Its thought as a result of this government regulation the numbers of high school students turning their backs on tobacco now outnumbers those giving up smoking cannabis.

The fact is, allowing people to grow their own cannabis for personal use, allows people to control  not only the amount of cannabis they consume, but also the amounts of aldulterants they ingest into their bodies as a result of buying "street cannabis". Thats real harm reduction.

The 2007 Youth Risk Behaviour Surveillance from the Centres for Disease Control and prevention, which was released only recently, reports numbers of current cigarette and cannabis users between high school-grades 9 and 12 to be around the same, at 20% and 19.7% respectively. 

Compared to the same report from 2005 and the good news is both substances have shown a fall in user numbers, down from 23% and 20.2% respectively. But cannabis use, at 20.25 has showed a slightly smaller drop for the first time, showing that the health risks associated with tobacco use are deemed more important issues than those relating to cannabis, for that age group.

The second significant report released this week, the Fiscal Year 2007 Annual Synar Report on tobacco sales to youth, showed the 10th straight annual decline in the rate of illegal tobacco sales to minors. In 1997, 40.1 percent of retailers violated laws against tobacco sales to minors. In 2007 the rate had dropped to just 10.5 percent, the lowest ever, so clearly the message is getting through using the programs of education currently in place in the US.

According to Aaron Houston, Director of Government Relations for the Marijuana POlicy Project in Washington DC, "Efforts to curb cigarette sales to teens have been wildly successful, and it's past time we applied those lessons to cannabis,"

"Tobacco retailers can be fined or put out of business if they sell to kids, but prohibition guarantees that we have zero control over cannabis dealers. Foolish policies have guaranteed that the marijuana industry is completely unregulated."

"This isn't about whether you think marijuana is good or bad, it's about common sense," Houston, a father of three children, continued. "If you think marijuana is bad, why would you want it controlled by unregulated criminals, which guarantees that kids have greater access to it?"

Proof if it were needed, that at its most fundamental level, prohibition is the key factor in the continued growth of the illicit cannabis market.

With a concerted effort of cannabis awareness and education there is absolutely no reason for cannabis not to show similar results within a decade or less.

But for that to happen we must remove cannabis from the hands of organised crime and the only workable solution is for government to regulate and provide it as a Class C controlled substance.

Not only would the government know exactly whats being consumed on the streets, we would also have an accurate representation of the numbers of cannabis users across all age groups, allowing us to prioritise and differentiate campaigns according to age group and demographic, thus allowing for more accurate "targetting" of those deemed most at risk from the unwanted side-effects of cannabis use.

According to Chairman of the ACMD Professor Sir Michael Rawlins, a professor of pharmacology, "The  (ACMD) Council therefore
advises that strategies designed to minimise its use and adverse effects must be predominantly public health ones. Criminal justice measures – irrespective of classification – will have only a limited effect on usage. We therefore urge you to invite the UK’s Chief Medical Officers to develop, on behalf of the government, a public health strategy that will meet our shared goals. Anything less will prejudice the health of future generations."

Read the reports;

http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/yrbs/pdf/yrbss07_mmwr.pdf
http://prevention.samhsa.gov/tobacco/synarreportfy2007.pdf