MY SON sat with me on a hospital bench outside the hospital canteen. Suddenly, he looked up and said: “Oh, mother, you don’t know how terrible it is to be Hitler.” “You’re not Hitler,” I said. “Your voices are only your own thoughts.” I took his hand. I knew I was doing what the psychiatrists had told me not to do. You are meant neither to contradict their convictions, nor to agree with them. But I knew what I did was right. He looked up. “You really believe that?” “I do,” I said. Then he wept. I put my arms around him, the man who had written to my mother saying I should have a gun put to my forehead and the trigger pulled.

He was in better form than he had been. At this moment he was not complaining that the nurses were plotting to kill him. For now, he had stopped showing me the loose floor tiles beneath the handbasin in his washing closet, where he believed they buried the bodies of past patients they had gassed. The nursing staff were endlessly kind and longsuffering for, strange to say, most people loved my son. He was charismatic, intelligent, a gifted artist. But without medication he was lost.

He had told me that cannabis was the most dangerous of the many drugs he had taken because it was cannabis that had triggered the paranoia, and it was the drug he feared most.

He died in a dealer’s flat in 2000 of heroin and dihydrocodeine poisoning within three days of being taken off section, and a full year clean of all illegal drugs.

What mystifies me is that Professor Robin Murray, head of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, who gives a convincing picture of the dangers of cannabis (T2, January 7), says: “We’re not saying the Government shouldn’t reclassify cannabis.” Equally, David Winnick, one of the MPs on the select committee which recommended reclassification, says “We would not change our view”.

They talk about informed choice. Come off it! Children as young as ten start rolling joints. Can you give kids with no experience of life an informed choice? Harm reduction is chickening out of taking adult responsibility for our young. Drug prevention is the only valid course. It has worked in Sweden. Here, we don’t even try.

Name and address supplied

The superdrug

WHAT your article failed to mention was the crucial distinction between the original strains of the plant found in the wild, and the cultured strains, which I believe are described as skunk. The past 20 years have seen the emergence of superpotent varieties, often grown hydroponically by enthusiasts interested in one thing only — stronger cannabis.

How they have succeeded. Varieties now available can contain hundreds of times stronger doses of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient. And God knows what else. The quantity of all manner of other chemical compounds, present in the wild strains in tiny doses, may also have been increased dramatically. It is my contention that heavy use of superpotent skunk is responsible for the increase in cannabis psychosis, which is why we need to make a crucial distinction between the wild herb and the artificially cultivated skunk varieties. I realise that legislating for this is probably unworkable in practice, so, reluctantly, I have to oppose any reclassification of cannabis.

Arthur Battram,
Matlock, Derbyshire

Controlling safety

IF CANNABIS is a dangerous drug it should be properly controlled and regulated in terms of strength, purity and how it is sold. Prohibition market forces encourage the production of ever-stronger varieties of skunk, in much the same way as alcohol prohibition meant bath-tub gin was available, but not beer. At the same time, highly contaminated “soap-bar” (impure) cannabis is being sold, which may have serious medical effects well beyond anything pure cannabis could ever do.

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