MY SON WAS TORN APART BY CANNABIS

A mother tells how a 'recreational' drug almost wrecked her family

ABOUT a week before the autumn term began, our son Rob developed puzzling
signs of a social conscience. He started to worry that he was boring people
and couldn't entertain them with his usual stream of wisecracks and
impersonations.

It was difficult, he said, to think of anything to say. Even on the subject
nearest his heart - Tottenham FC - he was dull and tongue-tied.

At the same time, we noticed that he was unusually interested in what we
were doing, as though he had been on a crash course to transform himself
from a normal, selfish teenager into a caring, participating member of the
family. "How was your day?" he would ask. Our jaws dropped.

Apart from his needless anxiety - none of his friends or relatives had
noted the slightest change in him - this seemed rather encouraging. Who
were we to complain if the pains of adolescence were to be accompanied by
the pleasure of acquiring a thoughtful and considerate son?

In the final days of the holiday, though, he became reluctant to meet
friends. There were none of the usual arguments about what time he should
be in - because he stopped going out.

On the second day back at school, he rang me at work to say things had not
gone well. He couldn't remember anything in lessons and there was the same
problem of communication with friends.

"They don't want to be with me. I'm quiet. I'm boring everybody. What's
wrong with me?" On the third day, he remained at home in bed, utterly
exhausted and miserable.

This was the pattern for a few weeks: a few good days, followed by a
difficult day, followed by a day in bed. He complained of not being able to
get to sleep at night.

We were watching an outgoing boy become depressed and mysteriously
introverted. Rob ate less and less and slept more and more. It's the sort
of thing that happens with teenagers, of course, but what a pity it had to
coincide with the beginning of his GCSE year.

By October, we were anxious enough to take him to our GP, who listened
attentively for 25 minutes while the surgery filled up behind us. His care
and concern were impressive.

The doctor concluded that our son was suffering from adolescent depression
- - he shouldn't force himself to go to school if he was too exhausted. He
also advised us to let Rob's teachers know that he was having difficulties.

Over the next month, we noticed that Rob had taken up smoking. On the few
evenings when he went out, he would return with his clothes and breath
smelling of smoke, and crash out almost as soon as he reached his room. In
the morning, he would examine the pupils of his eyes obsessively to see if
they were dilated.

He imagined he was suffering from everything he'd read about in the papers
- - ME, MS, BSE, a brain tumour. Was he going mad? Though his confidence was
at rock bottom, most days he made a supreme effort to go to school. With
homework, he was taking longer and longer to achieve less.

The good news was that, with us, he was wonderfully affectionate and
communicative, filling any silence with questions and comments - even on
tedious subjects such as the garden or the activities of young cousins.
After a while, we began to realise there was something forced about his
attentiveness, as though he had to keep talking at all costs.

One day, he rang from home, saying he had had to leave lessons because he
felt ill and couldn't concentrate. "It's come back," he said. I raced over
to find him curled up in bed, convinced he was having some kind of mental
breakdown.

Suddenly, he said that if he told me something, the black cloud might lift.
Would I promise not to be shocked or fly off the handle?

The confession was that he had tried cannabis. Foolishly, I felt a kind of
relief. So all this had nothing to do with pressure of exam work or trying
to reconcile opposing expectations of him from peers, teachers, and
parents. The depression - he thought and we thought - was simply the result
of bottling up a guilty secret.

We weren't by any means complacent, and reiterated, as strongly and calmly
as possible, the dangers of drug-taking. The depression came back. At the
end of our second appointment with the GP, we raised our suspicions about
cannabis, but were given all the usual assurances about it being
non-physically addictive.

In an inner-city, he said, it was difficult to avoid recreational drugs;
what do you expect, was the inference, if you choose to live in north
London? Rob admitted to "the odd joint in the park". Ah, how very much to
be expected. We were made to feel old-fashioned and reactionary in our
complete opposition to dope.

I was uneasy but in no mood to be combative. We were now being invited to
consider a medical solution - a low dose of an anti-depressant, related to
Prozac, could be what Rob needed to get on to a plateau of normality so
that he could find his old self.

We researched the side effects and, over breakfast one Saturday morning,
decided that we would go ahead. Rob was told that it would be "a bad idea"
to mix one mind-altering drug with another; so no cannabis and no alcohol.

Anti-depressants take a long time to work. While we were waiting for the
miracle, other things started to happen. Rob would come home with glassy,
bloodshot eyes and head straight for his room with as much instant food as
he could find. A sweet tobacco smell would come from under his bedroom
door. The fan he used on hot summer evenings was going full belt in January
and February to disperse the fumes.

There was little attempt to disguise what was going on. As soon as he was
asleep - usually spread-eagled on the bed, unwashed and fully dressed - we
would find the evidence of dedicated spliff-making: dead matches, Rizla
papers, bits of torn-off card, scraps of tobacco and pieces of cannabis
resin. There were always scissors to hand and usually a small penknife that
had been used to shred the resin. All these would be "hidden" in a video
box by the bed or simply covered with a book or magazine.

We would remove the whole lot every time, issue more threats, try to cajole
and reason. The most worrying part was that he was not just having the odd
puff in the park with friends: he was smoking a lot of dope alone. The
effect of the smoked resin (hash) can be up to eight times as strong as a
mixture of leaves and stalk (weed), though we didn't know that then.

In the morning, when his eyes and mind were clear, we explained what we had
done - and would do again. It must have been infuriating to have his little
factory raided time and again, but he never became aggressive or blamed us.

He didn't mend his ways either. Cannabis reappeared, as if it were an
invasive, growing thing like ground elder. Just when we thought we'd killed
it, it came back. After a week or two, his bedroom was dotted with scorch
marks. There were little burn holes in his clothes, his duvet cover and in
the carpet. We imagined the place going up in flames, and dared not go out
in the evenings.

I spring-cleaned the room from top to bottom, confiscated his electric fan
and bought new bed linen to try to encourage Rob to take pride in his room,
but the same thing happened again.

Gradually, we noticed that the room itself was looking tidier because it
was emptier. Two amplifiers disappeared within a fortnight, followed by two
bass guitars. They had been barrow-loaded away to the local pawn shop,
presumably to raise funds for more cannabis, since we had more or less cut
off his money supply.

We dreaded coming home to the answering machine and the obvious signs of
fridge-raiding (cannabis creates a furious hunger nicknamed "the
munchies"). Rob's teachers began to leave messages saying they were anxious
about his behaviour, especially in classes after the lunch break, when he
would be restless, disruptive or "just not with it".

"Whatever he's on," said the history teacher, "it isn't doing him any good."

When the police caught him and a friend tampering with a van, they were far
more interested in the van than in the cannabis resin they found in his
pocket.

By the time Rob's first appointment with a psychotherapist came through, he
was not the victim of depression; we were. That morning, he had tried to
steal from my wallet.

All trust between us was gone. We all sat round the plain white,
pictureless NHS consulting room and talked frankly about everything except
cannabis and attempted theft. If the psychotherapist was making any
connections between depression and cannabis-smoking, he wasn't saying. We
raised it ourselves at the end of the session - and again were made to feel
we were slightly over-reacting.

By the next appointment, home life had deteriorated to such an extent that
the whole consultation was given over to a discussion of Rob's drug habit.
Top of his list of reasons why he should give up was "debts" - debts to us
and debts to his suppliers. We were by now hiding anything of value, even
loose change. I had so many different places for my handbag that I
sometimes couldn't find it when I left for work.

Rob started selling his clothes, including an expensive coat bought with
the earnings from his Saturday job. His computer games disappeared in
plastic carrier bags, as did his CDs - and then ours. We couldn't send him
out with money to buy new trainers or revision books or to get a hair cut
because, by the time he reached the shops, some or all of it had gone.

People we had never heard of would phone for him, using first names only.
There would be suspicious five-minute assignations at the end of the
street. All this in pursuit of a "recreational" drug. People in whom we
confided asked us what his reaction was to being confronted with so much
wrongdoing. It was hard to say. All we knew was that black was white and
white was black; or, at best, that his normal moral values were a complete
fog.

We hated being policemen, but found ourselves becoming obsessively
watchful, mean and suspicious. All conversation turned on one subject. We
designated "Rob-free" evenings, when we would try to talk about something
else - but it didn't really work. I went to bed angry and woke up angry,
even if there had been no "incident".

Our worst moment, dramatically speaking, was arriving home one Friday
evening to find empty spaces where our speakers and CD music system had
been. The wheelbarrow had again been pressed into service. I am ashamed now
to think of how we reacted that night. Cold with anger and disbelief, we
took Rob to the pawn shop the next morning and paid to regain equipment
that was rightfully ours.

It was odd how unembarrassable we became. By the time we discovered that
Rob had been calling on our neighbours, asking if he could "borrow 10
pounds till the end of the week", we were already enlisting them to be our
extra eyes and ears when we could not be around. This had its dangers as
well as its advantages, because if anything went wrong in the street, he
was bound to be the first under suspicion.

In the end, he was excluded from school for rolling a joint in the
playground. During the week before he was accepted back, we mounted guard
day and night, in turns, and locked all the doors and windows. For the rest
of the term, he had to work under supervision during the lunch hour.

To begin with, we paid 30 pounds, 40 pounds, 60 pounds to get people off
his back. Each debt was always the last... We shouldn't have done it, but
exams were looming and Rob was paralysed with fear as deadlines for cash
approached.

What would happen, I asked one day as he paced the kitchen, dry-mouthed and
white as paper... what would happen if he didn't pay? Surely pushers and
dealers would just lose interest?

There was misery but no melodrama in his flat reply. First, he said, he
would be head-butted on the nose. If he still didn't pay up, it would be
the baseball bat. Finally, he would be tipped into the canal. I don't think
it was an attempt to blackmail us. We made another trip to the cash
dispenser and he walked off into the dusk to settle the "very last" debt.

I never bought the argument that cannabis is a "recreational" drug, but I
was prepared to accept it was less harmful than, say, cocaine or ecstasy or
even heroin. Our experience over the past nine months has convinced me that
it is as dangerous as any other, maybe more so.

During our search for help, we were relieved and astonished to find a drugs
counsellor who thought the same way and began to persuade Rob to see it,
too. He gave us a copy of David Copestake's booklet, Cannabis and Mental
Functions, which made us see Rob's so-called adolescent depression in a
completely new light. It was like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls.

There, in front of us, was a summary of the scientific evidence showing the
adverse effects of cannabis on the human system. In effect, it was a list
of Rob's first symptoms all those months ago - sleeplessness, lack of
motivation, forgetfulness, paranoia, aimlessness, and a feeling of being
generally misunderstood. The more chronic the use, the worse the symptoms.
"They have a problem understanding what other people mean... they cannot
solve their personal problems by reasoning..."

Last week, a group of doctors who specialise in public health called for
cannabis to be legalised for medicinal and recreational use, arguing that
bracketing cannabis with heroin and cocaine gives young people the idea
that taking hard drugs is no more dangerous than smoking a joint. The myth
of the harmlessness of cannabis is being perpetuated by the very people who
should know better.

The libertarians and the legalisation lobby make cannabis sound simple
when, in fact, it is complex. Its potency varies hugely, depending on which
part of the plant is used and where it is grown. Its effect depends on what
it is mixed with and the psychological and physical make-up of the user.
The pursuit of it is expensive, underhand and illegal. We have found it as
capable as any other drug of turning young people into liars and thieves.

Rob has had two meetings with his new counsellor over the past few months
and is beginning to show signs of understanding how close he came to
wrecking all our lives. I wish I could say I had some idea of how this has
been achieved, but both sides observe great confidentiality.

Though we make occasional unwelcome "finds", his room is generally a
smoke-free zone and we are again living with someone we recognise. It is an
uneasy peace, but it is better than outright war.

Cannabis and Mental Functions can be obtained from David Copestake, price 2
pounds, at 22 Meadow View, Banbury, Oxon OX16 9SR. Please include large sae.