Examining the highs and lows of medical cannabis
Can cannabis be good for you? I first heard of its medicinal properties when a dear and brilliant friend used to treat his acute bipolar depression with pot. Alas it seemed to advance his paranoia, persuading him to kill his pet cat. Not long after, he ended his own life. That was 30 years ago. He was 24. I wonder how he might have greeted the legal prescription of cannabis in the UK.
As explained in Horizon: Cannabis – Miracle Medicine or Dangerous Drug? (BBC Two), the compound in cannabis which causes psychotic disorders is known as TMC. It is emolliated by another compound called CBD, the one that triggers euphoric laughter. They are like a jostling devil and angel, graphically illustrated when presenter Javid Abdelmoneim inhaled cannabis across four weeks. Each time the compound ratios were varied. At one extreme he was all happy-go-lucky giggles, at the other an unreasoning, paranoid mess.
Abdelmoneim, an A&E doctor, told the story of medical cannabis. First researched as a palliative in the Sixties in Israel, where elderly women could be seen sparking up spliffs in a Jerusalem clinic, it’s now going global: a Canadian company has taken over a
vast orchid greenhouse in Denmark to grow cannabis for a market that may be worth $19 billion (£15.5 billion) by 2027.
For those with limited medical knowledge, what felt missing from this overview was a sense of how cannabis has become a last-ditch panacea for such a wide array of ailments. But it can clearly make all the difference. Alfie Dingley, now seven, no longer suffers the type of horrific epileptic seizure his mother once forced herself to film. But who pays? Carly Barton, who had a stroke in her twenties, got her first legal batch in the post with the media filming the event in her home. But all her life’s savings went to pay for only a month’s supply.
Abdelmoneim persuasively argued that the NHS can’t be expected to fund treatment which has not yet been subjected to stringent national trials. Meanwhile, out in the streets, Tmcenriched skunk is ushering in a mental health epidemic. This two-faced plant may give with one hand but sure knows how to take with the other.
When a celebrity noses around their family tree in Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One), the instinct is to find genetic evidence of what shaped them. Thus, on his English father Albert’s side,
Paul Merton was pleased to dig up a couple of buskers operating on the streets in Victorian London, one of whom was imprisoned for her part in an assault involving a banjo.
Not that much of Merton’s performative A-game was on display. Anyone tuning in for an hour of madcap improvised wit had to settle for one opening gag: “Family history is a mystery. I couldn’t speculate as to whether I’m related to the Duke of Cumberland, or any other pub.”
There was a reason for this. The real meat of his story was on his mother Mary’s Irish line. You can tell when a genealogical discovery has compelling richness – it hoovers up the lion’s share of the allotted time. Merton’s mother and aunt spent much of their early years in children’s homes, so were forgivably ignorant of their father’s story. All Merton knew from his sister Angela was that his grandfather, James Power, was said to have drowned at sea.
It was a reflective Merton who went in search of the facts, in which the forces of history played out in one short life. An agricultural labourer’s only way of escaping lowly farmwork was to enlist with the Royal Irish Regiment, but instead of shooting at the enemy he found himself firing on his fellow countrymen in the Easter Rising, prompting him to hand back his medals and join the Irish Republican Army.
Even for a format which demands it, Merton spent an unusual amount of time mutely absorbing the words of sundry Irish historians. Not that there were any quips in this narrative, which only worsened when, after a hellish stint in the merchant navy delivering Welsh coal to South America, his grandfather keeled over with a heart attack and toppled into the Glamorganshire canal in Cardiff. So much for drowning at sea.
Merton had cause to reflect beside his mother’s baptismal font in County Waterford and, later, at her father’s unmarked grave in Cathays cemetery. He didn’t cry, but nor for once did he make us laugh.
Horizon: Cannabis – Miracle Medicine or Dangerous Drug? ★★★★
Who Do You Think You Are? ★★★