Yes! It has been a long time coming that the full range of potential medical benefits are explored with this simple plant - not to mention the massive manufacturing potential - factoid: The first Model-T ford was made from a hemp composite that was stronger than mild steel! https://twitter.com/ScotNational/status/1336635956615581697

I'm also going to make a stark admission - Each day I make a choice between a shed load of medication which dulls my witts but alleviates (partially) the pain in my legs. Or the choice of having all my witts and being in pain.

The single best day of my recent memory was in May 2019 when I was in a jurisdiction where it is legal - The Hague in Holland. For an entire day, I had both my witts (the sharpest they had been in 10 years) and was pain-free.

They say that cannabis is a "gateway drug", except that's complete garbage. For millions who have to stuff big pharma drugs down our throat daily to combat pain, it's a liberation drug. I'd be the first to shift from the 18 pills a day I take, to this if it were made legal.

For the first time in a long time, I was pain-free, sociable, laughing and joking and relaxed. I had a personal choice in pain relief that allowed me to be the best version of myself. But the bigger pain was knowing that on stepping onto the plane, I was returning....

....to a state (the UK) where big pharma reigns supreme and where that personal choice was going to be taken from me. Back to the choice between mind and body.

Article 2 of the European Convention on Human rights is the "right to life". That a state cannot arbitrarily deprive a person of life. And while it is an article consumed with deprivation of life in the context of death and killing, i'd argue that a life which cannot...

...be fully fulfilled and cannot be fully lived, is in fact not life at all - it is purgatory!

We trust our doctors to prescribe pills and medicines and we trust them to monitor their side effects. We trust them to spot complications.

We trust them to do this for every medication except this plant. Which is stupid.

The idea that cannabis is a gateway drug is wrong - the gateway is in the fact that a person must turn to criminal elements in order to obtain it....

...thereby increasing the likelihood that pressure might there-in be exerted resulting in moving to other elicit substances. By pulling it out of the shadows, regulating it, taxing it and trusting doctors to monitor it, we destroy that gateway.

We have the scientific data to prove that cannabis does, infact, help those with serious disability. It's synthetic version is used every day by patients with Multiple Sclerosis.

So yes! I am very much an advocate of its legalisation, quality regulation, prescription and monitoring through the already existing channels we have. Period! And why shouldn't Scottish Farmers have the opportunity to profit from it.

Why shouldn't manufacturers of clothing, bags, apparel, composite materials, paper and many other things, have the opportunity to utilise the wastage from medicinal growing in order to profit. It can even be turned into biofuel!

And I am sure there will be a few out there who say: "you did what?" and try to decry it. To which I would say - try living with the knowledge that your liver and kidneys could blow out by the time you hit your 40's due to all the pills. You have zero right to judge!

I, however, have a right to judge you for defending a policy which would see millions of disabled people deprived of a say in their own pain relief in favour of stuffing pills down their throat which have a list of side effects longer than your arm.