My Latest Response to Tim Wilkinson

I think the time has come to be a bit briefer. Both of us have set out lengthy arguments in several parts. But principles, and basic truths, can be lost in too much detail. I don't actually expect this to change any minds. This argument is not about cannabis, but about a profound moral disagreement.

I grasped some time ago that this was a contest between those who care principally about themselves, and those who believe they have responsibilities to others, and thus between the present age and the one that has gone (and which may return).

Most of the responses I receive will be abusive and non-responsive.  I just wish to place this reply on record.

Much of what Tim says about the risks of cannabis has little to do with my point. I don't believe in addiction, a concept which assumes that people have no power to control themselves. They have such a power. But they often choose not to use it because they are enjoying themselves.

If people are 'enslaved' by a drug it is because they have enslaved themselves. I do very much believe that the law can protect people against such self-abasement, by scaring them away from it when they are too young and/or ill-informed to understand the dangers they run. 

A calm and smiling sea is more dangerous than a rough and wild one, for beneath that sunny calm can run fatal currents and irresistible rip-tides. Fear is often a saviour.

Now to the medical argument. Mr Wilkinson seeks to concentrate this upon what he would like to be a hard core of known fact.

I don't think this is possible and do not rely upon it. It is doubt that I rely on.

Alas, the whole area of mental illness, its cause, its operation, its nature and its treatment,  is itself very vague. The recent revolution in its treatment, from Psychoanalysis and Therapy to the indiscriminately-wielded chemical cosh of Neuropsychopharmacology, is so colossal that it is hard to see that the two have anything to do with each other.

Yet, like the discredited practice of pre-frontal lobotomy and the dubious one of electroconvulsive therapy, they are all linked by the urgent desire to find a treatment that will address this frightening form of human tragedy. Sadly,  the skills available rise very little above that of the frustrated layman thumping the TV set when it goes on the blink.

The desire to cure, tragically,  has always been a good deal stronger than the scientific knowledge needed to satisy that desire. It is precisely because of the weak scientific base of mental treatment that it is able to veer so wildly from one response to another.

Physical medicine of course advances and changes, but not in such a revolutionary fashion.

One thing I have learned in this debate, over many years (and I include in that the parallel debate I have been conducting with readers over mythical complaints such as 'ADHD' and 'Dyslexia', and over the highly suspect drugs misleadingly called 'antidepressants' ) is that neurology as a diagnostic tool is in its infancy, and that neurology is the only exact and objective science that can be applied here. And yet that it very seldom is applied because of its severe limitations – and thus that the  boundaries of mental illness are ill-defined and subjective. What is more, many people who have been 'diagnosed' with mental illness or various 'disorders' only actually become definitively, measurably *physically* changed when they take the medicines that are prescribed.

Taking drugs to alter the mind has one undoubted affect. They alter the physical, neurologically measurable state of the actual brain. This might suggest that a drug such as THC might have that property too.

Mental medicine, whether it be therapy or neuropsychopharmacology  uses the terminology of physical medicine,  but it does not really have the same characteristics.

Thus, while I make much use of (for example) Sir Robin Murray's work, because it clearly raises severe doubts about the safety of cannabis, I qualify my agreement with him. He isn't interested (as far as I know) in criminal sanctions for cannabis possession, though they seem to me to be the logical conclusion of what he is discovering.

And I am by no means sure that the complaint termed 'schizophrenia' is either well-defined enough to be medically and scientifically useful (see below) , or indeed to be described as the major risk from cannabis. Something exists. Something undoubtedly happens. People become ill, often in highly alarming and similar ways.

There is some sort of connection between it and cannabis.

But I am not sure it is shut off from many other mental disorders by a clear, sharp line, or that its prevalence and diagnosis are easily measured in a reliable and consistent way.

I think that both the study of mental illness, and the study of the effects and potential effects of THC, are in their infancy (not least because of the tiny areas of knowledge available to neurologists as yet) and I think that both sides can produce peer-reviewed scientific papers which support either alarm or complacency about cannabis. I'm accused of 'cherry-picking' those studies which support alarm. I am not sure what is wrong with that, unless I ignore studies which actually somehow prove cannabis is safe, which of course cannot be done.  I could make the same counter-accusation against my opponents, that they 'cherry-pick' those studies which support complacency. Of course they do. Who wouldn't?  But it doesn't make any difference if the accusation is true or false.

Why not?

The existence of *any* studies which suggest that a substance is harmful is itself of importance. The existence of counter-studies cannot possibly acquit cannabis of suspicion at this stage.

I'm simply not going to enter into this battle of peer-reviewed papers not because I cannot (of course I can) but because, in the end,  it is inconclusive.   But that inconclusiveness is – as I am sure Mr Wilkinson knows – one of my most powerful arguments.

Even my modest claim that there is something serious to worry about here, which we have not yet fully quantified, should be enough to give any responsible person pause. And Mr Wilkinson wishes to be responsible, a wish which ( I fear) wars in his breast with a wish to see cannabis acquitted of danger.

I am against complacency in any field of action, and my own personal experience leads me towards alarm. It is on the fact that there is doubt that I rest my case. If there were none, who would need us to debate?

Is repeated memory loss a mental illness? Is a damaging and irreversible decline in school performance (in many cases leading to a wasted life)  a mental illness? Is the general demoralisation of a person, from a self-supporting individual into a dependent one, a mental illness? Is an inability to consider or acknowledge the arguments of opponents a mental illness? If so, what is it called? And who is to decide? And who can say that these changes in human life, needless and avoidable, are minor?

In the course of an individual life, such a thing may cancel a happy, fulfilled future and turn it into a dingy and futile one. I write largely as a parent and as the friend of other parents – that great body of people who all understand something that non-parents do not – the aching, impossible responsibility for children which can never be shirked or avoided, and the burning desire to keep them safe from harm.



Yet I think most cannabis users, if honest, would acknowledge that such effects of this sort, often long-lasting , are common (not universal, nobody is arguing universality) among the users of this drug. Exceptions do not mean the danger is not there, merely that some escape it – just as some descend into locked-ward madness. This is the normal scale of human experience, extremes at either end, and a variegated middle.

I suspect that many users worry privately about whether the effects they feel on themselves, after the high has faded, may become permanent. I suspect many of them have seen friends or acquaintances go all or some of the way travelled by Henry Cockburn, and at least wondered if it has something to do with the drug.
They do not know. Neither do I.


That is why they get so angry with me for voicing their own unspoken and unwanted doubts. It is all right. I understand this anger very well and forgive those who vent it on me. In the days when I too thought and spake as a child, I did the same. But now I have put away childish things. By becoming a parent, I have moved out of the rear echelon and lazy base-camps of humanity, and towards the front line where , like it or not, only I stand between my children's generation and the dangers that menace it. Once this was done for me. Now, having buried those who did it for me, and walked away from the graveside suddenly and bitterly alone, I must do it myself. It is called growing up.

But such anger, while understandable,  is illegitimate in debate, and I appreciate the fact that Mr Wilkinson(though not all his allies) have avoided it.


As for Schizophrenia itself, it is notable that its diagnosis was sharply redefined after a major disagreement among psychiatrists about what it is.  There is no objective test for it. Even now, there are two rival sets of criteria, one in the USA and one elsewhere.

But that is minor combined with the revolution in diagnosis which took place in the 1970s, coincidentally the time at which large-scale cannabis use became common in many advanced societies.  This introduction of a much narrower diagnosis may have something to do with the fact that the prevalence of cannabis has not been accompanied by a higher rate of schizophrenia diagnosis in this period ( a fact often advanced to suggest that cannabis has not affected schizophrenia levels).

Once again, we are not dealing with an exact science. Let my opponents desist from caricaturing my argument with such silly such phrases as 'reefer madness', and from exaggerating or over-defining the claims I make.

My claim is this:

*Cannabis is – demonstrably - potentially dangerous to the human mind*


No more. No less.

Now, isn't it reasonable, as long as this proposition is tenable and unexploded, to treat it with caution? Mental illness, usually permanent and incurable, is not a thing to risk lightly. If any commercially-produced drug or foodstuff carried such a risk, wouldn't the very people who now lobby for a cannabis free-for-all be in the forefront of the campaign against wicked big business's greedy plan to poison us all for profit? And quite right too.

This inconsistency can only arise from a selfish desire to protect their own pleasure. Is this creditable? Is it, above all, an argument?

Now, I am told a lot that correlation is not causation, as if this were a great discovery of logic and philosophy.

But I have never said that correlation is causation.  I am quite willing to await the results which may be many years in coming, of the mighty studies now doubtless under way to see if and how cannabis causes mental illness (Oh, there are no such studies?  Why is that?).

My position, once again, is more modest. Epidemiology's first success, the location of a poisoned well by the mapping of cholera outbreaks in a London slum, was not searching for causation . The mechanism of how filthy water spread cholera took, I imagine, some time to establish.

But if doctors had ignored the correlation, and had not immediately chained up the offending pump until they had  evidence of causation in peer-reviewed journals, , they would have been irresponsible in the extreme.

The same could be said of Richard Doll and his colleagues when it became clear to them that the huge post-war increase in lung cancer correlated not with tarmac fumes, nor yet traffic fumes (both of which were suggested and widely believed), but with cigarette smoking – which had grown inordinately during the stress of wartime.

It would be years before the causal relationship was established between cigarettes and lung cancer ( and heart disease, and emphysema) .

But the correlation justified government action and warnings to the public, and changes in the law. .

And here I shall have some bitter fun, because those measures were undoubtedly delayed by similar arguments to those now being deployed by the cannabis lobby.

That will be in my next post.