‘NHS failure’ behind suicide of peer’s drug addict son

A PEER’S son who killed himself after becoming addicted to cannabis and developing mental health problems was failed by a NHS trust, an inquest found yesterday.

Rupert Green, 21, the son of Lord Monson, died in January last year, five days after he tried to hang himself in his mother’s garden in Farnham, Surrey.

Surrey assistant coroner Anna Crawford said yesterday that Surrey and Borders NHS Trust failed to refer him to a special service that could have watched him more closely. Mr Green was refused an assessment by the trust’s home-treatment team three days before he attempted to hang himself.

Miss Crawford said if the referral had been accepted, the team would have had a further chance to assess his risk and compliance with his medication.

Recording a verdict of suicide, she did not say the “failure” caused Mr Green to take his own life, adding: “I cannot from the evidence before me conclude it is probable they would have intervened in a sufficient time.”

She also said he had received a good standard of care before that point.

Lord Monson, whose elder son Alexander, 28, died in police custody in Kenya in 2012, launched a “war against skunk” after his younger son’s suicide.

He has urged the Government to decriminalise weaker strains of cannabis to prevent abuse of stronger strains.

Speaking after the verdict, he said that “heavy historic ingestion of highpotency cannabis” led to his son’s “appalling mental derangement”. Lord Monson added that he did not blame doctors and nurses for his son’s death, and described one nurse as “heroic”.