Where there's smoke ...

When the government last year downgraded it to a class C drug, the message seemed pretty clear: cannabis is harmless. Since then, there has been mounting evidence of a link between the drug and mental illness. So is it safe to skin up? Blake Morrison reports

Friday December 16, 2005

Guardian

About five years ago, Julie Lynn-Evans became aware that cannabis was not the mild and harmless drug that she had always thought it to be. Partly it was through having teenage children of her own and talking to other parents, and seeing how wiped out and catatonic kids could be after smoking "skunk", as the form of the drug now dominating the market is known. At the same time, she began to notice that a large proportion of the troubled adolescents she was seeing in her consulting room - all the boys, at least- were cannabis users. A psychotherapist with many years experience of working with teenagers, she suddenly saw links between their use of the drug and the problems that were bringing them to her, including paranoia, depression, lethargy, violence, school refusal, school exclusion and poor self-esteem. There was no scientific evidence she knew of to support her. But other psychiatrists she talked to had observed the same phenomenon and were arriving at the same conclusion.

"I'm not an alarmist," she says, "nor a reactionary. In fact, I'd say I'm one of the most liberal people I know. But I am really worried. What my generation smoked as cannabis and what today's kids are smoking are completely different. This isn't some cosy, middle-class moral panic - we're talking about kids with knives, kids in trouble with the police, kids on lock-up wards and in psychiatric hospitals. I used to get just a trickle of cases - now I've a long waiting list of kids who have lost their way. And there's no doubt that skunk plays a large part in many of the sad stories I'm asked to disentangle. It's an incredibly dangerous drug."

Earlier this year, to make her point, she told a newspaper: "I would rather my daughter took heroin." Now she slightly regrets the sound bite - "a needle full of heroin is a pretty scary idea, too" - but she sticks by the point she was trying to make: that while heroin addiction is curable, the effects of skunk on some people are not. "Once psychosis has been triggered, the effects can be permanent. I have young kids who come to see me who only get by because they're on anti-psychotic drugs. And for a small percentage, there's no way back. They've lost control of their lives and we've lost them."

Lynn-Evans and I come from the same generation, one that hit adolescence in the 1960s or 70s. Aren't her anxieties precisely those which our parents expressed when we took drugs? "Fair point," she says. "It could be that I'm turning into a reactionary old goat. But the kids who come to see me don't seem to think so. And the research to back up my hunch is in place now. There's more and more of it every week, and all the studies show the same thing: that for a significant number of young people, smoking cannabis poses a risk; and the earlier you start smoking, the greater that risk will be."

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