Cannibis Smoking

22 Nov 2005

Evening Standard

Like most people my age, I have always had a fairly relaxed attitude to cannabis. Student parties in the 1970s and 1980s took place in a haze of cannabis smoke. And it was demonstrably true that most of those people grew up into boringly solid citizens. But in recent times my views on cannabis have hardened. Partly this is due to the fact that I have become a parent. But I have also been affected by the daily spectacle at the end of my road in Hackney of gangs of boys, who should clearly be in school, lurking defiantly under their hoods with the glazed look in their eyes of people who spend a lot more time smoking cannabis than (for instance) reading the works of Harry Potter. Above all I have had ample anecdotal evidence from, local people and friends in youth work, that - whilst cannabis might be a harmless week-end diversion for middle class students - for undernourished young teenagers who smoke it all day long the effects can be catastrophic.

Recent research in Australia reveals that four out of five incurable schizophrenics were regular cannabis smokers. The long-term project showed that between seventy-five and eighty per cent of patients confined to mental institutions or undergoing compulsory treatment had used cannabis between the ages of 12 and 21.Here in Britain the picture is the same. Professor Robin Murray of the Institute of Psychiatry has said that cannabis use is the “number one” problem facing mental health services. Apparently 80% of new cases of schizophrenia are cannabis users. And cannabis smokers are seven times more likely to develop a psychotic mental illness. The figures are confirmed in my mind by personal experience. A good friend (a middle-class white woman of unimpeachable respectability) spent years turning a blind eye to the clouds of cannabis smoke coming from her sons’ bedroom. One degenerated into a paranoid schizophrenic.

Despite all the above, I think that cannabis should be more available for legitimate medical use and I think that the government was right to downgrade it. The law has to reflect reality. And cannabis is so widely smoked, by people of all ages, that criminalizing it would probably be futile. The links between cannabis and mental health are worrying; but the immediate effects of heroin and cocaine are scary. Furthermore many more crimes, particularly violent ones, are committed under the influence of alcohol than by cannabis smokers. So I believe it is right that our overstretched police should concentrate on Class A drugs. But young people (and their parents) need more information about the consequences of heavy cannabis use. And the seventies idea that cannabis is completely harmless, seems as old fashioned and inappropriate to me now, as the tie dye T shirts and cheesecloth shirts that we all wore then.    



back ⇢