HOW MUCH GRIEF CAN A FATHER BEAR?
When Lord Monson’s son died in a Kenyan jail, his solace was his other boy, Rupert. Now he has gone, too, a victim of skunk cannabis. Here, the peer talks of his loss — and crusade to change drug laws
’Talented, sporty ... Rupert was the sweetest boy’ ’He said there were spies in his computer’
The scene will be familiar to any parent whose children are in those fraught, volatile years between adolescence and adulthood. A family meal, just before Christmas, and tensions were simmering between Nicholas Monson and his 21-year-old son Rupert.
Karen, Rupert’s mother and a former flame of Nicholas’s, had arranged for the three to meet at a Chinese restaurant in London. It should have been a happy occasion, but now it was all Karen could do to keep the peace.
halfway through their main courses, an argument broke out between father and son.
‘Rupert just exploded,’ Nicholas recalls. ‘There was so much anger balled up inside him.
‘he unleashed this verbal fury, calling me all sorts of names.
‘I got up from the table, paid the bill and walked out. his mother was distraught. But I said: “What’s the point in me being here only to be shouted at?” I couldn’t take it any more.’
Tragically, this bitter row was the last time he ever saw his son. On January 18, Rupert, who lived in Farnham, Surrey, with his mother and younger sister, took his own life after months of severe psychosis caused, his family believes, by an addiction to the drug known as ‘skunk’, a particularly potent strain of cannabis.
his parents — who are now reconciled after several years of estrangement — tried repeatedly to get his life back on track but his young brain was simply too ravaged to recover from the drug which made him hallucinate and hear demonic voices.
After five days on life support, during which his parents maintained a heart-wrenching vigil at his bedside, Rupert’s brain activity was deemed so low that the support was switched off.
For Nicholas, 61, a peer and the 12th Baron Monson of Burton, Lincolnshire, who now lives in Warwickshire with his second wife, Silvana, losing Rupert was an unbearable blow. he had been born after Nicholas’s brief relationship with his mother ended — somewhat acrimoniously — and it took until Rupert was 14 for the two to grow close.
‘To lose him now, after building this lovely bond, makes it all the harder,’ Nicholas sighs. ‘We didn’t have much time together. I will always wish I’d got to know him sooner.’
Karen is, as might be expected, inconsolable, suffering the raw, unrelenting grief only a mother who has had to bury her own child can ever truly know.
But for Nicholas, who keeps his emotions firmly hidden from view, the pain runs deeper still. For Rupert is the second of his two sons to lose his life in tragic circumstances in less than five years.
In 2012, his elder son Alexander, 28, born to his first wife hilary and a half-brother to Rupert, died while in police custody in Kenya.
An inquest into his death remains open, but his family believes Alexander, a contemporary of Pippa Middleton at Marlborough College, was brutally beaten to death by a police officer — and they have spent considerable time and money fighting to prove it.
In a cruel twist, cannabis has been involved in both of Nicholas’s sons’ deaths. Alexander was arrested after a night out with friends on suspicion of smoking ‘bhang’, a form of the herbal drug — and the local authorities maintain he was killed by an overdose.
News that his younger son was using skunk — a super-strength type of cannabis that contains up to 20 times more brain-altering ingredient than other strains — made his worst fears a reality.
‘When I got the call from Karen to say Rupert had done what he did, everything came crashing down around me,’ he admits. ‘That vile, toxic compound robbed him of his life.
‘In those final months, the world inside his head was very dark. There were voices telling him what to do; people became monsters.
‘It was like being trapped in a nightmare from which he couldn’t escape. he was with the demons from the moment he started taking that drug.’
horrified by what it did to their handsome, good-natured boy, Karen and Nicholas have launched a war against skunk, desperate to raise awareness of the chilling effect the drug can have on a young person’s mind.
A chemically-enhanced form of cannabis, skunk comes primarily from the Netherlands and began flooding Britain’s streets in 2010.
While studies have shown a direct link between ordinary cannabis and mental health disorders, skunk users are at even greater risk, with sideeffects including paranoia, hallucinations and schizophrenia.
Teenagers, whose brains are still developing, are especially vulnerable — with 15 to 18-year-olds four times more likely to suffer harmful consequences than adults.
In three years, the number of people admitted to hospital after smoking skunk has risen by 50 per cent, with over 8,000 patients diagnosed with drug-related mental health disorders in the UK every year.
Controversially, Karen and Nicholas’s approach is to call for a decriminalisation of milder forms of cannabis and for skunk, currently a Class B drug like ordinary cannabis, to be escalated to the Class A category alongside heroin and cocaine.
‘I know it sounds perverse, but legalising cannabis would mean it could be monitored like cigarettes and alcohol,’ Nicholas explains.
‘You’d know what was in it. Making it available would also destroy the market for dodgy dealers.
‘The best way of describing it is that skunk is to cannabis what moonshine is to whisky. They both get you drunk, but with moonshine you run the risk of going blind. This drug destroys people.’
Nicholas, an eminent author and hotelier, met Rupert’s mother Karen, then a secretary and now a homeopath, at a dinner party in London in 1994, five years after the breakdown of his first marriage.
They were together for less than a year and had been separated for two months when Karen phoned to announce she was pregnant. By then, Nicholas, who already had two children, Alexander and Isabella, now 30, was in another relationship — and, after Rupert was born in 1995, Karen settled down and had a second child, a daughter called Arabella.
It was several years before they resumed contact — and several more before Nicholas plucked up the courage to start a relationship with his son.
‘Rupert was the sweetest young boy you can imagine,’ he says. ‘I came into his life slowly, tentatively, when he was around 14. I think it was difficult for him to comprehend why I wasn’t there all his life.
‘Getting to know him was an absolute joy. he was mad about sport — cricket, football, rugby, you name it. I took him clay pigeon shooting once and despite never having done it before, he wiped the floor with us. We had some brilliant times together.’
Rupert, a pupil at the prestigious Lord Wandsworth College in hampshire, spent several happy holidays with his father on highland holidays and in the Cotswolds.
A talented artist, he regularly presented him with sketches he’d done — his favourite subjects were animals — and Nicholas hoped that one day he might give an exhibition.
‘I was incredibly proud of him,’ says Nicholas. ‘he was a little shy, still finding his way, but he enchanted everyone he met.
‘When Alexander died, it was a comfort to have another son, one who would have the chance to blossom and follow his dreams.’
Unsure of what he wanted to do when he was older, Rupert went to Cardiff University to read chemistry, but changed his mind after a year and enrolled on a biology degree at essex.
It was here, his father believes, that he first came across skunk.
‘even now, I don’t know any of the details,’ he says. ‘he’d obviously been to some parties and there was a bit of peer pressure.
‘But I’ve met several of his friends over the years and they’re impressive, serious young people.
‘It’s not like he had fallen in with a bad crowd. I think drugs are something of a rite of passage for many students — sadly, Rupert included.’
The first sign that all was not well with Rupert came last July, when his family believe he had been taking skunk for several months.
‘I was worried as I’d sent him some money for his 21st birthday and I hadn’t heard anything back,’ Nicholas says. ‘Then, out of the blue, he called to tell me he’d failed his biology exam. I said I was sorry to hear that. And he said: “Well, there’s a good reason I didn’t pass. They’ve been spying on me. There are spies in my computer.”
‘It was at that moment I realised something was seriously wrong. he came to visit me but his behaviour was strange — he didn’t lift a finger to help, and that was very out of character. he kept talking about these spies, saying people were watching him.’
A row ensued and Rupert went to stay with his mother in Surrey. But
Karen was just as concerned and took him to a doctor, who diagnosed his fragile mental state and gave him anti-psychotic medication.
‘It was at this point that the issue of skunk was raised,’ Nicholas explains. ‘I remember telling him he shouldn’t get tangled up in drugs, but we had no idea how far down that road he was already.’
Term-time came around and Rupert told his parents he was going back to university to retake his exam. But it soon emerged he had been skipping lectures. One evening in November, he phoned Nicholas asking him to transfer £1,000 into his account.
‘I told him I couldn’t just send cash like that. I said I’d pay his rent instead. And he went mad. He said: “What do you think I’m going to do with it? Drink and other things?” I said I feared he would. And he said: “Well, you’re right. It’s my life.”
‘Later he called me back and said: “I want you to know that I just tried to kill myself. I’ve been out on the roads, hoping to be run over. Tonight I’m going to stand in front of a train.” ’
Terrified Rupert would carry out his threat, Nicholas immediately called the police — who tracked him down and brought him to safety.
For a short time, he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act for his own protection, and subsequently spent two weeks in hospital. Karen barely left her son’s beside and was relieved when, in late November, he was discharged.
Little did she know it was simply to free up a hospital bed, where stretched resources meant there was no longer space for him to stay.
Far from improving, Rupert’s psychosis had reached disturbing depths. ‘Some days he seemed better; other days he was completely out of it,’ Nicholas recalls.
‘To observe him on the days he was psychotic was truly horrifying, though they must have been infinitely more difficult for him. He was ghostly pale, numb to everything.
‘He was hearing voices, talking to people who weren’t there.
‘His mother would ask who he was speaking to, and he’d say: “Jimmy Carr.” Poor chap, he was very lost by then.’
Three weeks ago, Karen rang Nicholas in distress. Though he had now been off skunk for several months, Rupert’s mental state had deteriorated and she was desperately worried about his health. But it was to no avail. Just a few days later, Rupert took his own life.
Every day since, Nicholas has asked himself if he could have prevented it. ‘I feel I should have gone in stronger, done something to save him from himself,’ he says, shaking his head.
The same guilt — irrational but perhaps inevitable — played on his mind after Alexander’s death. It is a source of unbearable sadness that his two sons never had the chance to meet. Tragically, they had been planning their first meeting when Alexander lost his life.
‘They were strikingly similar,’ he explains. ‘Alexander was so looking forward to meeting Rupert, to playing computer games with him. It is such a shame. They would have got on so well.’
Today, it is Karen who dominates Nicholas’s thoughts. If there is one positive thing to have come out of Rupert’s death, it is that his parents are now united in their mission.
‘She has lost her golden boy, her prince,’ he says. ‘She is engulfed by darkness.
‘In many ways, having the whole experience with Alexander has given me the strength to get through this. It’s a journey I have made before.
‘Together, we owe it to Rupert to isolate this damn horrible drug — and make sure it doesn’t ruin more lives like his.’