HOW CANNABIS MADE ME A MONSTER

This week Jason Braham attacked the drug culture in public schools for
creating the monster who killed his daughter.

Fashion designer Lucy Braham, 25, was butchered to death by William
Jaggs, 23, a drug addict who went to Harrow School.

He has been sentenced indefinitely to Broadmoor maximum security
hospital.

Here, in an extract from his new book, Horatio Clare, 33, writes with
chilling honesty about how he encountered cannabis while a pupil at
Malvern School, and how his addiction almost destroyed his mind - and
his life...

This was a night flight bound for New York. The wide aisles, the ranks
of seats and the humming of the giant aeroplane's vast and harnessed
power filled me with a lurching excitement.

Guilty and lecherous in an unclean white shirt, elusive-eyed and
red-faced, I must have looked exactly the way I was that night.

I certainly felt like scum, drinking miniature vodkas and eating dope
all the way across the Atlantic.

I hadn't really meant to carry the little brown block of hashish on board.

But I never went anywhere without it and as, even at this stage, I was
not quite mad enough to try to take it through customs at the other
end, the simplest thing seemed to be to dispose of it by eating it.

I felt like an actor in a film, but not the hero. I felt like a minor
villain, and marvelled at how my life had become the story of a black
sheep.

I was 23 - an adult, though only on paper - who had already given a
DNA sample and prints (twice) to the police, receiving two cautions in
return.

One was long spent but the other was fresh and now I was in trouble
again. I knew I had gone too far and if I wasn't exactly on the run
from the police I was certainly a fugitive from justice.

I was a drug addict, but if you had told me that I would have laughed
and tried to put you straight.

Although, at the time, I was on a manic high, laughing desperately,
drinking so fiercely I never seemed to be drunk, smoking, rampaging
and only intermittently in touch with reality, I thought I was in step
with my peers.

I thought I was normal.

And I think that is the most frightening thing about this
story.

Clever cannabis. I loved it once and throughout the love affair never
blamed it for what it did to me.

But many of my generation went much further into drugs than I did and
drugs damaged many of their lives. Cannabis nearly destroyed mine.

The first time I got drunk, I was 14. In the basement of a friend's
House at Malvern, my boys' boarding school.

Alcohol was easy to get hold of - all we had to do was fake some ID or
persuade an older boy to buy it for us. And so, one night, a few of us
sat around in the semi-dark of the gloomy cellar, drinking cans of
lager (Ben and Miles) and a two-litre bottle of cider (me) until we
were giggling, and stumbling drunk.

By 6am the next morning I was lying face down in the shower bringing
up strings of surprisingly yellow bile. The experience did not put me
off, though.

On the contrary, I loved the intoxication and viewed the vomiting as a
not unreasonable price to pay for the hilarious evening.

My introduction to drugs came soon after, one Saturday night, again at
school.

I was sitting in a friend's study, wearing a poncho, which I thought
made me look great (this was the late Eighties), and listening to The
Cure, when we heard someone had dope.

We raided his room and found a tiny bag of what looked like dried
herbs behind his stereo.

Before long, we were out of school, standing in the bushes, smoking a
hand-rolled cigarette. My head span slightly.

I felt a sickly twinge, which passed, and when I realised the thing
would be finished before I had

another turn, I was secretly relieved. The incident that got me and
two of my friends expelled was scarcely any more serious.

We'd escaped out of a window to go to the girls' school, and when we
arrived we found our friends in the grounds passing round a small lump
of dope rolled in an envelope. We joined in.

A few days later, the Drugs Squad arrived to question us. We admitted
to smoking - and that was it.

The police gave us "cautions" which made us feel marked and our
expulsion for smoking cannabis made the national Press. I felt
unjustly branded; I had never even been high.

I then spent two drug-free years at an international
school.

But as soon as I left, I looked for dope again. I still had no idea
what drugs were like and wanted to find out.

With my first proper girlfriend and another friend, I went travelling
by train around Europe - first stop, Amsterdam, "to see the van
Goghs", we told our parents.

In the cafes around the canals we smoked dope, but it only made us
feel drowsy, disconnected and uneasy.

I had no idea what I might do with my life, and, almost by chance, I
spent my gap year in St Etienne in France teaching English, and
sharing a flat with a friend, Chris, and an American called Robert.

And that's where it started, one evening, when someone brought us two
small brown lozenges - the real thing.

For the next five days we sat around our kitchen table, arguing about
whose turn it was to buy and cook the pasta, and whose to skin up a
joint.

The first days, even months, of marijuana have a golden charm. You are
filled with a silly, sunny, toppling feeling, which bubbles into
laughter at the slightest thing.

Your sense of the absurd is sharpened and heightened; as well as being
surrounded by your newly stoned friends who are unusually susceptible
to the giggles, you are also funnier than normal.

The world is comical and amusing. You are in a small club with the
people you are smoking with and all you have to do is get hold of more
sweet-smelling Moroccan hash.

What I didn't know back then was that a habitual smoker becomes a
chronic nostalgic, in search of the happiness and the sensations they
felt at the beginning.

At York University, where I went to read English, I carried on
smoking. "We thought you were a vampire in first term," one of my
fellow students told me. "You only came out at night, with red eyes,
and hung around the coffee machine."

Our corridors reeked of weed. My cleaning lady took to raking the
debris of dope flakes and spilled tobacco on my desk into neat brown
dunes ready for use. I was always tired; not realising that I simply
had a stupendous dope hangover.

Once I stayed awake over 30 hours and smoked 60 joints in the last 12,
by the end of which I fell over and found I couldn't get up.

Lying on my back, waving my arms feebly above me, I groaned, "This is
it, it turns you into a beetle." At the time, I thought that was funny.

I experimented with LSD, too. We talked about our drug experiences as
if they were war stories - daring exploits in the face of the enemy,
with a narrow escape.

One holiday I went home so high I was tripping; my mother looked to me
like a small red gnome and I couldn't listen to what she was saying
about a fox attacking her lambs, without seeing teeth and severed
necks and blood. The vampire again!

The next day my mother and I talked, as we did many times over the
years. Was I on drugs? Sometimes I said no. Sometimes I said, with
defiance, yes, I was smoking marijuana.

My mother took me as she found me. When I was dirty, unshaven and
stoned she was angry and sad. "The one thing I can't stand," she
warned, "is lies." Only years later did she talk about how miserable I
made her at that time.

"I thought you were choosing it," she said, later. "I never thought
you were an addict." I never thought that, either.

By this time, the Nineties, dope was everywhere. Everyone pretended to
be shocked when Noel Gallagher of Oasis said that for most young
people taking drugs was as normal as having a cup of tea, but as far
as we were concerned he understated it. We'd had more joints than cuppas.

At their 1994 party conference, the Liberal Democrats voted to
decriminalise cannabis, and Channel 4 staged a Pot Night, an evening
of celebratory programmes devoted to the drug. But it wasn't as
harmless as they thought.

I did make a stand, once, when I got a bad mark for an essay in which
I should have done well. I went to see a doctor, and talked about it
to my half-sister. When she reported the conversation to my father, he
was worried enough to leave work in London and come up to York to see
me.

"You're not right. You're intense, you're acting mad and you're not
doing any work," my friends warned me. "You have to stop smoking dope.
It's not good for you. It makes you loop-de-loop." I knew they were
right. I knew I was slipping. I came off drugs, but then the
depression set in.

The first sign was sinister. I woke up to laughter, a high, empty
sound, alarming and desperate - my own. Gerard Manley Hopkins has best
described the plunge into depression. "I wake and feel the fell of
dark not day," he wrote.

It should not be able to become much more terrible than that, but it
does. You fear your friends. You fear the look in their eyes, the pity
and the worry. A shadow of your intelligence remains, but you cannot
remember anything - your mind's drawers are locked or empty or the
handles are broken off.

I researched suicide on the internet - I was desperate not to exist -
but did nothing.

Somehow, goodness knows how, I managed to graduate with a 2:1 and took
a job as a trainee reporter on the Torpington Gazette in Devon.

Before long, I was immersed in covering the local beat of cheese
contests, rows about drains, rhododendron woods being saved, holes in
the school roof and the new organist at the church.

I didn't take any drugs - until a friend from college turned up at the
newspaper office and announced that she was living nearby.

Michelle was working in a health food shop and living on vegetables,
candlelight and dope. She also had skunk - a stronger variety of
cannabis which is sulphurously sweet, with more powerful highs and
lows.

Paranoid on skunk, I felt like an idle, legless, breathless creature
with yellow fangs, clinging to existence like a tick.

I did not fall straight away. I tried. Every night, I lugged the
office laptop home to write. I played sport and I went to pubs. But as
Michelle gave me first a puff, then a joint, then at my request a bag,
I began to crave. Fuelled by skunk, my engagement with local
journalism became more combative and more vexed.

Skunk obliterates the memory and I often locked myself out of my flat.
On the night before Christmas Eve, though, I was just turning the key
in my door when I saw a milk float, bottles gleaming in the neon
orange of the street lamp. Hel-lo.

I didn't hesitate. Never mind that I had no driving licence and had
never operated an electric vehicle, I climbed into the driver's seat,
stamping down hard on the pedal.

With a gratifying hum, the milk float took off. I aimed it up the
deserted road and around a left-hand corner. "Yeah, baby, fly!" I
urged. We took a sharp bend and there was a grating sound and a smash
behind us. "Whoa, milk overboard! Oh well, plenty left. . ."

On I went, tearing through the housing estate and up towards the
moors. As the road climbed, the float laboured, so I lost a bit more
weight by shaking off some more milk. Cursing and struggling to
dislodge a stacked crate as I twisted round in the cab, I took my eye
off the road - and, crash.

Minutes later, I was lying face down on the Tarmac, being handcuffed
by the police who took me in, took fingerprints and a DNA swab and let
me go with a caution.

On January 2, when I returned to work, I was sacked. I went on a
bender - beer, vodka and dope, at

the end of which I returned to the Gazette offices and set fire to two
black rubbish bags by the door.

Tomorrow, I thought to myself, when they all arrive at work, there
will be a blown-about pile of ash and they will all have to walk
through it to get in, and they will know that it is a message, a
jeering two fingers, from me.

The next morning, walking past, I was horrified to see what I had
done. The smart blue door was scorched and a piece of chipboard had
been nailed over some of the panels. It looked as if someone had tried
to burn the building down.

Eight hours later, I was on a plane, chewing hash, drinking vodka,
running away.

I came back, eventually, and faced the music; admitting to burning the
bags, but not trying to burn the place down, and was lucky to be given
a suspended sentence.

I didn't stop smoking, though, through several jobs and relationship
break-ups. I just got better at hiding it, hugging the dope to me like
a comfort blanket, my private accelerator and magnifier to intensify
and soften time.

It wasn't until years later, after a series of manic highs and
dreadful lows, that I quit. It was the sight of a young friend, a
skunk addict, going down the road I had travelled that finally helped
me to do so.

I wanted to save what remained of my life and set a better example. I
stopped smoking drugs and started thinking about it. I decided to
write a book about why so many of us had done so many drugs and what
they had done to us.

Some of the souvenirs of my journey I carry on my face: lots of lines
and tiny broken veins; smoker's skin; a burst capillary under one eye;
laughter lines. Now when I smell or see marijuana I feel a little
sick, partly with nerves, partly excitement. But I turn it down.

Clever cannabis. You could not conceive a better way to lead people to
the deathly summits of drugs than by blurring their foothills with
this flowery, funky, ubiquitous little weed, just illegal enough to
feel naughty, just tolerated enough to feel safe.

It made me vicious and it made callous people rich. It took so much
from me.