My son died but cannabis must be legalised
The only way to stop super-strength skunk destroying more young lives is to legalise low-potency cannabis, says Lord Monson
Four years ago, my son Rupert, then 19, told me he occasionally took cannabis. I wasn’t worried. Rites of passage and all that. Don’t progress to heroin, I warned, recalling funerals of friends. In January 2017, Rupert took his life in violent fashion. In his last six months, he had suffered the full gamut of psychosis: schizophrenia, false memories, a God complex, paranoia and visitations. Of his visitations, the friendliest was from a comedian (Jimmy Carr), who at least made him laugh. The rest of his mind’s gatecrashers were ghouls.
Rupert’s descent from an artistic, athletic, easy-going boy into the vortex of psychosis began, his mother and I believe, during his second year at Essex University – in common with nearly every campus in the country, an easy place to obtain recreational drugs. He was seen first by the family doctor and then a psychiatrist, who prescribed medication. After returning to university and threatening suicide, however, intervention followed and he was sectioned. Rupert was released from hospital in mid-november 2016 but on Sunday, Jan 15, he asked his mother to take him to hospital as the voices in his head, of which he had been continuously complaining, had grown louder and were taunting him, telling him to kill himself.
Within hours he was assessed at a local outpatients’ clinic as being a high-risk candidate for suicide. Unfortunately, every bed in the Surrey and Borders NHS Trust had been taken that day. Rupert was sent home.
The next day he was assessed again at home by his local psychiatric team. Astonishingly they graded him as being a very low risk candidate for suicide. Two evenings later, Rupert walked out of the house, having had a calm dinner with his grandmother, and into nearby woods – never to return home. Discovered in an unconscious state, Rupert was taken away by ambulance.
Around the clock, family and friends sat by his bed, while efforts were made to save him. Five days later, he was pronounced dead. I recall a doctor mentioning that Rupert was another victim of skunk. Skunk, to my untutored ear, was just another name for cannabis. What I have since discovered has shocked me into campaigning for reform of Britain’s drug laws – and standing as a candidate in an election to fill a hereditary cross-bench vacancy in the House of Lords, to raise awareness of the damage wreaked by high-potency cannabis.
Forty years ago, in my early 20s in New York, I smoked the occasional spliff. My memories of it are of a pleasant disengaged sensation and one memorable moment of hilarity. The downside, I recall, was a rasping effect in the throat leading to coughing fits, lethargy and barely being able to string together a sentence.
Following the shock of Rupert’s death, my first intellectual response was that he was inherently susceptible to psychosis. I then began my cannabis chemistry lessons.
The two main active ingredients of cannabis are THC and CBD. THC is psychoactive and brings the high. CBD ameliorates its effect. From analysis of police confiscations, about 40 years ago, the THC strength of cannabis was 1.4 per cent and CBD was about 0.5 per cent. My eureka moment came when I learned that the cannabis now mainly sold on the street – a hybrid commonly referred to as “skunk”, of which the doctor spoke – has a THC strength of about 16 per cent; 12 times higher.
Today, while there remains a demand for low-potency cannabis (five per cent THC and below), its availability is falling. A recent forensic analysis of captured cannabis by Greater
Calling skunk ‘cannabis’ is like calling brandy ‘cider’
Manchester police suggests 95 per cent of what is sold on the street is so pharmacologically rearranged that it should be deemed a different product. Calling skunk “cannabis” is like calling brandy “cider”.
The horror of skunk for the vulnerable user is less its high THC than its near absence of CBD. Why? Because skunk, with its CBD removed, is quicker and cheaper to make – and addictive. An addicted user is much more profitable for dealers than an occasional user.
In February 2015, a study by Prof Robin Murray found that low-potency cannabis did not increase the chance of anyone becoming psychotic above the national average. But regular users of skunk had a five-times higher chance of going – let us call it what it is – mad. Many enter a dark and scary portal from which they never return. Others, like Rupert, go so far as to kill themselves.
Derek Tracy is a consultant psychiatrist and a clinical director of Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust. “Skunk can produce really agitated and aggressive states,” he says. “Patients are proving hard to treat.”
The official figures on mental health admissions relating to drugs are alarming enough – more than doubling in 10 years. But many, like Rupert, cannot even get admitted, so unofficially the figure is higher still. The Mental Health NHS Trust of Barnet, Enfield and Haringey has England’s highest acute mental health bed occupancy: 105.6 per cent. A hospital source says three quarters of the patients on its acute psychiatric assessment ward typically have used skunk or spice (an even stronger synthetic near-copy).
One of the more extreme examples of a person losing his mind on skunk was a middle-class teenager, a rugby star with a bright future living at home in Sussex, who developed a skunk habit that sent him gradually deranged. In a sudden fit one morning four years ago, he obeyed the commands of the voices in his head and stabbed his mother 12 times. Prompted again by the voices, he then ripped open his anus with a knife and sliced off his penis. While both mother and son survived, the struggle to recover from the trauma continues.
If the case against skunk consumption for recreational use is strong, the argument for the prescription of low-potency cannabis for many medical conditions such as arthritis, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy is equally difficult to challenge. Yesterday, Sajid Javid announced a Home Office review of the medicinal use of cannabis.
If you accept that skunk is a social and medical scourge, destroying lives and costing the taxpayer a fortune, the number one social policy priority is surely to get this menace off the streets.
How do you achieve that? Answer: by encouraging a less harmful alternative.
Skunk should be made class A, while low-potency cannabis should be legalised and regulated, as with the retail alcohol market, so purchasers would know the strength of what they are buying. Because of developing brain issues, sales of cannabis should not be permitted to anyone under 21.
Like tobacco and alcohol also, users would be educated about the dangers, and the Government would reap a windfall of tax receipts.
The Liberal Democrats estimated this would amount to about £1 billion a year. If you then factor in a decrease in skunk-induced psychosis, the nation’s medical and social services bill would fall by as much again.
A year ago, the Prime Minister wrote me a letter saying she shared my concern over skunk and relayed news that the Government was developing a cross-party drugs strategy. About time. Our drugs policy is a mess – hopeless 20th-century laws for a 21st-century blight.
Of the spectrum of recreational drugs consumed in Britain, skunk is the most pervasive and destructive. Nine out of 10 teenagers attending drugs clinics are there because of skunk. If there is a way to drive it off the streets of Britain, without legalising low-potency cannabis, I have yet to hear it.