Michael heath

Norman Balon, who has died at the age of 99, missed the point when he defined himself as ‘London’s rudest landlord’. There, I think, he mingled self-publicity and self-defence. People didn’t go to the Coach and Horses, Soho, to be shouted at by him; they shouted at each other quite enough. Really he was the actor-manager of a twice-daily claustrophobic, drunken extemporisation in his pub which embodied bohemianism and self-destruction in the last two decades of the 20th century. Remember that 40 years ago the Coach was thick with cigarette smoke, that many customers were drunk daily, at lunchtime, and that no one was fearful of what they said. Things were not then as they are now. The Spectator contributed a lot to Norman’s decades of celebrity.

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.