Tag: fear

Top police chiefs say smell of cannabis is a ‘sign of crime’ that can make even them feel ‘unsafe’… and frontline officers should ‘do something about it’

Britain’s top police chiefs today urge their officers to crack down on cannabis.

The country’s longest-serving chief constable admits the smell of the drug is a ‘sign of crime and disorder’ which makes even him ‘feel unsafe’.

Sir Andy Marsh, who leads the College of Policing, said frontline officers should ‘do something about it’.

He is backed by Greater Manchester Police Chief Sir Stephen Watson and Merseyside Chief Constable Serena Kennedy.

In a joint intervention following recent calls for decriminalisation, they tell future police leaders they must listen to their communities and be prepared to take a tougher line.

Launching a new leadership programme for policing, they acknowledged forces were in a ‘foot race for public confidence’ and officers can no longer ignore what has traditionally been perceived as the ‘little stuff’. 

Sir Andy, who is the officer in charge of police standards, said: ‘In my community, my kids are too frightened to use the bus stop because it always stinks of cannabis.’

He told the Mail ‘policing is about creating an environment that people feel safe in’ and said: ‘I’m speaking from personal experience and people I talk to, if I walk through a town, city, or even village centre and I smell cannabis, it does actually have an impact on how safe I feel.

‘One definition of what police should be doing is – [if] something [is] happening which does not feel right, someone ought to do something about it.’

He added: ‘For me, the smell of cannabis around communities, it feels like a sign of crime and disorder.’

The call for action comes after figures on Sunday revealed that three in four people caught with the drug last year were let off with an informal warning or community resolution.

In the year to September 2024, 68,513 people were found in possession of cannabis, but only 17,000 were charged, according to data released under Freedom of Information laws.

Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan has called for the decriminalisation of possession when it involves small amounts of the drug. 

But recently judges have warned that cannabis is ‘not a benign drug’ after a series of horrific cases, including a samurai sword rampage in Hainault, east London, where a schoolboy was killed and four others seriously injured by a drug-crazed Brazilian who had a £100-a-day habit.

The head of Merseyside Police said of cannabis: ‘The public should absolutely expect us to take positive action around those things and hold us to account over it. 

‘We have to work with our communities, it’s no longer good enough to inflict priorities on them, we have to hear their voices and make them part of the problem-solving.’

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Psychedelics May Reset Brain-Immune Link Driving Fear and Anxiety

A new study suggests that fear and the immune system are connected in previously unknown ways. Researchers at Mass General Brigham found that the immune system can influence stress and fear behaviors by changing how brain cells communicate.

The investigators further showed that psychedelic treatments could target these neuroimmune interactions and reduce stress-induced fear in preclinical models and found similar results in human tissue samples.

Results are published in Nature.

“Our study underscores how psychedelics can do more than just change perception; they can help dial down inflammation and reset brain-immune interactions,” said corresponding author Michael Wheeler, PhD, of the Gene Lay Institute of Immunology and Inflammation as well as the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system.

“This could reshape how we think about treatment for inflammatory disorders and conditions like anxiety and depression.”

Prior research has shown immune signaling can drive the development of neuropsychiatric diseases such as major depressive disorder (MDD). However, the ways that specific immune mechanisms can also affect behaviors due to chronic stress or MDD remained unclear.

Using a mouse model of chronic stress, the researchers determined that increased crosstalk between cells in the amygdala, or the brain’s fear center, boosted fear behaviors, elevated inflammatory signaling, and activated fear-promoting amygdala neurons.

Furthermore, inflammatory immune cells called monocytes migrated from other parts of the body to the brain meninges during chronic stress. The research team demonstrated that artificially manipulating these cells impacted fear behaviors.

Treating stressed mice with psilocybin and MDMA prevented monocytes from accumulating in the brain and lowered fear behaviors.

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