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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: The myth of the new killer drug
Hugh Muir The Guardian
Tuesday 08 Nov 2005 In the beginning, people did a bit of cannabis. Then, in the search for what one might call the higher high, there was skunk, a mixture of superior grade cannabises. Progress, depending on your point of view, is reputed to have arrived in the form of super skunk - or "Punk" - an even more potent variant, possibly genetically modified, which was reported to have reached our smokers last month. But where did Punk come from? The answer, it seems, is nowhere. The local newspaper in the the north London borough of Haringey last month ran a front-page story about it, warning its readers that super skunk was being mixed with Ketamine - the horse tranquiliser beloved of clubbers - or with heroin, or with crack cocaine, or even with embalming fluid. One local community worker said this latest concoction, a kind of turbo-charged super skunk, was unwittingly being smoked by children as young as 13. But Colin Stewart, of the drugs charity Release, seems less than perturbed by the reports of Punk sweeping the streets of the capital. "Oh, that one again," he says. "The dealer at the school gate mixing cannabis with heroin to get the children hooked. The lacing of cannabis with ketamine or crack." Some people, he says, do mix their joints with something a bit stronger, but that only happens out of choice - not because dealers are being more than usually nefarious. "The only place people need to be a bit careful is in nightclubs where it might happen for predatory reasons. But selling laced pre-prepared cannabis joints to children doesn't really make sense." While no one can view every transaction between dealer and user, the economics of selling cannabis speak for themselves. "For a UKP10 deal of skunk you could build between five and 10 spliffs, depending on how weed is used," says Stewart. "If there's weed worth 50 pence in it, why put a UKP5 rock of crack in there? There's no money in it." Despite the fact that drug dealers usually have a pretty sound grasp of profit margins, and there is no evidence to suggest they are trying to smuggle class As on to the street under cover of grass and hash, the public doesn't seem to get the picture. "You get parents ringing us to say they have seen something on Panorama," says Stewart. "We are going back to the days of Reefer Madness in the 1920s and 1930s. There is so much misinformation being put around. Skunk has been a Godsend to the anti-cannabis brigade." So if you're worried about killer drugs in your household, don't consult the pharmaceutical experts - ask an economist. They are the ones to tell you if your fears are well-founded.
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