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UK: Cannabis makes me depressed
Jenny McCartney Sunday Telegraph
Sunday 25 Jan 2004 Opinion I have a prediction: now that David Blunkett is downgrading cannabis to a class C drug, dope-smoking will become more widespread, but less fashionable. The most intoxicating thing about cannabis for the middle classes - even taking into account the soaring levels of its active compound, tetrahydrocannabinol, in specially-bred modern brands - has always been its delightful illegality, which enables people with mortgages and sensible jobs to flirt with the pleasurable illusion that they are living in the Bronx each time they dial up their "dealer". Now the frisson has been diluted. Yet just as the Government indicated that perhaps cannabis is not so dangerous after all, hordes of rather surprising people have come out and said that it certainly is. Robin Murray, a professor of psychiatry at the Maudsley hospital, said that dope-smoking can greatly heighten the user's risk of developing psychosis, and worsens the symptoms in those already suffering from mental health problems. His concerns were echoed by Sue Arnold, a journalist who once championed the legalisation of cannabis for medicinal purposes. Ms Arnold revealed how she had turned against the drug since one of her sons - who was highly partial to a puff - had a psychotic episode that has left him on medication for the rest of his life. The Government's powerful disapproval, however, has long been dope's greatest marketing asset. There are many people who see the state as a Big Mummy whom they don't trust. If Mummy proclaims that beef is safe, she's lying. If Mummy champions GM foods, it's just a way of maximising profits for the big multinationals while giving us all mysterious forms of cancer. Mummy says that she doesn't like smoking and drinking - but she sure creams off the taxes from them, right? Cannabis enthusiasts protest that while legal cigarettes are mass-produced using cancer-inducing chemicals, illegal cannabis is hand-cultivated by counter-culture growers committed to supplying a harmless high. The impassioned advancement of this argument has given many stoned folk much pleasure over the years. But what will happen to the fun now that an exhausted Big Mummy has said, in essence: "Okay - you lot can smoke dope in your own room, but don't bother the neighbours." It seems sensible that the police shouldn't waste time prosecuting people for posessing small amounts, and no one - including most psychiatrists - seems particularly worried about those who indulge in the very occasional spliff. They are, however, highly concerned about the effects on those who spend whole days in a blurry haze. Yesterday, a reporter from Radio 4's Today programme ventured to a south London estate, in which a despairing community worker described how the local schoolboys have spliffs lodged in their mouths at nine in the morning. The teenagers themselves appeared knowledgeable but unconcerned about the potential dangers of cannabis: "Yeah, it makes you forget things . . . it makes you schizophrenic." One said that he was smoking "twenty-quid's-worth a day" because of "stress". Did everyone he knew smoke dope? "Yeah." It was - unless you were stoned, perhaps - rather depressing to hear, and the most miserable thing of all was that nobody, not even Big Mummy, seems to care.
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