Tag Archives: Great Britain

Our Reaction to Rescheduling: It’s Politics, not Science

Our initial reaction to the announcement that the Biden Administration may reschedule marijuana is that it is a political move intended to get young voters. We have not seen a Press Release.  If true, this move is not based on science, or it’s based on bad science.  We support whatever Smart Approaches to Marijuana decides to do in terms of legal options or other avenues to stop rescheduling

More than 100 individuals who are victims of marijuana or have family members who are victims wrote to the DEA and the DOJ and pleaded with the DEA not to reschedule marijuana.  We’ve written about the differences between decriminalization, rescheduling and legalization with commercialization.
Continue reading Our Reaction to Rescheduling: It’s Politics, not Science

Cannabis is to blame for my son’s death – please don’t legalise

The following is the bulk of a letter from Janie Hamilton to Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Great Britain. We thank Mary Brett informing us, and Janie Hamilton for allowing us to share this letter. 

Dear Mr. Johnson:

Our beloved son, James, died on 31st July 2015 after a cannabis-induced psychotic refusal to accept life-saving treatment for testicular cancer.  He was 36 and did not have to die. The cannabis stole his life three times over – first it stole his young life from under our very eyes, then it possibly caused the testicular cancer, and then it stole his capacity to make a right-minded decision to have treatment at the first sign of the lump. Continue reading Cannabis is to blame for my son’s death – please don’t legalise

Attackersmokedcannabis.com asks Residents of UK to sign petition

A new website records murders, suicides and violence connected to cannabis use in Great Britain and Ireland.   Ross Grainger, writer, administers the website, attackersmokedcannabis.com.

‘Cannabis is a common factor in an alarming number of violent crimes, including murder, rape and child abuse, as well as suicide. As calls for the legalisation of cannabis grow ever louder, we demand the government first investigate the possible link between cannabis and violence.’

Grainger asks readers in Great Britain are asked to sign a petition to the British parliament. With more than 12,000 signatures, this petition passed the mark requiring a response.  Government responds to all petitions that get more than 10,000 signatures.  At 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in Parliament.

The website links to a 287-page catalogue of over 150 tragedies which occurred between 1998 to 2018.  For example,   “Beloved mentally ill teenage cannabis smoker found dead in woodland” is one sad story similar to stories in the USA.    Another incident dates back to 2003. Charles King, 23, a student at Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design hung himself from a tree. He left a note saying, “Cannabis has ruined my life.”   (In Arizona, Andy Zorn left a similar message, “My soul is dead. Marijuana killed my soul + ruined my brain.”  His mother wrote some blogs for us, and his story is found on MomsStrong.org.)

Categories

The website divides incidences into following categories:                  Murder, manslaughter and infanticide (53)
Frenzied stabbings and savage assaults (48)
Rape and sexual violence (21)
Suicide and self harm (28)

In addition, there are sections on media bias, the tip of the iceberg and objections anticipated.  After Great Britain downgraded cannabis from a Class B drug to Class C in 2002, mental health problems increased. New cases bipolar and schizophrenia rose to record numbers. Great Britain went back to the earlier classification, after six years.

The catalogue reinforces our claims about murders, child abuse and suicides related to marijuana.  It is a valuable addition to the book a book published in January, Alex Berenson’s Tell Your Children the Truth about marijuana, mental illness and violence.

Follow Grainger on Twitter

Grainger also reports crime news involving psychotic breaks or cannabis withdrawal symptoms on Twitter, at Ross_Grainger.  He recently posted a horror story of cannabis addiction, the  ‘barbaric’  man who threatened to cut unborn child from mother.

He also reported of the hideous rape and murder of six-year-old Alesha MacPhail in Scotland, brought to justice  last week.  Of this crime, Peter Hitchens said:  “As soon as I heard the appalling details of this case, which took place on the peaceful Isle of Bute, I searched for the word ‘cannabis’ in the trial records. And immediately, as usual, I found that the accused was known to be a regular user of this drug.”

Hitchens continued, “It really is time to blast aside the PR spin which claims that marijuana is a ‘soft’, safe drug or even an actual medicine. It is nothing of the kind. Users all too often become mentally ill. And they are all too often found – as in the Alesha MacPhail case – to be the perpetrators of terrible, violent crime.”  (Peter Hitchens frequently writes of the connection between marijuana and crime)

The Unraveling, Part 3: Temporary Mental Instability vs Bipolar I

(Read Part 1 and Part 2.  Permission required for reprinting) After Ryan’s death, I remembered reading many years ago in a magazine  about Margaret Trudeau, then wife of the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. She was in her 20s, partied with socialites, and also suffered psychotic breaks.  Each time she referenced her use of marijuana as the trigger for those episodes.  I’ve since read current articles, and she continues to share. For her, marijuana led her into “madness.”  It was much later that she was diagnosed with  bipolar disorder.  It’s hard for me to accept her son, Justin Trudeau, wanting to have the same position his father held.  He’s a proponent of pot, despite knowing his mother’s mental health was so affected by marijuana. It speaks volumes on how great the opposition to promoting the truth about this drug!

Ryan was not helped to understand why his brain lost touch with reality under the influence of THC–this is the “elephant in the room.” The fact that hospitals don’t consider marijuana a factor in the picture of mental health is a tragedy. We need every researcher, past and present, across the globe, who understands the truth about what pot does to young brains to stand up in solidarity.

The experience of Great Britain was that it decriminalized marijuana, saw a spike in mental illness as a result of loosening the law, and then tightened their laws again. Canada has website on the cannabis-psychosis-schizophrenia link. The US, on the other hand, is not noticing its problem, or influenced by the marijuana financiers, is refusing to see that so many young people who are addicted to it are also  having psychiatric problems. I believe the psychiatry community has failed to connect the dots, ignoring the facts of today’s cannabis – so much stronger than when they were in school, or even 10 years ago.

The Lancet Journal of Psychiatry’s recent article points to a sevenfold risk of suicide for teens who use marijuana.

The second break happened 18 months after the first one, but this time I pre-arranged for Ryan to receive drug rehabilitation at a different hospital. The hospital in Pasadena gave the ‘green light’ for rehab. We paid $12,500 up front and Ryan’s PPO would insure the rest. His uncle and grandfather came, too, for support. Less than 24 hours after admittance, the staff coerced Ryan to their locked unit, where he was warehoused for 13 days with anti-psychotics exceeding the FDA limits.

The staff asked us several times: “Could Ryan have dropped acid? He doesn’t seem like our bipolar patients.” Once again his toxicology report came up positive (+) for THC. Again, in 2011, just like 2009, no one believed marijuana could cause this effect.
By now, we realized that our son’s drug problem was with weed and that he had relapsed with weed, but he never got a shot at the drug rehab for which we had already paid.

Ryan was “dumped” from their unit on the 13th day. The insurance refused to pay for it, perhaps after reading the notes of how much worse Ryan had become inside the hospital unit.  Why are insurance companies allowed to have so much influence on a patient’s treatment when they don’t have expertise?  He was drugged mercilessly into just a state of stupor. It was an endless nightmare for our son and for his family.

Ryan was taken off the last anti-psychotic at the first follow-up visit with the same psychiatrist because he appeared normal, compared to his state during hospitalization. However, he was still actively psychotic at that one week follow up. (I had stopped Haldol when he came home, as I was horrified my son had been receiving Haldol round-the-clock. Of course, at 6’4”, Ryan was intimidating. He had never become violent, but he tried to escape several times, realizing he had been tricked from the open unit into the locked unit.)

Coming Home Again

Ryan was hit with a personal betrayal at the same time–which just leveled him. Yet, with love and support of our family, he emerged once again from psychosis 10 weeks later. It came within the same time frame as the first episode, probably not a coincidence. This time it happened without medications, and I am suspicious that the medicines didn’t really affect his state of mind coming off psychosis after the first episode.

Ryan stayed with the Ivy League psychiatrist after coming out of psychosis for several visits. He drove all the way to his office in Pasadena, then had to wait up to 1 1/2 hours, as he piled in patients for the 15-minute check-in. I always hoped Ryan would invite me to go with him, but he didn’t. On the last visit, Ryan came home and announced “Mom, I’m not going back to see him because he never takes his head out of the computer, and doesn’t even look at me.”

After my son died, I subpoenaed his records only to find many days of nursing notes documenting: “Please call my mom she’ll know how to help me.” “I can’t stay in here like the last time, you don’t know what happened to me there.” But no one called me or told me despite my calling twice a day and visits every night.

During the 2nd hospitalization, I believe the massive anti-psychotics administered threw him into full-blown psychosis, as compared to the mild state of psychosis at the time he entered to get drug rehab. Drugging a young person into such a state of stupor, and then stopping medication upon discharge, surely that plays havoc on the young brain – already under siege from the effects of THC.

There are families whose kids died from drug overdoses, but began their drug usage with pot. There are those who have children hopelessly addicted to marijuana and there are those of us whose children die from the consequences of marijuana usage. All of us are stymied by a cover-up of the marijuana-mental illness link, and the fact that mental health treatment doesn’t adequately connect with substance abuse and addiction treatment.  Follow our posts by email to receive part 4 and part 5, to be published in December.