WHY I DITCHED MY LIBERAL VIEWS ON DOPE

Sue Arnold Wanted To Legalise Cannabis - Until The Drug Triggered A
Psychotic Episode In Her Son

I wrote a piece for the front page of this newspaper seven years ago under
the headline 'Smoking dope restored my sight'. It was the account of an
evening I'd spent with friends, one of whom offered me a spliff, which
temporarily improved my habitual vole vision to something approaching
normality. I have a congenital eye condition called Retinitis Pigmentosa
(RP) which has been getting steadily worse, and in 1993 I was registered blind.

Normality may not be an accurate description for my post-spliff condition.
I was too stoned to alert anyone to the miracle; I couldn't even stand up.
This was not the happy-clappy window-box weed we used to smoke as students,
which made you giggle and fall over. This was a far more powerful brew
called 'skunk', of which there are countless varieties with romantic names
such as Northern Lights or Khali Mist or Snow White. Like roses at the
Chelsea Flower Show there is an annual pot growers' championship in
Amsterdam; the stuff that opened my eyes, which won 'best skunk in show' in
1996, was called White Widow.

The following morning I made an excited telephone call to Professor Alan
Bird, my consultant at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and told him about
the 'new cure'. He wasn't impressed. It was well known, he said, that
certain kinds of marijuana improve the vision. Studies had been done on
Jamaican fisherman who smoked ganja before they went out in their boats at
dusk to improve their night vision.

The response to my article was phenomenal. I had more than 500 letters from
a variety of people: doctors wanting to use me for research, myopic old
ladies asking for recipes for Space Brownies, weed merchants enclosing new
skunk strains, and Lester Grinspoon, associate professor of psychology at
Harvard, enclosing his seminal work Marijuana Reconsidered. And flurries of
radio and television producers inviting me to take part in discussions
about the pros and cons of legalising cannabis.

My initial stance was pro for medical purposes, but not for recreational
use, largely because I was fed up with falling over my teenage children and
their friends, slumped around the house in that catatonic post-cannabis
state known as 'mong'. Rosie Boycott, then editor of the Independent on
Sunday, asked me to subscribe to its campaign to legalise pot. Gradually, I
dropped the distinction between medicine and recreation, and regularly
fought in the blue corner to decriminalise dope, against drug tsars,
teachers and social workers in the red corner, protesting its dangers and
insisting it should remain outlawed.

That was seven years ago, since when a lot of water, you could say, has
flowed under the bridge. I'd describe it more as a flash flood. All my
liberal, laissez-faire views about dope have gone by the board. Seven years
ago, four of my six children in their teens or early twenties had tried,
given up or were still smoking dope. The two youngest were at primary school.

Then, two years ago, out of the blue, the son in his third year studying
languages at university had what psychiatrists call 'a psychotic episode',
triggered by cannabis. He was paranoid, schizophrenic, heard voices,
thought he was being followed and was convinced, like John Nash in A
Beautiful Mind, that someone had put a chip in his head which could read
his thoughts.

It didn't help that my son was in Cuba when it happened, shouting down the
telephone that he needed help but refusing to give us his address.

When he rang off, still raving, it was midnight and I heard on the news
that a hurricane was heading for Havana. For two days Cuba was
incommunicado, and I remember thinking then that nothing in my life could
be worse than those 48 hours. I was wrong. It got much worse.

One of my daughters flew to Havana to look for her brother and, to cut a
long, long story short, my son came home heavily sedated, spent six months
in hospital in an intermediate care unit (ICU). He was prescribed different
drugs and, after a series of events which are too difficult and painful to
describe, has just resumed his final year at university.

He's still on medication and will probably have to take it for ever. It
goes without saying that if he ever smokes another spliff he will have a
relapse.

Two of his siblings still smoke cannabis. When I went up to see my middle
son at his university hall of residence, the first thing I smelt on the
staircase was weed. Ninety per cent of kids who smoke dope are blissfully
unaffected by it, but the misery of the 10 per cent on whom it wreaks
irreparable damage - to say nothing of its effect on their families - makes
up for that bliss in spades.

Most of my youngest son's friends (he is 14) smoke cigarettes, quite a few
smoke spliffs - it is always available at parties - but thank God he hasn't
tried either. He's seen what it can do.

The younger you start smoking cannabis, a recent survey claimed, the
greater the likelihood of its triggering paranoid psychosis. Seventy per
cent of mental health patients in London hospitals are young men who
started smoking dope in their teens for what David Blunkett, the Home
Secretary, laughingly refers to as 'recreational purposes'.

They're not laughing now.