Cannabis

Back to reality Sir: The harms caused by cannabis are not a result of a failure to police it properly (‘Stench of failure’, 8 November). They are primarily because the distribution of it is controlled by criminals rather than corporations. Criminal gangs maximise their profits by pushing more addictive forms of drugs, and their activity wreaks misery on their families and communities. Psychosis is only associated with skunk, which is a more addictive form of cannabis, high in THC relative to CBD. Smokers of this are estimated to be 2.6 times more likely to have psychotic-like experiences than non-smokers. Herbal cannabis is not associated with psychosis; in fact, the high levels of CBD in it have some therapeutic and even antipsychotic benefits.

The New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was that rare figure in politics – a progressive who followed the facts. The contrast between his grown-up moral clarity and the adolescent ideological posturing of New York City’s latest Democrat darling, Zohran Mamdani, could not be starker. Moynihan was a welfare reformer who knew that incentivising work, not subsidising idleness, was the route out of poverty. He was a resolute supporter of Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, backing the victims of two millennia of prejudice against terrorists and tyrants. By way of contrast, Mamdani demonises that state as a proxy for what he considers the wider western sins of colonialism and exploitation. It was on crime, above all, that Moynihan showed courage.

The skip man laughed as he took pity on me, the daft English blow-in who was taking the EU rules on rubbish disposal literally. ‘You put so much concrete in that skip that if I weighed it in properly it would cost you a thousand euros,’ he said. I told him I really didn’t mind paying the going rate. He said he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘If you’ve got land you can always get rid of concrete blocks by filling holes with them,’ he said. ‘Don’t be putting concrete into skips.’ We ordered a skip and the company boss was appalled that we put lots of stuff in it we could have fly-tipped The builder boyfriend, hard at work clearing the farmyard and barns, was aghast as I trotted outside to tell him his rookie mistake. ‘I don’t want to fly-tip on my own land!

Paying the price Sir: Lionel Shriver’s piece about university standards rang true to me (‘University is supposed to be hard’, 15 October). When I, then working for a distinctly moth-eaten British university, visited a very famous private college in Massachusetts in 1985, I expressed my envy of his luxurious surroundings to a professor of English. His reply was: ‘Don’t envy us. You have something we don’t have. It’s called standards.

The latest heatwave reminded me of my brief career as a marijuana farmer. This wasn’t in the summer of 1976, when I was 13, but three years later, by which time my family had moved to Devon. My father had been commissioned to write the biography of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, the founders of Dartington Hall, a utopian community in South Devon, and wanted to be nearer the archives and the couples’ friends and colleagues whom he was planning to interview. Having been brought up in London, I was terrifically snobbish about how behind the times the local teenagers were – still wearing flares and listening to Status Quo, gawd help them! But at least the house we’d bought came with a tiny bit of land. That meant I could cultivate my own cannabis plantation.

As we creep back into the open, as the Covid wards empty and the mental health clinics fill up, how are we going to tell what’s driven people crazy: lockdown, or what seems to have been a favourite lockdown hobby — smoking weed? Last week Sadiq Khan, London’s goblin mayor, announced that if re-elected he’ll set up a commission to look into the case for decriminalising cannabis. It’s not in Khan’s gift to decriminalise anything — Downing Street has already issued a response which amounted to: ‘Decriminalise dope? You must be high.’ But Khan doesn’t care. This isn’t about the policy, it’s about the posturing.

In rural upstate New York, where I grew up, pot-smoking was disproportionately a sport of farmers’ kids. That’s because inequitable ownership of land meant that some people could grow weed more discreetly than others. Among those with acres to till, private oases of marijuana were easily created by their offspring out of sight — especially, I recall, in between tall rows of feed corn. And with easier access to the drug, the sons and daughters of farmers also seemed to smoke more of it than the kids who were forced to rely on retail. This brings us to a paradox that, while not exactly one of Zeno’s, amounted to my earliest intuition of a chicken-and-egg problem.

Young people are now more likely to consume marijuana than to smoke tobacco. The social acceptance of tobacco is falling, just as the popularity of weed is getting higher. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 12 percent of US adults (and 22 percent of those aged 18 to 29) said they smoke marijuana. It won’t be too long, I predict, before we look back in horror at the widespread acceptance of cannabis use. It’s easy to forget that anti-tobacco researchers had to plod on at tortoise pace for years before they were able to prove what they had long suspected to be true (and what we all now take for granted): the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Big Tobacco was so rich and powerful that its lobbying suppressed the true dangers.