Getting things done

Getting things done, moving fast

Things with the Action Group are going well. We are determined to make the government aware of the extensive suffering that is taking place among families across the country, due to cannabis misuse among children and teens. We have no one political party allegiance; our intention is to get cross-party support in Parliament, to make change happen. I have asked everyone who is on our mailing list to go and see their own MP, to talk about the effect that cannabis is having on family life. If you haven’t yet done this, please make time to do so. One of the key things to point out is that the government promised us a ‘massive and consistent’ health education campaign back in 2004, when cannabis was reclassified. This has never materialised: why not? We want to see that promise fulfilled.

We now have support from MPs, some of whom we have approached, others whom have expressed an interest in meeting us. We have been to see Tim Loughton, the Shadow Health and Children’s Minister, who now supports our group. Edward Garnier MP, Graham Brady MP and Christopher Chope MP have all said they support our group too. Our core steering group is made up of parents, all of whom have personal experience of the misery that cannabis can cause. We also have a large group of advisers alongside us, including biologist and Eurad spokesperson Mary Brett, Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, Peter Stalker who heads the NDPA, Peter Walker an ex-headteacher who advises on drugs-testing across the world and James Langton from the Clearhead organisation.

I don’t think the government foresaw what a disaster the downgrading decision would be for families: reclassification sent out the confused message to the public that is was safe to smoke cannabis. Children began using it as part of their adolescent rebellion: parents and teachers were undermined. It isn’t cigarettes children are smoking behind bike-sheds now, it’s cannabis, and mainly ‘skunk’ and it is driving thousands of them wild.

We are putting a sign-up document on the site in the next few days and we need as many people as possible to sign it. We can then show this to the government, as proof of how many people feel strongly about the issue. We’re going to ask people to show support for the following aims:

1. The public to be made aware of the scientific and medical facts about the potential effects of cannabis (particularly ‘skunk’) on the mental health of children and teenagers.

2. Preventative drug-education in schools, using powerful marketing techniques, to replace the current harm-reduction education. We need to help prevent children from becoming users, that way demand will stop, and we need to start early – at primary level.

3. Reclassification of cannabis back to Class B from Class C, to send out the powerful, unequivocal message that smoking cannabis in childhood and teen years is highly dangerous.

People will then be asked to sign via email. Sounds like a good idea? I hope so.

I have been to the launch of the Conservative Party’s ‘Social Justice Policy Group’ Report this week, and the findings are fascinating. Although I have no allegiance to any political party, I am delighted that this report has been published, bringing the UK’s huge social problems into the spotlight.

Drugs are, of course, among the most difficult social problems with which this country is faced. We have the worst problem in Western Europe. How did that happen? There is a lot of talk about the ‘war on drugs’ but I don’t think that war has ever started. As someone at yesterday’s meeting at the launch of the Addictions Working Party document said: there is too much tolerance of drugs – we do not need them as a society, what we need to have are policies of zero tolerance, and we need to protect children from the ills of drugs by raising their awareness so that they don’t start using them in the first place.

Cannabis, though, is still seen as a cool, soft, harmless drug. The generation who smoked it back in college, who are now in their late 40s and 50s, have added to the problem that is now afflicting so many of us, by their belief that cannabis is harmless. Indeed, the baby-boomers, some of whom are still smoking cannabis, are now running the country. But back in the 60s and 70s, people weren’t smoking cannabis until later, in their twenties usually. Children and teens were certainly not smoking the stuff en masse, and the cannabis that was on sale was generally resin which is not as strong as the home-grown skunk that kids are smoking now.

All the medical evidence is now there to underline the dangers of smoking this super-strength, genetically-modified, substance in childhood. Everyone who smokes it will be affected in some way, for some who become habitual smokers they may never find their way home again. I have had three mothers write to me this week, signing up to our campaign, who have lost their sons to cannabis. Children are dying, and this is cannabis we are talking about. Some kids become depressed and can’t keep their lives together, others move onto alcohol and/or harder drugs and lose their lives that way. Siblings are suffering, I had one mother write to me today to say that her youngest son is having suicidal thoughts; her eldest son died from a heroin overdose after beginning on cannabis at 13. She is devastated, and talked to me of the anger she feels at the selfishness of drug addicts, who only see their own needs, not realising that everyone around them is affected.

Within my own family, our youngest son Alex (13) has been talking to us again about his feelings around what has happened to us as a family. He is happy to have broken up from school. He did not do well in his exams, and will be in one of the lowest streamed classes next year, from being in the highest. I try to tell myself that he will be fine next year, but feel guilty about the amount of attention I have given to Will and his problems, presuming Alex would do well at his studies, knowing that he is a very able child.

At least Will is no longer in the house, nor will he ever live here again, so maybe we can restore a sense of peace which will enable Alex to thrive, and to relax and blossom at school. He is still upset and fragile, though, and has asked that we treat him like a child, not a grown-up. He says he hasn’t wanted to talk to us about how he’s been feeling, so as not to add to our burden, but he’s now embarrassed about breaking down at school and crying and says he doesn’t entirely trust that we won’t have Will back. He says that some kids at school make fun of him for having a brother who is a drug addict, and he says that’s normal, that’s what happens but people don’t understand what it’s been like.

Alex was mugged in April, and that seems to have been the trigger for his nervousness and his need to talk about the effects of living with a brother like Will. Having his phone and iPod taken by the muggers, brought back memories of Will taking his belongings, sometimes going into his room late at night, when he was in bed. Alex is clearly wounded by what he has been through. He is a big, robust boy, though, and acts and speaks much older than his years, so that can be confusing for those who come into contact with him. We need to remember, though, that he is only thirteen, and, as he says, he was only nine when our problems at home began, hardly even knowing what cannabis was. He says that Jack also takes out his aggression on him, too, which upsets him.

Will is still in his house in Blackheath, but I have not spoken to him for a week. He told me that he was going to try to get his job back, by explaining that he had been ill and that was why he had left and not returned. I am not sure what has happened with that.

Guy’s mother came to stay with us last weekend. It was Open Day at Alex’s school, and since the time that Will was at that school she (and Guy’s father when he was alive) would always come up for that event. This year it was raining heavily as I dropped Alex at school. Women in lacy finery were stepping around puddles like lakes in high-heeled sling-backs, the men struggling to open golfing umbrellas against the wind. Guy had arranged to meet his mother in London and then travel down together to Alex’s school in South East London. Guy’s relationship with his mother, Caroline, and consequently with his sister, has been altered since Will went to stay at her house last winter, after we made the decision that to exclude him again. Both Guy’s sister and mother have over the years alluded to the fact that we have been too strict as parents, and consequently Will is not accountable for what he’s done.

Will was still at his crammer in Kensington then, having a third attempt to complete ‘A’ levels. Guy’s sister was not happy that Will was staying with her mother, but it was Caroline who had offered for Will to go there. He had been ‘sofa-surfing’ since we had thrown him out over the October half-term holiday, after repeated thefts and drug-induced aggression that was affecting us all. I think my mother in law felt that she could do a better job than us.

‘I’m giving him a lot of TLC, you know, really looking after him, I think it’s good for his soul’ she told me just after he had arrived.

I wished her luck then, saying that it wasn’t a lack of care that Will was suffering from, but skunk addiction, but I was unconvinced that she heard me, or understood what that meant. I hardly understood it myself, but knew that we couldn’t continue with Will in our midst.

Will had been stealing from just about everyone he came into contact with, and we had recently bought a safe, and placed our most valuable things in there. When Guy drove Will down to his mother’s house, an hour and a half away in Surrey, on a cold October evening, he took the safe with him, calmly showing his mother how to use it, telling her not to leave the code number lying around. (No, of course, dear, don’t you worry I won’t. He’ll be fine with me. I’ve never had any trouble with him.)

Guy said it seemed a bizarre thing to be doing: it was in that house that Will and Jack had spent a lot of time when they were little, staying with their grandparents, and now Guy was dropping Will there just as we used to do years ago, but this time under the appalling circumstances of being in a position that we could no longer have him in our house, and with a safe under his arm. It is also the house that Guy spent his childhood, he was born there.

Will was there for six weeks. We knew that my mother in law would be under a strain having Will in the house, even an ‘ordinary’ teenager in your house when you’re 80 would be hard-going, but she was not admitting anything to us. Her game-plan was, I’m sure, that the arrangement with her would be such a success that we would be encouraged to have him back to start again. (‘He’s never been any trouble with me’ was becoming her catch-phrase, along with ‘I do give him money though, do you give him money? Because London is very expensive. That’s probably the problem, that he doesn’t have enough money so he takes it.’)

We heard from Guy’s sister, however, that Caroline had been complaining to her about the worry Will was causing her: not coming home when he said he would do, she would be often waiting up for him or having changed her plans to accommodate him. He was also disappearing for days at a time, she often lying awake at night wondering where he was. I remember many telephone conversations with Caroline where we said that if it was too much, we would arrange for Will to go elsewhere. But, she wouldn’t admit there was a problem, but told us repeatedly that he needed to be with his family. We agreed, but were unsure how you integrate someone into a family who so clearly doesn’t want to be there, and told her this.

‘But he misses all of you so much’ she said.

‘Does he? Has he said so?’

‘No, but I’m sure he does. He should be with his family, he’s been fine with me, no trouble at all’

I took this to mean that if he was no trouble with her, then he should be no trouble with us. If only that were true. The one thing I knew I wanted back then, was to have my family intact again. I still do, but have given up the hope of Will ever living with us. At that time, and until very recently, I still held out the hope that Will could live with us without contravening what few rules we had within 24 hours, which was the pattern. Caroline is a highly competitive woman; she needs to win at whatever she’s doing. The story is still that Will was fine with her, even though the truth is something different. Even after we found a silver mirror belonging to her in Will’s jeans the day he returned to us after living with her, she found it difficult to acknowledge the truth of what was going on. When Will rang her the next day to ask for money she transferred hundreds of pounds into his account without reference to us. She had to be the ‘good one’.

Will was with her when he ‘lifted’ a mobile phone from a table in a restaurant, whilst waiting for us to arrive for Alex’s birthday lunch. But, this is not referred to, either, almost as though if you don’t look at it, it doesn’t exist. That is one way of viewing the world, I suppose. I know that her mission when she became a grandmother was to be like her own granny, who lived with her when she was young. She told me this when Will was first born. She wants to be adored and well-thought of by her grandchildren when she dies, and she is determined that this will be the case.

Last weekend, though, she was in danger of not being thought of in those terms by her own son certainly. Guy told me later that one of the first things she said to him when they arrived at Open Day was that it was Will’s birthright to live at home.

‘Not if he’s trying to destroy it, it’s not’ Guy replied.

They both stared out grimly at the pouring rain from the Pimm’s tent. Guy said he wanted to strangle her then, but instead told her about Alex. Maybe this would make her see what the truth was here.

‘Alex is suffering, he’s broken down twice at school and is seeing the counsellor. Deb’s been called in to see the teachers who are worried about him. They’ve been asking what they can do to help, as it’s obvious Alex is in some distress.’

‘He looks alright to me’ she replied.

She later gave Alex £50.00 in cash, which certainly made him smile. If only things could really be fixed so easily by money.

Debra is away on holiday. Next Diary entry 14 August 2007