Two important drug law cases in January and March 2017
See “Legal Developments 2017” for the cases of R v Poraj; and R v Johnson. The latter case is important in relation to the issue of whether a person who carries, or conveys, an article into prison (in the absence of authority to do so) must know that the article is ‘prohibited’ albeit that it need not be proved that he/she knew precisely what the article was. Practitioners should be careful about using the colloquialism “Spice”. There is no such drug in science or in law called “Spice”. It is used to refer to certain synthetic cannabinoids of which there are a good many. Some are controlled under the MDA 1971 and some are not. They may, or may not be, “psychoactive” for the purposes of the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016.