Cannabis News
Stigma behind medical cannabis in UK patients
In recent years, public opinion has been leaning heavily in favour of cannabis as a restorative. Besides its medical properties, it is the world’s most commonly used recreational drug.
Whether for recreational use or for medical, many governments have started to follow suit, shifting their policy to reflect that cannabis certainly isn’t going away any time soon.
However, many cannabis users still deal with stigma from society, especially in areas of the world like the UK where cannabis remains illegal for recreational use.
Patients in the UK who have been prescribed medical grade marijuana still find they have been discriminated against.
In the workplace, in social contexts, coming under scrutiny from friends and family or encountering negative stereotypes about being lazy, criminal, or less intelligent.
In a recent study comparing seven different European countries, each with various levels of cannabis criminalisation, researchers from the University of Amsterdam hypothesised whether more punitive laws meant a lower tolerance for cannabis use.
This hypothesis was exactly right. The study published in the European Journal of Criminology showed stigma was without a doubt much more intense in those countries.
In the early 1900s, there were a huge variety of different disorders and conditions that were routinely treated with cannabis, and patients wouldn’t think twice about using it.
However, around the 1930s and continuing for decades, a targeted campaign of laws and reform began to be pushed out across the globe, changing society completely and making cannabis stigma the new normal.
Harsher penalties, higher levels of stigma
Researchers in this study surveyed 1,225 cannabis users from seven different European countries – Greece, Germany, Italy, France, the UK, Portugal, and the Netherlands.
These seven countries all have fairly different policies surrounding cannabis, although it is technically illegal in all.
The Netherlands, followed by Portugal, has the least punitive laws and Greece has the most punitive laws.
Depending on the country, those caught with cannabis might face between 0 and 12 years in prison, showing the wide variety in the criminalisation of the drug.
After analyzing the responses, the researchers found that their hypothesis was generally correct.
Participants from Greece, where penalties were highest for using cannabis, reported the highest level of stigma, while those from the Netherlands reported the least.
Interestingly the most common way people reported experiencing stigma was through the perception of negative stereotypes people hold about cannabis users.
Around one-half of respondents said most people believed that cannabis users are unreliable – and around 25% said most people believed that cannabis users are dangerous.
Around 25% of cannabis users also reported avoiding people because they feared they’d be looked down on for their cannabis use.
In all countries, being a daily user of cannabis increased your likelihood of reporting cannabis stigmatization.
In an encouraging finding, being rejected by a family member for using cannabis didn’t seem to differ based on the criminalization in the country – but being rejected by a friend for using cannabis was most likely in Greece and least likely in the Netherlands.
Still, Germany stood out in the study as despite being more liberal in its policies towards cannabis than Greece, it had almost as high ratings when it came to certain aspects of stigmatization, which the authors suggest might be a response to Germany’s recent contentious public debates around cannabis.
Still overall, across the seven countries, there was a statistical tie between harsher penalties for cannabis use and higher levels of stigmatisation.
So, as predicted, there does seem to be some connection between governments penalising cannabis use and societies stigmatising them.
Learning from studies like these, and changing the way our society thinks about cannabis use, is the only way to remove stigma in the UK and prevent patients from feeling like criminals, or outcasts.
