‘Skunk killed my son – we must get tough’
Lord Monson is campaigning for stricter penalties for the drug he blames for the death of his second son. He tells India Sturgis why
Lord Monson has spoken of his “war on skunk” after the death of his son, Rupert, who was addicted to the drug. “People don’t know what they are ingesting,” the peer told The Telegraph. Theresa May has written to him saying she shares his concerns as he tries to get the drug listed as Class A.
‘I don’t know the Prime Minister. To receive her letter was overwhelming’
Lord Monson flicks through a series of images on his phone, each showing a different artwork. The brushstrokes are deft: a traveller walking through the woods, a comically morose cat, a leaping antelope.
“He really was exceptionally gifted,” sighs Nicholas Monson heavily, leaning back into his chair. “He wanted to be a teacher. I also wanted him to be an artist, because I thought his work was that good. He could have been anything.”
For the second time in five years, the 12th Baron Monson of Burton, Lincolnshire, is living through an unimaginable hell. Earlier this year, on January 23, his youngest son Rupert died in hospital, five days after trying to kill himself near his home in Surrey.
The 21-year-old was suffering from psychosis triggered, his family believe, by an addiction to skunk fostered during his university years, which led him to hear voices, have hallucinations and experience violent bouts of aggression.
Sadly for Monson, the inexorable pain of losing a son is “well-trodden emotional territory”. In 2012, his eldest, Alexander, died in Kenya while in police custody, after being arrested on suspicion of smoking cannabis. Lord Monson has spent the past five years campaigning to prove that the 28-year-old was battered to death by a police officer.
“[This bereavement] is pretty much a mirror image of Alexander. I mean, Alexander, the first one, was really hard for me. Every day I just had to think about putting one foot in front of the other. I couldn’t think weeks ahead, I just dealt with each day. Now I live with the pain.”
We meet at Victoria Lodge Spa, his home in Stratford-upon-Avon – a Grade II listed house currently in the throes of renovation, which he shares with his wife, Silvana.
In the 18-month period after the family believe Rupert began using skunk, while studying biology at Essex University, he changed from an artistic, athletic, easy-going boy to a paranoid, aggressive and introverted shadow of his former self, who repeatedly threatened to take his own life.
With the conclusion of the inquest into Alexander’s death finally due this summer, Lord Monson, 61, is now throwing his weight behind a “war on skunk”, to which a quarter of new psychotic cases are attributed.
The peer wants to see it reclassified from a class B to a class A drug; eradicating demand for it, in tandem, by decriminalising, regulating and taxing the milder form of cannabis, and educating people about its effects in much the same way as alcohol and cigarettes.
Skunk, a particularly powerful form of cannabis, is characterised by a much higher concentration of THC, the main psychoactive ingredient. A report in The Lancet suggests it can contain levels up to three times as high as that found in low-potency hash cannabis, meaning its effects can come on more quickly and more strongly.
“The skunk that is being presented to young people as cannabis isn’t cannabis, it is something completely different,” explains Monson. “People don’t know what they are ingesting because it is on the black market.”
Researching the effect of skunk on young, developing brains – not least, distinguishing between correlation and causality – is a work in progress, but The Lancet study suggested that daily users were five times more likely to experience depression, anxiety and extended periods of psychosis than those who had never touched it.
This month, Monson gained a powerful ally in Theresa May, who personally wrote to him to say she shared his “concerns over the use of skunk” and that the Government is “developing a new cross-party drug strategy” to combat it.
“I don’t know the Prime Minister,” says the hereditary peer. “To receive a letter like this is overwhelming. I feel there is a change in the political air coming.”
He is hopeful that the Conservative Party’s election manifesto will reflect a new stance on the drug, encouraged by cases like that of 11-year-old Billy Caldwell who, this week, became the first person to be given medicinal
marijuana (in the form of cannabidiol oil, which contains no THC) on the NHS, to control his epileptic seizures.
As father-son relationships go, that between Rupert and Monson was late-blooming. Monson met Rupert’s mother, Karen Green, at a dinner party after the end of his nine-year marriage to his first wife, Hilary, the mother of Alexander and Isabella. The relationship was brief and Rupert was raised by Karen in Farnham, Surrey, with her new husband and, subsequently, their daughter.
Monson didn’t meet Rupert until he was 14, but made up for lost time, taking him on trips to the Scottish Highlands and Berlin. He talks fondly of his son’s natural ability at clay pigeon shooting, cricket, golf and art. Rupert painted him pictures, Monson took him to his gentleman’s club and the pair grew close.
The first inklings things weren’t right began in December 2015. Rupert became “strange and withdrawn” and wouldn’t get in touch for weeks at a time from university in Colchester. A few months later, just before his 21st birthday, he called his father to say that he’d failed his exams.
“He said he hadn’t been getting on with his flatmates and they’d been spying on him and trying to get into his computer. He was basically accusing his female flatmates of being part of a witch’s coven. He thought they were trying to get to him. It didn’t stack up.”
Concerned, Monson had his son to stay for a few days but the pair fought, and when Rupert threatened to punch his father, he asked him to leave. Soon after, Karen called in a state of high distress to say Rupert was walking around the garden talking to imaginary people and calling her unrepeatable names. She took him to Safe Haven, a psychiatric assessment drop-in centre, where Rupert admitted he was smoking skunk, although his parents had little understanding of the substance.
“I thought skunk was just a generic word the young use for cannabis,” says Monson. “I assumed it was just a rite of passage. Karen and I were very worried.”
Unfortunately Essex University, mindful of Rupert’s rights as an adult, was unable to discuss his mental health with them, so Monson took matters into his own hands. “I had someone basically spy on him. I know that he was in trouble.”
Last November, Rupert called his father and demanded £1,000; when Monson replied that he wouldn’t give him cash but would put it towards his food or rent, he hit the roof.
“He said he was going to finish it,” recalls his father. “He said he had tried killing himself the day before and now he was going to try again.”
Helpless, 160 miles away in Warwickshire, Monson notified Essex police and Rupert was immediately transferred to a secure psychiatric unit and sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Two weeks later, he was released, loaded with anti-psychotic medication and, for a while, he appeared to improve. Christmas was spent contentedly in Scotland with his mother, grandmother and cousins. He sent his father a tie and a note to say he hoped their relationship would get back on track.
But in early January, the voices in Rupert’s head started again; scared, he agreed he needed to be readmitted to hospital, but no beds could be found. Two days later, after lunch at his grandmother’s near his home in Surrey, he left the house and never came back.
Karen, speaking for the first time since the tragedy, is still in shock at the speed with which her son changed. She has lost over a stone in weight and is unable to continue work as a homeopath. “My brain is all over the place. I am wrecked.”
She feels Rupert was let down on numerous occasions by a failing NHS mental health service – one so overstretched that the police are now used to plug the gap in urgent care for the mentally unwell. A development that prompted Her Majesty’s chief inspector of constabulary, Sir Tom Winsor, to speak out last week about the “unacceptable drain” of using officers as a “service of first resort”.
“Rupert was seen by psychiatric nurse [days before he died] who has more than 16 years’ experience,” says Karen. “She spent three hours phoning hospitals trying to get him admitted, but all refused, claiming to have no beds. Why would she have spent that long on the phone imploring hospitals after interviewing Rupert? She knew the state he was in.
“[The NHS] failed. They could have stopped the tragedy. We could have had Rupert still, without a doubt.”
An internal investigation is now under way into Rupert’s care at Surrey and Borders NHS Trust. For his parents, it is too late to bring their son back, but it’s not too late, they hope, to save others from the scourge that blighted his young life.
“I don’t want any other family to go through what we’ve been through,” says Karen. “Something has to change.”
‘The NHS could have stopped the tragedy. We could have had Rupert still’