Cannabis psychosis scare Vs tobacco policy

News this week about the rates of use of cannabis and its relationship to the development of mental illness – almost a case of chickens coming home to roost for just about everyone involved in the whole debate.

The stated aim of UK drugs policy as it relates to cannabis is to reduce its use to a minimum and this of course was what the government claimed to be behind the recent decision to move cannabis back to class B – “sending a message” and all that. In truth, the move to B has been all about appeasing the media and those with influence based on what is looking like a groundless scare. In order to see why this is true, now is a good time to review developments over the past 20 years or so. Why 20 years? Because that takes us back to 1988 and the start of the “Acid house” revolution; the rave culture. Yes it really has been that long, almost a whole generation in fact.

Back in 1988 of course cannabis was a class B drug and, along with the explosion in recreational drug use cannabis consumption really took off. The law was seen as irrelevant and certainly didn’t pose any kind of deterrent. It was pretty clear by the time of the mid 90’s the law had fallen into disrepute and was just about unenforceable, indeed it had become the norm for police to all but ignore cannabis possession and something had to be done.

These were heady days that saw the formation of a new wave of law reform campaigns including this site, UKCIA, in 1995.

By the time “New Labour” came to power in 1997 revolution was in the air but all thoughts of drug law reform were killed off pretty quickly, Tony Blair was credited with wanting to breath new life into the war on drugs and cannabis law reform was officially off the agenda. The first attempt at the drug war mark 2 fell flat though, with the appointment of the so-called “Drugs Tsar”, the somewhat strange figure of Keith Hellawell.

Despite this the law reform campaign continued and  as we came up to the millennium the country partied like it was 1999 – which was fair enough because it was indeed 1999. In any case the cannabis marches in London became an annual happening, starting with the “Mayday is J day” event in that year.

After Labour’s return to power in 2001 one of the first actions of the new Home Secretary, David Blunkett, was to announce that cannabis would be moved to class C and at the same time a softly softly approach was introduced in South London. It began to look like things were, finally, about to change. Of course, the prohibition lobby was outraged and soon debated ways to fight back

The main arm of the prohibition movement in the UK is the  National drug prevention Alliance (NDPA). On its website, director Peter Stoker wrote an interesting item entitled “UK drugs professionals give Blunkett good cause to think again”, where he described the way the prohibition campaign started its fightback.

Internal seminars led to the first major public meeting, held in the Moses Room at the House of Lords, in November 2002,

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This initiative generated many useful waves; meetings and representations with parliament, the civil service, the media and within the drugs profession followed. From ‘friends in high places’ it was learnt that there was a far from united attitude to the reclassification idea – another encouragement to go that extra mile …

That ‘extra mile’ came in the form of another public meeting, on 21st October, this time in the plush new parliamentary offices of Portcullis House, across the road from Big Ben.

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The first speaker was Professor Robin Murray from the Institute of Psychiatry. Leaving no doubt as to his focus, Professor Murray entitled his talk ‘Marijuana and Madness’.

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The Coalition is working on several fronts this week, and if nothing else the disciples of dope will not find an empty goal facing them. “These are exciting times …”

And so reclassification eventually happened, although it was so neutered as to, in effect, be meaningless. The only change was to formalise what had in fact become unofficial police policy of warning people found in possession of small amounts of cannabis. Exactly one year to the day however, the NDPA inspired campaign fought back with the emotive claim that cannabis caused madness.

In January 2004 RETHINK launched their “cannabis and mental health” campaign on Radio 4’s Today program. Now there’s no reason to believe the RETHINK campaign itself was a campaign for prohibition, but certainly some behind the scenes saw it as the vehicle to do just that.

Later in the year RETHINK helped promote a conference in London at the Institute of psychiatry entitled “Cannabis and Mental Health“. UKCIA went along and you can see the write up of the presentations here. Although the conference was interesting and contained a lot of unbiased and objective research findings, it was noticeable that on the panel during the final debate was a senior member of the NDPA,  David Raynes .

What was going on here? Well, no-one is suggesting for a moment that  respected scientists like Robin Murray were using their position to promote a political agenda, but what was becoming clear is the issue was being exploited by by someone to reverse the reclassification decision. Over the next few years a huge amount of media hype drowned out any sensible debate. Now of course there was – and still is actually – a sensible debate to be had concerning cannabis and mental health.

Zerrin Atakan, one of the main organisers of the London conference is on record as saying

“I personally believe it should be legalised so it is tightly regulated and it says on the packet how much THC is in it. At the moment it is worse because people think it is legalised and there is confusion and it is in the hands of the dealers. That is not a good situation.”

Likewise Jim Van Os – another organiser of the conference and the author of the 2004 study often cited as a reason to turn the prohibition screw has said

“…  the fact that cannabis could trigger psychosis in a small minority of people was a good reason to legalise it, not ban it. This would allow governments to promote advice and information and control more dangerous forms like skunk. Packets could carry how much THC, the most dangerous compound, the drug contained, along with how much CBD, the compound believed to provide beneficial effects.”

However, little of this got reported in the UK media, instead we had the “cannabis makes you mad” stories in all their lurid over exaggerated detail. We were told how “genetically modified” skunk was 20 – 30 times more potent than the hippy weed of the 60’s and more besides, the NDPA had done their work very well indeed.

So we come to the appointment of Gordon Brown to succeed Tony Blair last year and his almost immediate decision to  play to the popular press and give them what they wanted; a crack-down on cannabis with a return to class B based on the fears of a link to mental illness.

Now, it should be stated that few  involved in  the mental health debate on anything like a professional level – other than Marjory Wallace (Radio 4 2004)  – wanted cannabis returned to class B. RETHINK certainly didn’t and they say so on their website – “Why cannabis should stay as class C”

Instead of wasting time and money tinkering with the legal classification of cannabis, what is really needed is the kind of full-scale public education campaign that the government promised in 2006.

In the end it looks like RETHINK will have got nothing from their cannabis and mental health campaign other than achieving the one thing they said they didn’t want, reclassification to B. It’s highly unlikely they’ll get their “full scale” education campaign, or even cannabis warnings on Rizla papers. They allowed themselves and their campaign to be used, quite shamelessly, by prohibitionist agenda and this is the result.

But what of the research? Back in 2004 when the NDPA launched their campaign there did seem to be growing evidence of a causal link between cannabis and mental illness, but over the past few years little more progress has been made. Indeed, only this week a new piece of research from Denmark with the snappy title of “Familial Predisposition for Psychiatric Disorder” seems to cast serious doubt on the whole idea.

Sadly, this is one of those bits of research that is not intended for pubic gaze and UKCIA hasn’t managed to get hold of the full text yet (if anyone reading this has access to it please send us a copy) but the abstract looks good: From the Archive of General Psychiatry website:

Conclusions  Predisposition to both psychiatric disorders in general and psychotic disorders specifically contributes equally to the risk of later treatment because of schizophrenia and cannabis-induced psychoses. Cannabis-induced psychosis could be an early sign of schizophrenia rather than a distinct clinical entity.

This has, in fact always been a distinct possibility, what’s called a “Pre morbid” indication in psychiatrist speak, meaning a symptom which shows before the illness does. In other words a psychotic reaction to cannabis could indicate that someone is in danger of developing a serious mental illness.  It should be remembered there are few such reliable indicators.

It’s not quite the full blown proof that cannabis doesn’t cause mental illness maybe, but it’s getting there and there’s a good chance that the NDPA campaign of reefer madness has obscured an important finding.

So what of cannabis use over the past 5 years or so it’s been at class C? Well as we all know it’s fallen rapidly. The irony is the law or the placing within the Misuse of Drugs Act has almost certainly had nothing to do with it, quite possibly neither have the reefer madness claims. Rather, something else has happened which has been quite unrelated: According to the Guardian

Public health campaigns about the dangers of tobacco smoking may lie behind the change.

“A lot of young people are strongly anti-cigarette smoking and as society changes the way it views tobacco it seems to be changing attitudes to cannabis as well,” said Paul Griffiths, of the European monitoring centre for drugs and drug abuse.

This, as it happens, is something UKCIA has been promoting as the way forward for nearly 10 years now, we tried telling RETHINK that as well, but they weren’t interested.

Perhaps if we could have a drugs policy built on real awareness, on education and social policies which actually work, we wouldn’t have a drugs problem at all. But as long as we have a government that is swayed by misleading media campaigns from pressure groups with connections in high places, we’ll never have a sensible drugs policy, so we’ll always have the problem.