Cannabis Makes Inmates Behave Says Danish Study

Let’s be honest. If you thought prisons were drug free you weren’t really paying attention. But all drugs aren’t the same. Stimulants such as alcohol and cocaine tend to make inmates more aggressive and confrontational. According to a Danish study published last week, when the inmates are using cannabis as a drug they tend to be more relaxed and better behaved.

The study comes from the book “Cannabis Use: Intervention and Market in Denmark” — and it’s only in Danish so have fun reading it. Torsten Kolind is an anthropologist who worked on the study, and he said it’s easier on the prison guards when the inmates can smoke because “there’s more peace and calm”.

“The guards act pragmatically to get through their working day, and that works better if they go gentle on cannabis. It’s not an indication that the guards are not doing their jobs properly, but nobody would want to work in a place where they constantly have to punish and control.”

Denmark has a no tolerance policy on cannabis.

Prison guards want peace. They don’t want to isolate prisoners and break up fights all day. A prison is meant to separate dangerous people from society and punish people, but it’s also meant to rehab those people and correct their mistake to make them a valued member of society again. “What kind of institutions do we want in our society? In Denmark, we have a humanistic view on life, where we consider inmates on an equal footing with other people.”

Kolind condones allowing for cannabis so the inmates can use it as a form of self-medication. A lot of inmates are able to smuggle it in. The prison guards are supposed to confiscate any cannabis they find, but most of the time they let it slide.

Cannabis is like nothing else. It has so many known applications, but it seems like almost every day we learn something new that it can do. Now we know that it can make the most misbehaved members of society actually behave.