and downgrading the danger it poses, is taking place just as medical experts are warning that the huge surge in cannabis consumption in the US this century is proving far more harmful than expected.

The numbers involved are enormous. More Americans now use marijuana every day than drink alcohol every day. Habitual use has jumped hugely since 1992, when there were one million daily consumers compared to 18 million today. And these are only the hard core of those seeking a high. In 2024, some 44 million Americans told the National Survey on Drug Use and Health that they had used marijuana in the previous month, and 64 million had used it in the previous year.

As more Americans consume marijuana, they become vulnerable to its greatly enhanced toxicity compared to 30 years ago. In 1995, marijuana confiscated by the Drug Enforcement Agency contained just 4 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient which produces the “high”. Today the average THC level of seizures is at least four times higher at 16 per cent and it can be 90 per cent. Seizures by the UK Border Force and police tell the same story with the average THC levels of high potency cannabis, or “skunk”, at 10 to 15 per cent, and often higher still.

Prior to the 90s, cannabis was widely considered a “soft” drug, far less dangerous than “hard” drugs like heroin, cocaine and LSD. Smoking pot was for many a minor act of........

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