Basel is orderly, prosperous and bourgeois. It is hosting the next dressage World Cup, the faces of bankers grace advertisements at tram stops and commuters are encouraged to make donations to help protect artisanal alpine beekeeping. The city is perhaps an unlikely place to legalise recreational cannabis. But it has been sold legally here in a dozen high street pharmacies and a dispensary — and across Switzerland’s biggest cities — for the past three years as part of a legalisation pilot project. The nationwide effort to study different models of regulation is not premised on cannabis being entirely harmless. Rather, it asks whether those harms are better managed by the state than left to an illegal market.
In London, however, the authorities still spend vast sums policing a lucrative cannabis market that remains in criminal hands. Across the capital, almost one in 10 adults are cannabis consumers, the highest proportion of any British region, and polling has shown two-thirds of Londoners favour either legalising or decriminalising cannabis.
