Skunk panic: The Myerson’s book Vs the need for child protection

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. That old Cliche has been shown to be so true this week as the Guardian newspaper – normally one of the more trustworthy of the bunch – demonstrated in style with it’s continued coverage of the Julie Myerson book “The Lost Child”.

Somewhat stung by the generally bad reception this book has received elsewhere in the media, the Guardian allowed itself to be used as a free publicity organ by not only Julie Myerson, but also her husband amongst others.

Unless you’ve been in some kind of skunked out haze this past week, you can’t have failed to miss the hype surrounding Myerson’s book, but  if you have managed to for some reason, here’s a summary:

Middle class mother, a regular contributor to the Guardian, spends years writing about her child and the problems of “Living with a teenager”. Said child smokes the “deadly addictive killer skunk” form of cannabis, parents throw him out then mother writes a book about it all, identifying the kid who’s now aged 20 and articulate enough to answer back in – of all places – the Daily Mail. Honestly, you couldn’t make this up.

The old cliche was demonstrated in all it’s ugliness on Tuesday when Jonathon Myerson – the husband of Julie and Father of Jake the kid (following it ok?) was granted the best bit of a page worth of the Guardian “Comment and features” section to write what can only be described as a load of opinionated rubbish in defence of his wife’s new book. Now, Jonathon Myerson is also a regular contributor to the Guardian and so was in a good position to get his views published. Clearly he can write his articles without the hassle of getting them past any kind of editorial process that might check for such boring details as factual accuracy – a case of “who you know” indeed.

What got up most peoples noses is the way Julie Myerson has exploited her son in order to make money from the book. This widespread revulsion seems to have caught them by surprise, but hey, any publicity is good publicity and as the Guardian told us in yet another article the publication date has been brought forward to cash in on the “unexpected” publicity.

As this is a cannabis news blog, we will concentrate on the issue these people claim to be wanting to raise and the way they are making it, rather than the way they’ve been willing to exploit their own flash and blood to do it.

Jonathon’s article was full of errors and untrue statements, way too many to go into detail about, but it is worth highlighting just a few if the myths he presents as fact:

Describing why the use of “skunk” cannabis is in his view so much worse than drinking gin he writes

“… skunk gets you as high as gin but has psychotropic effects to boot.”

As if gin doesn’t have psychotropic effects? For the benefit of Jonathon Myerson who clearly doesn’t know what “psychotropic effects” mean, Answers.com defines it as

Having an altering effect on perception, emotion, or behavior. Used especially of a drug.

Gin does that sort of thing, Jonathon, it does it big time.

He claims:

“Skunk is GM cannabis.”

No it is not. Genetic modification is a product of genetic engineering, which is defined as

Scientific alteration of the structure of genetic material in a living organism.

That has never been done to cannabis. What has been done is selective breeding, an entirely different process and something farmers have been doing for thousands of years. It is frankly mind boggling that a supposedly professional writer would confuse those two terms unless it was in order to deliberately mislead. He isn’t alone in this however, more later.

About “skunk”, he claims:

“Evidence from the Forensic Science Service suggests that skunk cannabis (otherwise known as sinsemilla) is remarkably stronger than ever before.”

Oh dear oh dear. “Skunk” is a cross-strain of cannabis, whereas sensi – or “sinsemilla” is you must – is produced by growing female plants alone, without males. They are not alternative words for the same thing. You can, if you like, grow sensi hemp – almost totally devoid of THC, or non-sensi skunk complete with seeds.

There has always been strong cannabis and there is no evidence to suggest that sensi skunk is “remarkably stronger than ever before.” So is this plain ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation? Only Jonathon Myserson knows for sure, but I suspect he isn’t that stupid.

However, if you can bear to read through all this misinformation, Joanthon eventually gets to the heart of the issue he claims to be so concerned about

The Department of Health figures (one in five will have tried cannabis by the age of 15) insist use is falling in Britain. That’s not how it feels in south London – or, presumably, south Manchester or south Glasgow. Here, it feels like everyone has had a toke by the age of 15.

Now here we have a statement of undeniable truth, it’s not just in the big cities either, all over the country kids are getting their hands on cannabis.

Where UKCIA differs from the claims made by the myerson’s is that the problem isn’t “skunk” so much as a general lowering of the age of initiation to cannabis use.  Skunk isn’t the issue, the issue is kids are using cannabis – and other drugs, but mostly cannabis. Skunk hasn’t caused this to happen; prohibition has.

The Myerson’s seem to be claiming that if kids were using the “old skool” hash of days gone by that would be OK. Would it?  Would it really? I beg to differ. Or perhaps they’re claiming that if skunk hadn’t come along, kids wouldn’t have been ensnared by the illegal trade? Again, unlikely at best.

The fact that ever younger kids are getting involved in the illegal drugs trade – because that is what’s happening – should send shivers down all of our spines, whatever kind of cannabis they’re using. If anything is a symptom of the failure of prohibition stoned children are surely it.

By making these claims of a “skunk panic” – claiming we have some new GM version of addictive cannabis, these people are distracting attention from the real issue which society needs to face up to, it is their motivation for doing that which UKCIA questions because far from highlighting the real problem and the obvious cause of it, the Myerson’s are using all this to support calls for more prohibition.

The very real issue of child protection is created by the prohibition of a massively popular drug which is supplied by an unregulated and uncontrolled black market which cares nothing for age limits or the protection of any vulnerable minority.

Perhaps there is an issue of concern around high potency cannabis, but it’s a complicated issue as this blog investigated a few weeks ago. If there is a need to improve the THC/CBD balance in cannabis, then we need to control the supply side. Again, it’s an argument for legalisation, not prohibition.

So today, Sunday 15th, the Observer (The Guardian on Sunday) carries the story further with “The families torn apart by teenage skunk epedemic“. Basing the story around the Julie Myerson book, the observer builds on the skunk panic, almost entirely missing the real concern of young kids under 15 getting involved in the cananbis culture. It interviews Debra Bell – the creator of the fact-free “Talking about cannabis” website (read it’s facts about cannabis page and weep) who also focuses on the “skunk addiction”, deflecting attention again from the child protection issue. To be fair, Debra Bell does say

Our generation smoked, but here and there. Everybody did it – but children didn’t smoke it, children whose brains were still developing.

Indeed. Child protection, we need it. But again, Debra Bell supports prohibition and opposes the idea of control and regulation.

Once again the lie is told by the writer of this article:

… cannabis as somehow the healthy herb despite its genetically modified new form.

Misinformation, repeat it often enough and it becomes the truth.

Not everyone supports the likes of Bell and Myerson though. Hellen Sello was also quoted. Sello is someone well known to UKCIA and other cannabis forums as a mental health activist who has debated the issue long and hard with us over the years. Her son developed schizophrenia at the time he was smoking cannabis. Sello’s argument is far better informed. She says

I support legalisation, not because I think young people take a great deal of notice of the law – they don’t – but because I think that with legalisation comes control. Give people more information: vulnerable young people need to know what this drug can do. If anything makes me really angry it is that this is such a polarised debate, an immature debate. It’s either that cannabis is good or it’s bad.”

Perhaps all this hype will eventually open up the debate a bit because we need to focus on the real problems, not on some imagined issues based on misinformation, distortion and outright lies. But it certainly hasn’t been a good week for the Guardian’s reputation as an honest and objective source of information.

One last thought. All of this hype has not only distracted from the issue of child protection, it’s also obscured what by right should have been the big story. This week the UN passed it’s policy toward drugs for the next 10 years, which is more of the same. It wasn’t passed with any great fanfare though, instead something of an air of acceptance that it’s all failed rather badly. All this is covered quite nicely over on the Transform blog

It’s best to bury bad news, eh?