November 2009

It has been four years since we have all been at home as a family to celebrate our eldest son’s birthday, which was a week ago. Guy’s birthday is two days before. Last year, we met for a meal in Covent Garden between their respective birthdays – Guy was going to be 50 and William 21. We hadn’t seen Will for over a year; we had asked him to leave two years before that. We have all come a long way since then, and we are still together.

It has not been easy having our eldest son back to live with us. There is no blueprint as to how to do this; and at times it seems too difficult. Something very precious has been broken – I guess I’m talking about the trust and bond we all once had. It is long ago since I can remember trusting William and feeling there was a family bond between us. It was around five years ago that began to erode. Guy and I recently spoke about the tension of having Will back, what was contained in that exactly? Guy said simply that it was like living with a stranger, and I knew what he meant.

The feelings are confusing. On the one hand, Will is my son and I love him completely, and would do anything to make sure he was happy, safe and thriving. It’s like a biological yearning I have for him to do well in life. On the other hand, I feel I don’t know him, and I certainly don’t trust him. Talking to a journalist recently about this, she summed it up so well: ‘You mean it is easy to forgive, but not to forget’. Exactly so.

We have kept going though, despite this, and the hard work seems to be paying off. Will is still on the plumbing course, he has found weekend work in a large retailers locally, and is learning to drive. We went out as a family for both birthdays – the cinema for Guy’s, and a show (Dylan Moran) for Will’s. All of these things give me hope. Which can be a dangerous place to visit.

Will and I have talked about the tensions between us. I’ve said that I keep feeling he is going to ruin everything by doing something reckless. I’ve admitted that I’m almost expecting it, and when events trigger past unhappy times, I feel the fragile peace we have between us about to evaporate, and it all seems hopeless again. This happened recently on two occasions. Firstly, when I found a small bottle of Optrex in the washing machine (‘It’s not mine! Do you honestly think I’d go back to using cannabis again? I’m just so far away from that now.’) and secondly when he went out on a Friday, with cash I’d given him, and didn’t return all weekend. (We have made it plain to all the boys that if they are staying out overnight they must text or ring to tell us, so we can bolt the door for one thing). William’s pattern for five or six years was that when he had money he would leave and not be in touch with us until it ran out.

So when William went out two weekends ago on a Friday and didn’t call or text I was getting very twitchy. Late that Sunday night Guy called him, to ask him why he hadn’t been in touch. When Will finally came back that night Guy said that if he did that again he would have to leave. At moments like that it feels easier to exclude him again, and for the four of us to recapture the well-being we established with him out of our lives.

I have been suffering from stress as a result, and like most people when you undergo emotional turmoil the body takes a hit. It’s been a difficult year, with such huge changes to negotiate. And change is difficult for everyone, and is not to be underestimated. My split with my ex-colleagues, at the charity I had worked so hard to establish, was difficult enough. I could not, however, have continued to run the charity, work several shifts on the support line, finish writing my book, and be the ‘glue’ to make sure my family sticks together, including the recent return of our eldest son. That would all have been too much.

My work supporting parents continues though. Every week I speak to parents who are moving through similar situations to the one that we have endured as a family. Some are dealing with much worse, where the child is involved with crime (usually dealing cannabis, and/or being arrested for associated crimes), or a child who has been violent to a parent and is in a psychiatric ward, or has become suicidal. All the stories are the same, although names and locations are different – all involve early cannabis use that escalates and begins to impact on everyone. This is why Professor David Nutt is wrong when he said recently, about cannabis:

‘Why should people be imprisoned for possessing something that effectively only harms themselves?’ (‘The Report’ BBC Radio 4. 19.11.09) – my italics.

No one of us lives in isolation – how could we? We are all part of a community which is made up of different units, and the main societal unit is the family. Families are always hurt by drug abuse, many of them are destroyed irrevocably by skunk use in childhood. Many parents separate because they disagree about the best course of action, or the recurring stress poisons the love they once felt for one another.

Many families have been undermined by the tide of liberalisation, in attitude to all drugs, that has been flowing through our society over the past years. Used by the flower-power generation of the 1960s, cannabis in particular became part of the counter cultural revolution of the time. These people are now in their late 50s and 60s; yet the cannabis of that time is hardly available now. There have been fundamental changes to the product, and today’s children and families have been caught up in the confusion that more liberal attitudes, including ‘softly, softly’ policing, and then reclassification, have brought in their wake. I remember hearing interviews with young people about the downclassification of cannabis – many thought that cannabis was legal, and that it had been declassified (ie legalised). Some said that they knew it was illegal but that everyone turned a blind eye, and that it wasn’t taken seriously because it was ‘just a bit of puff’, and a bit of a joke.

All of this confusion – there had to be a knock-on effect. And our family and many like us have been damaged as a result. None of us in our family will ever be the same again, because of the severity of the wounding. Where you have wounding you always have pain.

A mother I have spoken to twice before rang me this morning. She is asking her son to leave, after the police came to the house the day before. She knows her son is dealing drugs, and fears that he may be selling to children. She has had enough, this was the last straw after years of heartache. As had the lady who rang me yesterday, saying she now has an injunction against her son returning to the house. She had rung the police to ask her for her son to be removed after he has issued threats to kill her.

‘I’m afraid of him, my only child. I feel so ashamed. I’ve never had to do anything as difficult as this. Maybe he will now go down a worse road to worse drugs, and it will be because I threw him out. But I can’t have him here, it’s too much.’

Another parent, a father, is dealing with his son’s repeated suicide attempts. His son refuses to blame cannabis for his condition. He says he cannot have his son in the house, though, due to the effect on the younger children and the strain on his marriage.

The stories are all so similar. Many parents fear distancing themselves from the addict because of the potential ruin that the user will come to. It is humbling that I can be of service to these parents (and sometimes partners of cannabis users). Asking your children to leave is awful; often other family members do not approve – in my experience there is always someone in the family who is disapproving. This often stops parents from carrying out what they know instinctively to be the right thing. But, how does it get this bad, for so many of today’s parents? As the mother who rang me this morning, for practical advice on how to re-house her son said about the country’s problem with this drug:

‘Someone is going to have to do something. What about all those little boys who might start on the stuff – who my son may be selling to. What sort of society can we expect if we don’t do something about this?’

Our son ‘stood by’ cannabis for as long as he could. He trusted his mates when they said it was safe. It is well-known that in adolescence a young person’s friends become the most important part of their life, as they begin to move into adulthood which will involve leaving their families.

Will and I were both interviewed for the Radio 4 documentary I’ve quoted from above. It is during interviews that I often learn more about what it has been like for Will to have had this experience with cannabis. He was asked why he had been unconcerned when we asked him to leave. He said that he knew how much he was hurting others (friends and family) and so felt he would fare better alone, when that would be minimised. It was only when he stopped using cannabis, going cold-turkey, that he could start to trust himself not to make a mess.

Most parents get no support for themselves or their children. Theirs is a private hell, which is where I can be of help, having travelled a similar road. When Guy and I talk about the future launch of the Cannabis Diaries as a book, he often says that he thinks of it as a public service. He says that had he had a book like that when we were in our darkest times, it could have been a life-saver.

Not everyone agrees with Guy though. Someone who runs a blog and calls himself ‘Johnny Void’ wrote to the publishers of the Cannabis Diaries last week, rubbishing the work I have been doing these past two years and suggesting they think again. Having read a little of this man’s blog in the past, I know he writes about ‘prohibitionists’ – and has referred to me with this term – yet here he is seeking the censorship of my Diaries. How curious. How afraid he must be of this book going out into the world. The publishers remain unperturbed. They did write back though, asking what his stake was in all of this. Good question.

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