Matthew Norman: A spliff is one thing - skunk quite another
The last time I smoked skunk, I became convinced that I was trapped inside the body of a bassett hound
Published: 20 July 2007
All lovers of political milestones are invited to plant an asterisk in their diaries to remind them to celebrate Monday week. For it was on 30 July 1997 that our new PM, Mr Tony Blair, hosted his Cool Britannia party at No 10, a soirée most fondly recalled for the little chat in which he joked sycophantically with Noel Gallagher about the latter's prodigious use of cocaine.
What a brave new world, you couldn't help thinking, that has such creatures in it as a young premier who joshes with rock stars about an activity carrying a maximum prison sentence of seven years.
When Mr Blair later regaled us with the full hilarity of his first meeting with Cherie's father Tony Booth, who eschewed: "What are your intentions towards my daughter?" in favour of "Do you mind if I roll a joint?", it seemed we might finally be making progress on this vexing issue. If the PM was so studiedly relaxed about his musical idols and soon-to-be in-laws using listed substances, so it fleetingly appeared, surely the Puritanism that has blighted drugs policy for so long must be on the wane.
Yet here we are, poised to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Cool Brittania bash, and the Home Secretary's confession that she smoked the occasional undergraduate spliff leads the news bulletins and, no doubt, today's front pages.
Jacqui Smith's admission follows to the letter the first two-thirds of the standard, tripartite modern political formula. Like every other MP who has 'fessed up to dabbling with cannabis, with the admirable exception of Tim Yeo (or Tim Yo!, as he was briefly renamed), she insists (a) that she only smoked it "a few times", and (b) that she "didn't particularly enjoy it".
At the time of writing she hasn't yet unveiled (c) "the stuff around in those days was so much less harmful than the skunk of today". But in the light of Gordon Brown's proposed re-reclassification of the drug to class B, making possession an arrestable offence once again, perhaps this will follow.
In fact, (c) is the only point worth making. No one in possession of their senses gives a damn whether Jacqui Smith smoked dope at Oxford 20 years ago, albeit most of us would find it mildly distasteful if she didn't. The media in general, and certain newspapers in particular, gravely misjudge the level of public disapproval towards celebrity drug use, as the flourishing of Kate Moss's career confirms.
Even the Americans have grown up on this one. Fifteen years ago Bill Clinton's "I did not inhale" - perfectly true in that legalistic way of his; when he was at Oxford, he used to bake his grass into cookies - was a huge and potentially lethal story. Three years ago, Barack Obama admitted to teenage use not only of marijuana ("I inhaled," he said. "That was the point"), but also cocaine, and it has done his presidential chances no harm.
The shift in perception is clear. With the public, if not quite yet the political classes, what was once an issue of morality has become primarily one of health, which is where the matter of skunk comes into play. Skunk is by no means a harmless drug. As I write, I am being serenaded by the elderly Rastafarian from five doors down. For several hours each day, he sits on his wall, yelling abuse at passers-by, and while I've never managed to discuss the roots of the psychosis - it isn't easy to engage a man who, on being bidden good morning, shakes his walking stick at you and screams: "You ain't my friend, man. You my sworn, God-given enemy" - the pungent scent emanating from his wall offers a useful clue about the pathology.
The last time I smoked skunk (and it was the last time; never again), I became convinced that I was trapped inside the body of a bassett hound, or possibly a beagle. For the next hallucinatory hour, I padded around an unfamiliar sitting room, pawing members of a family I didn't recognise, barking and howling in the desperate hope that they'd grasp the situation, and find a way of releasing me from canine bondage. What worked for Lassie whenever a flaxen- haired boy had fallen down a well did not work for me. All they did was stroke my outsize ears and give me rabbit-flavoured Schmackos.
Vaguely comical as it might seem, this was a terrifying hint of madness, and convinced me that reports of increased instances of psychosis in cannabis users were more than the usual media scaremongering; that far from remaining at class C, skunk and such brethren as the cocaine-sprinkled White Widow, with their greatly enhanced levels of the psychoactive substance THC, should be raised to class A.
The problem here is that two entirely different but chemically related drugs - the one palpably dangerous to mental health, the other far less damaging than tobacco or alcohol - are bracketed under the same name. The practical difficulties in separating them, or, rather, in enforcing their separation, are obvious. You cannot bang up people for smoking something they bought in the belief that it was harmless weed or "green", or expect even the most responsible dealers to hand out authentification forms, as signed by the local laboratory, with every eighth they sell.
But somehow it has to be done, because restoring all forms of cannabis to class B would be absurd when its post-reclassification use has fallen by a remarkable 25 per cent among the young people who, with their unformed synaptic pathways, are most at risk. There is no more certain way of reversing this trend than making dope enticingly wicked once again.
Whether or not Gordon Brown is serious about this is difficult to judge. His tone at PMQs on Wednesday was pleasingly unmoralistic, stressing the need to improve drugs education and help those who need clinical treatment. But he may equally be using the issue as a cute piece of Middle England, Tory-nullifying repositioning, and a further method of distancing himself from his predecessor. There are far bigger problems than cannabis, none more so than the moral and practical insanity of criminalising heroin addicts, but the dangers of hallucinogenic cannabis, particularly to young minds, needs to be addressed.
If the Prime Minister is serious, he should command Jacqui Stoner-Smith to ask the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to concentrate on finding a way to formalise a clear, enforceable distinction between skunk and less harmful strains when they reconsider the matter shortly. Sitting in an armchair grinning inanely at appalling television is, by and large, an experience to be recommended (how else is anyone expected to enjoy My Family or repeats of On The Buses?). Lying on a sofa growling and being force fed Bonio biscuits is something firmly to be avoided.
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