Against Cannabis
Daily Mail
Like most people my age, I have always had a relaxed attitude to cannabis. In the seventies it was just another part of the counter-culture along with flared trousers, long hair, psychedelic art and rock concerts. The image of the cannabis leaf was as much a symbol of youthful rebellion as the CND logo or the ubiquitous posters of the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. Most student parties of the seventies and eighties took place in a haze of cannabis smoke. And because, almost without exception, those young people grew up into boringly solid citizens, I have always rejected the idea that cannabis use leads inevitably to becoming a hardened drug addict. But in recent times my views on cannabis have begun to change. Of course this may be partly due to the fact I have become a parent and am now part of the generation that we were all rebelling against.
But I have also been affected by what I see around me in Hackney in East London; the area that I live in and which I have represented in Parliament for over eighteen years. Crime, including gun crime, is one of our biggest problems. And much of it is committed by people either on drugs, trying to obtain the money for drugs or by drug dealers settling some dispute. As is common in Inner London, expensive family housing is cheek by jowl with grim council estates and all the detritus of the drug economy. So every morning on my way to the bus stop I pass the pushers and the addicts who have been milling about all night on the main road. The police have periodic “sweeps” of the area but the dealers and their clients soon filter back. Local shopkeepers tell me that one of their first jobs, when they open up their shops at dawn, is to scrub down their doorways where the addicts have urinated. Nothing cures you quicker of even the faintest notion that taking drugs is romantic than the sight every day of degraded, emaciated women with vacant faces and clutching cans of extra-strength beer; who are intent only on prostituting themselves for their next drug fix.. And all the while, around them, people are hurrying to work and children are going to school. I am also struck by the daily spectacle, right at the end of my road, 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 Harry Potter. Some are recruited to make drug deliveries on their bicycles. In time they will graduate up the management ladder in the drug gangs. Little more than children; their lives are over before they have begun.
Above all I have had ample anecdotal evidence from local people and friends who work with young people that – whilst cannabis might be a harmless weekend diversion for middle class students- for malnourished young teenagers who smoke it all day long the effects can be catastrophic. And increasingly the research bears this out. In 1987 a seminal study of 45,000 Swedish conscripts into the armed services revealed that those who admitted smoking cannabis in the year before joining the army were at a higher risk of developing schizophrenia for the next twenty years. And the more cannabis they had smoked the greater the risk. Seven studies in the past three years have shown the link between smoking cannabis as an adolescent and developing mental illness. One recent research projects was in Australia. It revealed that four out of five incurable schizophrenics were regular cannabis smokers. And it showed that between 75% and 80% 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. He says that 80% of new cases of schizophrenia are cannabis users and that cannabis smokers are seven times more likely to develop a psychotic mental illness. In amongst the statistics the message is clear, even to us non-scientists, which is that if you smoke too much cannabis too young it is likely to scramble your brain. The figures are confirmed to me 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 two son’s bedroom. One degenerated into a paranoid schizophrenic..
I still do not think that cannabis is a “gateway” drug which leads inexorably to heroin, cocaine and hopeless drug addiction. But I am persuaded that it can have disastrous effects on mental health; particularly if you start smoking it too young. Despite this I do believe that it should be made more widely available for legitimate medical use. One of my colleagues Paul Flynn MP has campaigned resolutely on this issue for years. He is a middle-aged Welsh MP, who is as far from a counter-culture figure as can be imagined. But he has been tireless in persuading colleagues of the relief cannabis can bring to people with conditions like chronic arthritis for whom no other form of pain relief has worked. And, on balance, I think that the government was right to downgrade it; although this has been a very controversial decision. I believe that the law has to reflect reality; not the world as we would like it to be. And cannabis is so widely smoked by men and women of all ages and of all classes, that criminalising it would be futile. It was noteworthy that, when the redoubtable Anne Widdecombe tried to suggest a “crack down “ on cannabis , there were so many middle-aged Tory MP’s willing to make a point of going public about their youthful encounters with cannabis. This was not just a case of slapping her down. More than anything else, it was an act of solidarity with their generation..
Furthermore it is important to remember that many more crimes, particularly violent ones, are committed under the influence of alcohol than by cannabis smokers. And, although the long-term links between cannabis and psychotic mental illness are undoubtedly worrying, the immediate effects of heroin and cocaine are scary and destructive of society. This is something that I see every day. So I believe that 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 clear messages about the dangers.
The links between cannabis smoking and race are a vexed subject. In the fifties many white people thought that that it was a peculiarly West Indian habit. .Rastafarians today still like to insist, to the gullible, that smoking cannabis is a religious sacrament and a key part of their religion along with their dreadlocks.. That has always struck me as a particularly self serving piece of “do-it-yourself” theology. But the idea that cannabis smoking is a uniquely black problem belongs to the heyday of Christine Keeler and Lucky Gordon. Nowadays any parent can tell you that cannabis abuse occurs amongst young people of all classes and all colours.
In the Seventies we all thought that cannabis was perfectly harmless. It was seen as a vaguely bohemian habit like going around barefoot. You did not have to smoke cannabis yourself to be willing to defend other people’s right to do so. So witch hunting politicians for what they may, or may not, have done as a student is pointless. And it will lead to an ever decreasing pool of normal people willing to go into politics. A better use of everyone’s energy would be campaigning for more and better drug rehabilitation facilities. And we also need to make our prisons drug free zones. It is not well known enough that many women go into Holloway prison drug free and come out with a heroin habit so widespread is drug use in this and other prisons. But, looking back at the Seventies with the benefit of age, experience and what I see on the streets of Hackney, I sadly I have to acknowledge that the naïve ideas we had about cannabis then are as old fashioned as tie-dyed T shirts, cheese cloth shirts and the cardboard long-playing record sleeves that the cannabis cigarettes got rolled on.
back ⇢