Influential British businessman and TV star Lord Alan Sugar has called on the government to legalize cannabis to reduce knife crime in London.
Lord Sugar is the star of The Apprentice; he has a net worth of £1.3 billion ($1.7 billion) and he sits in the House of Lords, leading to comparisons with Donald Trump. In a TV interview with Piers Morgan, he likened a ban on recreational cannabis use to prohibition in America.
He argued that it causes crime and violence, and said it should be regulated just like alcohol and tobacco. A House of Lords debate on medicinal cannabis earlier this month caused him to form a strong opinion about it. He asked a question to his peers about whether it should be legalized and heavily regulated in order to cut out gang warfare plaguing the streets of London.
Morgan and several viewers backed his views, although some of the more cynical factions suggested he was already shaping up to bid for a weed franchise. Cannabis remains illegal for recreational use across the UK, although it has been all but decriminalized in many areas of the country.
Britain ushered in a new era of legal medicinal marijuana at the start of this month, but one mother claims doctors are frightened to prescribe it. Hannah Deacon’s six-year-old, Alfie Dingley, regularly made front-page news as she could not source cannabis that would prevent him from suffering 30 seizures per day. He was essentially the poster boy for the movement to legalize medicinal cannabis in Britain, but now she says she cannot find a doctor to prescribe it because the guidelines laid down by the NHS are too restrictive.
She has started a petition demanding that the Department for Health and NHS England urgently review the guidelines, and it could be forced to bow down to her influence. The next step would be to roll out the sort of regulated industry Lord Sugar is calling for, and cannabis is becoming a lot more widely accepted across the country. In Brighton, on the south coast, a new restaurant called The Canna Kitchen will open its doors on Dec. 1. It will specialize in vegan food infused with CBD in a bid to provide “the next evolution in plant-based dining”.
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