Patient grew cannabis after hospital tests
By Hugh Muir

A MAN given cannabis as a painkiller during Home Office tests grew the
drug when the research finished, a court was told yesterday.

Andrew Betts, 30, who suffers from an incurable stomach illness, was the
sole subject of licensed tests at Hammersmith Hospital in west
London which enabled him to halve his daily intake of morphine. This led
to a dramatic reduction in his sideeffects and meant that he was no
longer clinically depressed.

But when the tests came to an end Betts, Britain's only known sufferer
of Familial Mediterranean Fever, an inherited and nonfatal condition,
was forced back on to morphine with a dosage usually prescribed for
terminallyill cancer patients.

He then grew 45 cannabis plants from seed at his home using tin foil,
lighting, a fan and propagator, said Roger Smart, prosecuting, at Maidstone
Crown Court, Kent. Despite an unsophisticated, makeshift greenhouse,
some of the plants grew to four feet tall.

They were discovered after police received a tipoff and raided his
semidetached house last August. Mr Smart said the plants were found in the
back garden and cellar of the house where a room had been lined with
silver foil and other drug production equipment.

Had they matured, the estimated total yield of all the plants would have
been 220 grammes. Betts would have grown the plants and selected the
female ones which contain higher levels of THC, the active ingredient in
cannabis.

He would then have sampled them and disposed of the rest by feeding them
to his pet chinchillas. "Betts said that, if the police had not found the
plants, he would have picked and dried the leaves before smoking them in
cigarette papers," said Mr Smart. "He admitted he knew it was illegal
to have cannabis other than as part of the Home Office trials."

He had two previous convictions for drugrelated offences. In 1987, he
admitted supplying cannabis resin and in February, 1994, he admitted
smuggling 300 grammes of herbal cannabis through Harwich. He received a
sixmonth conditional discharge for the second offence.

Penelope Barrett, defending, said: "It would be easy for an observer of
this case, particularly in light of his previous convictions, to report him as
some kind of menace to society but this is an extremely unusual set of
circumstances.

"The drug was not to be pedalled but kept for him. He was not seeking to
cause direct harm to anyone else but to alleviate what he saw as a
very real dilemma. His position was that he was caught between the devil
and deep blue sea. Take such levels of morphine and he was like a
zombie; do not take take it and the pain was crippling."

Betts, a father of three, of Gillingham, Kent, originally denied the
charge of cultivating cannabis but changed his plea to guilty after Mr Recorder
Peter Morgan ruled that his defence of necessity or duress could not be
put before a jury.

Conditionally discharging him for two years, the judge said: "Although I
admit to great sympathy for the defendant and the pain he suffers I
cannot bend the law as I see it for his sake. You will not be justified
or excused if you repeat the offence or use cannabis when not under
licence."

Outside the court, Betts's wife, Lesley, said she was not happy about
the outcome. "I would rather the case had gone to trial," she said. "It is
unfair that he was not even given a chance."


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