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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Cannabis: a drug more dangerous than heroin
Melanie Reid The Herald
Thursday 19 Oct 2006 The dangers of cannabis use by young people have been evident for several years. Growing numbers of teenagers are encountering mental health problems and their distressed families, searching for answers, are discovering an unwelcome truth: that everywhere circumstantial links exist between heavy cannabis use and various forms of psychosis. Most painfully of all, these families are realising that there is no way back; that the damage is done. This is the common pattern. A bright child with no obvious psychological problems reaches his mid-teens (it tends to be boys rather than girls) when suddenly his school work starts to deteriorate. He seems to have trouble thinking clearly; he starts to miss lessons and becomes isolated from friends. He complains that people are talking about him behind this back. The teenager may get to university, but then starts to suffer depression and psychosis. At some point, the parents learn their child has been a heavy cannabis user for years. He may drop out, and find it difficult to get a job. In severe cases, he will become overwhelmed with paranoid fears. The workers at the National Schizophrenia Fellowship (now called Rethink) hear this heartbreaking story again and again from parents. No-one can say for sure there are causal links between heavy cannabis use on developing brains and psychiatric disorder. The fact that X follows Y does not prove that X was the cause of Y. But for many professionals in the field - such as Neil McKeganey, professor of drug misuse research at Glasgow University, who says he is now contacted frequently about people in their late teens running into difficulty in this way - there is a conviction that smoking cannabis may, indeed, be desperately harmful for predisposed youngsters. We are deficient in knowledge about the most common street drug (after alcohol). Concerned academics find it deeply disconcerting how little research there is on cannabis. They point to the fact that the government is preoccupied with heroin and cocaine, and as a result has devoted little money to a drug that has traditionally been regarded as a low-level problem. You do not have to look far to see why. The fact that in 2004 the government downgraded cannabis, moving it from a class B to class C drug, means ministers are most unlikely to commission research that would be likely to have a deeply embarrassing result, ie that the reclassification was foolish. Nobody willingly likes egg on their face; even fewer want to pay for it. What evidence exists is hard to ignore. In 1997, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported the adverse effects of the drug, especially for adolescents. These included: developmental problems, permanent cognitive impairment, psychosis, chronic apathy (usually permanent) and an impact on the frontal lobe function of the brain which can trigger schizophrenia and manic depression. A Swedish study in the 1980s found heavy users of cannabis at the age of 18 were six times more likely to develop schizophrenia in later life. Two recent studies in Holland have found that the incidence of psychosis in cannabis users was almost three times higher. Depression was also three times more common in cannabis users. In areas of south London, the incidence of schizophrenia has doubled in 30 years. Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, and a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital, is one of the few UK experts studying cannabis. For years, he has been warning about the harm the drug can cause, pointing out that cannabis is the common reason for relapses in psychiatric patients. The same relapse was evident at Yale medical school when volunteers were given THC, the major active ingredient of cannabis, by injection. Professor Murray said recently: "Five years ago, 95% of psychiatrists would have said cannabis does not cause psychosis. Now I would say that 95% say it does. It is a quiet epidemic." His was among research gathered for the Conservative Party's social justice policy review this week. The report cited Professor Peter Jones of Cambridge University, who found that eight out of 10 cases of initial psychiatric disorders occurred in those who were heavy users of cannabis. He said: "I work in a first-contact schizophrenia service and it might as well be a cannabis dependency unit." He estimates that children who start smoking cannabis at 10 or 11 treble their risk of developing schizophrenia. Mary Brett, the researcher who prepared the report for the Tories, has criticised the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (who reviewed the evidence in 2002 and advised the government to downgrade cannabis) because not one single expert on cannabis, psychosis or schizophrenia was a member. The issue, it's clear, will be there to battle over at the next General Election. It's a gloomy prospect. I can think of nothing worse, or more unhelpful, than an unctuous fight on old right/left lines over cannabis. We'll regress to a polarity between the liberal baby-boomers who smoked grass 30 years ago, with their nostalgic posturing, versus the traditional hang-'em-and-flog-'em brigade. It is crazy, for what was an argument about social freedoms is now a medical argument about the risk of permanent brain damage. But lost in the wilderness will be common sense, and damaged families will be left to spin in the wind. You don't need to be a reactionary to be deeply worried about cannabis . You just need to be a parent of a teenager, or know a young person, as I do, whose life is now blighted by mental ill health, most probably as a result of excessive cannabis use. We need to remove this debate from the political arena and put it into the hands of the scientists. Times have changed. We are talking about a different drug, one which under the umbrella name of skunk is massively more powerful than the grass of 30 years ago, which was equivalent to two pints of beer. Nowadays the relatively mild form of the drug is almost unobtainable. It has been overtaken by artificially produced skunk, grown hydroponically in people's houses. This form of the drug can be up to 20 times as powerful as the natural product and one joint can have the effect of more than 10 pints. Small wonder that thousands of young people who smoke it regularly lay themselves open to developing psychosis, or that experts, given its widespread use, now view cannabis as more dangerous than heroin. In their submission to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in July 2006, Rethink, representing the parents, made the case that the government has not contributed to the evidence base on cannabis, and has failed to reflect the evidence that already exists. Damningly, the organisation said that to its knowledge, the government has never attempted to communicate the mental health risks of cannabis to the wider public and to school-age children. More than 25 years ago, in a report on cannabis, the World Health Organisation said: "To provide rigid proof of causality in such investigations is logically and theoretically impossible, and to demand it is unreasonable." Surely we have more evidence now about this quiet epidemic than was ever thought possible, and it is time to warn teenagers of the dangers they face. email author The dangers of cannabis use by young people have been evident for several years. Growing numbers of teenagers are encountering mental health problems and their distressed families, searching for answers, are discovering an unwelcome truth: that everywhere circumstantial links exist between heavy cannabis use and various forms of psychosis. Most painfully of all, these families are realising that there is no way back; that the damage is done. This is the common pattern. A bright child with no obvious psychological problems reaches his mid-teens (it tends to be boys rather than girls) when suddenly his school work starts to deteriorate. He seems to have trouble thinking clearly; he starts to miss lessons and becomes isolated from friends. He complains that people are talking about him behind this back. The teenager may get to university, but then starts to suffer depression and psychosis. At some point, the parents learn their child has been a heavy cannabis user for years. He may drop out, and find it difficult to get a job. In severe cases, he will become overwhelmed with paranoid fears. The workers at the National Schizophrenia Fellowship (now called Rethink) hear this heartbreaking story again and again from parents. No-one can say for sure there are causal links between heavy cannabis use on developing brains and psychiatric disorder. The fact that X follows Y does not prove that X was the cause of Y. But for many professionals in the field - such as Neil McKeganey, professor of drug misuse research at Glasgow University, who says he is now contacted frequently about people in their late teens running into difficulty in this way - there is a conviction that smoking cannabis may, indeed, be desperately harmful for predisposed youngsters. We are deficient in knowledge about the most common street drug (after alcohol). Concerned academics find it deeply disconcerting how little research there is on cannabis. They point to the fact that the government is preoccupied with heroin and cocaine, and as a result has devoted little money to a drug that has traditionally been regarded as a low-level problem. You do not have to look far to see why. The fact that in 2004 the government downgraded cannabis, moving it from a class B to class C drug, means ministers are most unlikely to commission research that would be likely to have a deeply embarrassing result, ie that the reclassification was foolish. Nobody willingly likes egg on their face; even fewer want to pay for it. What evidence exists is hard to ignore. In 1997, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported the adverse effects of the drug, especially for adolescents. These included: developmental problems, permanent cognitive impairment, psychosis, chronic apathy (usually permanent) and an impact on the frontal lobe function of the brain which can trigger schizophrenia and manic depression. A Swedish study in the 1980s found heavy users of cannabis at the age of 18 were six times more likely to develop schizophrenia in later life. Two recent studies in Holland have found that the incidence of psychosis in cannabis users was almost three times higher. Depression was also three times more common in cannabis users. In areas of south London, the incidence of schizophrenia has doubled in 30 years. Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, and a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital, is one of the few UK experts studying cannabis. For years, he has been warning about the harm the drug can cause, pointing out that cannabis is the common reason for relapses in psychiatric patients. The same relapse was evident at Yale medical school when volunteers were given THC, the major active ingredient of cannabis, by injection. Professor Murray said recently: "Five years ago, 95% of psychiatrists would have said cannabis does not cause psychosis. Now I would say that 95% say it does. It is a quiet epidemic." His was among research gathered for the Conservative Party's social justice policy review this week. The report cited Professor Peter Jones of Cambridge University, who found that eight out of 10 cases of initial psychiatric disorders occurred in those who were heavy users of cannabis. He said: "I work in a first-contact schizophrenia service and it might as well be a cannabis dependency unit." He estimates that children who start smoking cannabis at 10 or 11 treble their risk of developing schizophrenia. Mary Brett, the researcher who prepared the report for the Tories, has criticised the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (who reviewed the evidence in 2002 and advised the government to downgrade cannabis) because not one single expert on cannabis, psychosis or schizophrenia was a member. The issue, it's clear, will be there to battle over at the next General Election. It's a gloomy prospect. I can think of nothing worse, or more unhelpful, than an unctuous fight on old right/left lines over cannabis. We'll regress to a polarity between the liberal baby-boomers who smoked grass 30 years ago, with their nostalgic posturing, versus the traditional hang-'em-and-flog-'em brigade. It is crazy, for what was an argument about social freedoms is now a medical argument about the risk of permanent brain damage. But lost in the wilderness will be common sense, and damaged families will be left to spin in the wind. You don't need to be a reactionary to be deeply worried about cannabis . You just need to be a parent of a teenager, or know a young person, as I do, whose life is now blighted by mental ill health, most probably as a result of excessive cannabis use. We need to remove this debate from the political arena and put it into the hands of the scientists. Times have changed. We are talking about a different drug, one which under the umbrella name of skunk is massively more powerful than the grass of 30 years ago, which was equivalent to two pints of beer. Nowadays the relatively mild form of the drug is almost unobtainable. It has been overtaken by artificially produced skunk, grown hydroponically in people's houses. This form of the drug can be up to 20 times as powerful as the natural product and one joint can have the effect of more than 10 pints. Small wonder that thousands of young people who smoke it regularly lay themselves open to developing psychosis, or that experts, given its widespread use, now view cannabis as more dangerous than heroin. In their submission to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in July 2006, Rethink, representing the parents, made the case that the government has not contributed to the evidence base on cannabis, and has failed to reflect the evidence that already exists. Damningly, the organisation said that to its knowledge, the government has never attempted to communicate the mental health risks of cannabis to the wider public and to school-age children. More than 25 years ago, in a report on cannabis, the World Health Organisation said: "To provide rigid proof of causality in such investigations is logically and theoretically impossible, and to demand it is unreasonable." Surely we have more evidence now about this quiet epidemic than was ever thought possible, and it is time to warn teenagers of the dangers they face. email author The dangers of cannabis use by young people have been evident for several years. Growing numbers of teenagers are encountering mental health problems and their distressed families, searching for answers, are discovering an unwelcome truth: that everywhere circumstantial links exist between heavy cannabis use and various forms of psychosis. Most painfully of all, these families are realising that there is no way back; that the damage is done. This is the common pattern. A bright child with no obvious psychological problems reaches his mid-teens (it tends to be boys rather than girls) when suddenly his school work starts to deteriorate. He seems to have trouble thinking clearly; he starts to miss lessons and becomes isolated from friends. He complains that people are talking about him behind this back. The teenager may get to university, but then starts to suffer depression and psychosis. At some point, the parents learn their child has been a heavy cannabis user for years. He may drop out, and find it difficult to get a job. In severe cases, he will become overwhelmed with paranoid fears. The workers at the National Schizophrenia Fellowship (now called Rethink) hear this heartbreaking story again and again from parents. No-one can say for sure there are causal links between heavy cannabis use on developing brains and psychiatric disorder. The fact that X follows Y does not prove that X was the cause of Y. But for many professionals in the field - such as Neil McKeganey, professor of drug misuse research at Glasgow University, who says he is now contacted frequently about people in their late teens running into difficulty in this way - there is a conviction that smoking cannabis may, indeed, be desperately harmful for predisposed youngsters. We are deficient in knowledge about the most common street drug (after alcohol). Concerned academics find it deeply disconcerting how little research there is on cannabis. They point to the fact that the government is preoccupied with heroin and cocaine, and as a result has devoted little money to a drug that has traditionally been regarded as a low-level problem. You do not have to look far to see why. The fact that in 2004 the government downgraded cannabis, moving it from a class B to class C drug, means ministers are most unlikely to commission research that would be likely to have a deeply embarrassing result, ie that the reclassification was foolish. Nobody willingly likes egg on their face; even fewer want to pay for it. What evidence exists is hard to ignore. In 1997, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported the adverse effects of the drug, especially for adolescents. These included: developmental problems, permanent cognitive impairment, psychosis, chronic apathy (usually permanent) and an impact on the frontal lobe function of the brain which can trigger schizophrenia and manic depression. A Swedish study in the 1980s found heavy users of cannabis at the age of 18 were six times more likely to develop schizophrenia in later life. Two recent studies in Holland have found that the incidence of psychosis in cannabis users was almost three times higher. Depression was also three times more common in cannabis users. In areas of south London, the incidence of schizophrenia has doubled in 30 years. Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, and a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital, is one of the few UK experts studying cannabis. For years, he has been warning about the harm the drug can cause, pointing out that cannabis is the common reason for relapses in psychiatric patients. The same relapse was evident at Yale medical school when volunteers were given THC, the major active ingredient of cannabis, by injection. Professor Murray said recently: "Five years ago, 95% of psychiatrists would have said cannabis does not cause psychosis. Now I would say that 95% say it does. It is a quiet epidemic." His was among research gathered for the Conservative Party's social justice policy review this week. The report cited Professor Peter Jones of Cambridge University, who found that eight out of 10 cases of initial psychiatric disorders occurred in those who were heavy users of cannabis. He said: "I work in a first-contact schizophrenia service and it might as well be a cannabis dependency unit." He estimates that children who start smoking cannabis at 10 or 11 treble their risk of developing schizophrenia. Mary Brett, the researcher who prepared the report for the Tories, has criticised the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (who reviewed the evidence in 2002 and advised the government to downgrade cannabis) because not one single expert on cannabis, psychosis or schizophrenia was a member. The issue, it's clear, will be there to battle over at the next General Election. It's a gloomy prospect. I can think of nothing worse, or more unhelpful, than an unctuous fight on old right/left lines over cannabis. We'll regress to a polarity between the liberal baby-boomers who smoked grass 30 years ago, with their nostalgic posturing, versus the traditional hang-'em-and-flog-'em brigade. It is crazy, for what was an argument about social freedoms is now a medical argument about the risk of permanent brain damage. But lost in the wilderness will be common sense, and damaged families will be left to spin in the wind. You don't need to be a reactionary to be deeply worried about cannabis . You just need to be a parent of a teenager, or know a young person, as I do, whose life is now blighted by mental ill health, most probably as a result of excessive cannabis use. We need to remove this debate from the political arena and put it into the hands of the scientists. Times have changed. We are talking about a different drug, one which under the umbrella name of skunk is massively more powerful than the grass of 30 years ago, which was equivalent to two pints of beer. Nowadays the relatively mild form of the drug is almost unobtainable. It has been overtaken by artificially produced skunk, grown hydroponically in people's houses. This form of the drug can be up to 20 times as powerful as the natural product and one joint can have the effect of more than 10 pints. Small wonder that thousands of young people who smoke it regularly lay themselves open to developing psychosis, or that experts, given its widespread use, now view cannabis as more dangerous than heroin. In their submission to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in July 2006, Rethink, representing the parents, made the case that the government has not contributed to the evidence base on cannabis, and has failed to reflect the evidence that already exists. Damningly, the organisation said that to its knowledge, the government has never attempted to communicate the mental health risks of cannabis to the wider public and to school-age children. More than 25 years ago, in a report on cannabis, the World Health Organisation said: "To provide rigid proof of causality in such investigations is logically and theoretically impossible, and to demand it is unreasonable." Surely we have more evidence now about this quiet epidemic than was ever thought possible, and it is time to warn teenagers of the dangers they face. email author The dangers of cannabis use by young people have been evident for several years. Growing numbers of teenagers are encountering mental health problems and their distressed families, searching for answers, are discovering an unwelcome truth: that everywhere circumstantial links exist between heavy cannabis use and various forms of psychosis. Most painfully of all, these families are realising that there is no way back; that the damage is done. This is the common pattern. A bright child with no obvious psychological problems reaches his mid-teens (it tends to be boys rather than girls) when suddenly his school work starts to deteriorate. He seems to have trouble thinking clearly; he starts to miss lessons and becomes isolated from friends. He complains that people are talking about him behind this back. The teenager may get to university, but then starts to suffer depression and psychosis. At some point, the parents learn their child has been a heavy cannabis user for years. He may drop out, and find it difficult to get a job. In severe cases, he will become overwhelmed with paranoid fears. The workers at the National Schizophrenia Fellowship (now called Rethink) hear this heartbreaking story again and again from parents. No-one can say for sure there are causal links between heavy cannabis use on developing brains and psychiatric disorder. The fact that X follows Y does not prove that X was the cause of Y. But for many professionals in the field - such as Neil McKeganey, professor of drug misuse research at Glasgow University, who says he is now contacted frequently about people in their late teens running into difficulty in this way - there is a conviction that smoking cannabis may, indeed, be desperately harmful for predisposed youngsters. We are deficient in knowledge about the most common street drug (after alcohol). Concerned academics find it deeply disconcerting how little research there is on cannabis. They point to the fact that the government is preoccupied with heroin and cocaine, and as a result has devoted little money to a drug that has traditionally been regarded as a low-level problem. You do not have to look far to see why. The fact that in 2004 the government downgraded cannabis, moving it from a class B to class C drug, means ministers are most unlikely to commission research that would be likely to have a deeply embarrassing result, ie that the reclassification was foolish. Nobody willingly likes egg on their face; even fewer want to pay for it. What evidence exists is hard to ignore. In 1997, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported the adverse effects of the drug, especially for adolescents. These included: developmental problems, permanent cognitive impairment, psychosis, chronic apathy (usually permanent) and an impact on the frontal lobe function of the brain which can trigger schizophrenia and manic depression. A Swedish study in the 1980s found heavy users of cannabis at the age of 18 were six times more likely to develop schizophrenia in later life. Two recent studies in Holland have found that the incidence of psychosis in cannabis users was almost three times higher. Depression was also three times more common in cannabis users. In areas of south London, the incidence of schizophrenia has doubled in 30 years. Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, and a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital, is one of the few UK experts studying cannabis. For years, he has been warning about the harm the drug can cause, pointing out that cannabis is the common reason for relapses in psychiatric patients. The same relapse was evident at Yale medical school when volunteers were given THC, the major active ingredient of cannabis, by injection. Professor Murray said recently: "Five years ago, 95% of psychiatrists would have said cannabis does not cause psychosis. Now I would say that 95% say it does. It is a quiet epidemic." His was among research gathered for the Conservative Party's social justice policy review this week. The report cited Professor Peter Jones of Cambridge University, who found that eight out of 10 cases of initial psychiatric disorders occurred in those who were heavy users of cannabis. He said: "I work in a first-contact schizophrenia service and it might as well be a cannabis dependency unit." He estimates that children who start smoking cannabis at 10 or 11 treble their risk of developing schizophrenia. Mary Brett, the researcher who prepared the report for the Tories, has criticised the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (who reviewed the evidence in 2002 and advised the government to downgrade cannabis) because not one single expert on cannabis, psychosis or schizophrenia was a member. The issue, it's clear, will be there to battle over at the next General Election. It's a gloomy prospect. I can think of nothing worse, or more unhelpful, than an unctuous fight on old right/left lines over cannabis. We'll regress to a polarity between the liberal baby-boomers who smoked grass 30 years ago, with their nostalgic posturing, versus the traditional hang-'em-and-flog-'em brigade. It is crazy, for what was an argument about social freedoms is now a medical argument about the risk of permanent brain damage. But lost in the wilderness will be common sense, and damaged families will be left to spin in the wind. You don't need to be a reactionary to be deeply worried about cannabis . You just need to be a parent of a teenager, or know a young person, as I do, whose life is now blighted by mental ill health, most probably as a result of excessive cannabis use. We need to remove this debate from the political arena and put it into the hands of the scientists. Times have changed. We are talking about a different drug, one which under the umbrella name of skunk is massively more powerful than the grass of 30 years ago, which was equivalent to two pints of beer. Nowadays the relatively mild form of the drug is almost unobtainable. It has been overtaken by artificially produced skunk, grown hydroponically in people's houses. This form of the drug can be up to 20 times as powerful as the natural product and one joint can have the effect of more than 10 pints. Small wonder that thousands of young people who smoke it regularly lay themselves open to developing psychosis, or that experts, given its widespread use, now view cannabis as more dangerous than heroin. In their submission to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in July 2006, Rethink, representing the parents, made the case that the government has not contributed to the evidence base on cannabis, and has failed to reflect the evidence that already exists. Damningly, the organisation said that to its knowledge, the government has never attempted to communicate the mental health risks of cannabis to the wider public and to school-age children. More than 25 years ago, in a report on cannabis, the World Health Organisation said: "To provide rigid proof of causality in such investigations is logically and theoretically impossible, and to demand it is unreasonable." Surely we have more evidence now about this quiet epidemic than was ever thought possible, and it is time to warn teenagers of the dangers they face. email author The dangers of cannabis use by young people have been evident for several years. Growing numbers of teenagers are encountering mental health problems and their distressed families, searching for answers, are discovering an unwelcome truth: that everywhere circumstantial links exist between heavy cannabis use and various forms of psychosis. Most painfully of all, these families are realising that there is no way back; that the damage is done. This is the common pattern. A bright child with no obvious psychological problems reaches his mid-teens (it tends to be boys rather than girls) when suddenly his school work starts to deteriorate. He seems to have trouble thinking clearly; he starts to miss lessons and becomes isolated from friends. He complains that people are talking about him behind this back. The teenager may get to university, but then starts to suffer depression and psychosis. At some point, the parents learn their child has been a heavy cannabis user for years. He may drop out, and find it difficult to get a job. In severe cases, he will become overwhelmed with paranoid fears. The workers at the National Schizophrenia Fellowship (now called Rethink) hear this heartbreaking story again and again from parents. No-one can say for sure there are causal links between heavy cannabis use on developing brains and psychiatric disorder. The fact that X follows Y does not prove that X was the cause of Y. But for many professionals in the field - such as Neil McKeganey, professor of drug misuse research at Glasgow University, who says he is now contacted frequently about people in their late teens running into difficulty in this way - there is a conviction that smoking cannabis may, indeed, be desperately harmful for predisposed youngsters. We are deficient in knowledge about the most common street drug (after alcohol). Concerned academics find it deeply disconcerting how little research there is on cannabis. They point to the fact that the government is preoccupied with heroin and cocaine, and as a result has devoted little money to a drug that has traditionally been regarded as a low-level problem. You do not have to look far to see why. The fact that in 2004 the government downgraded cannabis, moving it from a class B to class C drug, means ministers are most unlikely to commission research that would be likely to have a deeply embarrassing result, ie that the reclassification was foolish. Nobody willingly likes egg on their face; even fewer want to pay for it. What evidence exists is hard to ignore. In 1997, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported the adverse effects of the drug, especially for adolescents. These included: developmental problems, permanent cognitive impairment, psychosis, chronic apathy (usually permanent) and an impact on the frontal lobe function of the brain which can trigger schizophrenia and manic depression. A Swedish study in the 1980s found heavy users of cannabis at the age of 18 were six times more likely to develop schizophrenia in later life. Two recent studies in Holland have found that the incidence of psychosis in cannabis users was almost three times higher. Depression was also three times more common in cannabis users. In areas of south London, the incidence of schizophrenia has doubled in 30 years. Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, and a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital, is one of the few UK experts studying cannabis. For years, he has been warning about the harm the drug can cause, pointing out that cannabis is the common reason for relapses in psychiatric patients. The same relapse was evident at Yale medical school when volunteers were given THC, the major active ingredient of cannabis, by injection. Professor Murray said recently: "Five years ago, 95% of psychiatrists would have said cannabis does not cause psychosis. Now I would say that 95% say it does. It is a quiet epidemic." His was among research gathered for the Conservative Party's social justice policy review this week. The report cited Professor Peter Jones of Cambridge University, who found that eight out of 10 cases of initial psychiatric disorders occurred in those who were heavy users of cannabis. He said: "I work in a first-contact schizophrenia service and it might as well be a cannabis dependency unit." He estimates that children who start smoking cannabis at 10 or 11 treble their risk of developing schizophrenia. Mary Brett, the researcher who prepared the report for the Tories, has criticised the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (who reviewed the evidence in 2002 and advised the government to downgrade cannabis) because not one single expert on cannabis, psychosis or schizophrenia was a member. The issue, it's clear, will be there to battle over at the next General Election. It's a gloomy prospect. I can think of nothing worse, or more unhelpful, than an unctuous fight on old right/left lines over cannabis. We'll regress to a polarity between the liberal baby-boomers who smoked grass 30 years ago, with their nostalgic posturing, versus the traditional hang-'em-and-flog-'em brigade. It is crazy, for what was an argument about social freedoms is now a medical argument about the risk of permanent brain damage. But lost in the wilderness will be common sense, and damaged families will be left to spin in the wind. You don't need to be a reactionary to be deeply worried about cannabis . You just need to be a parent of a teenager, or know a young person, as I do, whose life is now blighted by mental ill health, most probably as a result of excessive cannabis use. We need to remove this debate from the political arena and put it into the hands of the scientists. Times have changed. We are talking about a different drug, one which under the umbrella name of skunk is massively more powerful than the grass of 30 years ago, which was equivalent to two pints of beer. Nowadays the relatively mild form of the drug is almost unobtainable. It has been overtaken by artificially produced skunk, grown hydroponically in people's houses. This form of the drug can be up to 20 times as powerful as the natural product and one joint can have the effect of more than 10 pints. Small wonder that thousands of young people who smoke it regularly lay themselves open to developing psychosis, or that experts, given its widespread use, now view cannabis as more dangerous than heroin. In their submission to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in July 2006, Rethink, representing the parents, made the case that the government has not contributed to the evidence base on cannabis, and has failed to reflect the evidence that already exists. Damningly, the organisation said that to its knowledge, the government has never attempted to communicate the mental health risks of cannabis to the wider public and to school-age children. More than 25 years ago, in a report on cannabis, the World Health Organisation said: "To provide rigid proof of causality in such investigations is logically and theoretically impossible, and to demand it is unreasonable." Surely we have more evidence now about this quiet epidemic than was ever thought possible, and it is time to warn teenagers of the dangers they face. http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/72474.html LETTERS: letters@theherald.co.uk -- WebBooks Amazing Amazon Store: http://astore.amazon.co.uk/webbooks05
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