Investigating the proposition that cannabis is worth bothering with, this hot topic looks at reports that stronger cannabis on the market is increasing harms to users, prospects of recovery from disorders and dependence, and the emerging response to synthetic forms of cannabis like ‘spice’.

In 1990s Britain a common reaction to allocating resources to treating cannabis users was, ‘Why bother? We have more than enough patients with problems with serious drugs like heroin.’ The typically calming use of the drug by adults was seen as preferable to the main alternative – alcohol and its associated violence and disorder. Calls for a treatment response were seen as pathologising what in many societies is both normal and in some ways desirable youth development: trying new experiences, challenging conventions, and exposing the hypocrisy of alcohol-drinking adults. In 1997 the Independent on Sunday launched a campaign to decriminalise cannabis, culminating in a mass ‘roll-up’, and 16,000-strong pro-cannabis march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square. Its Editor Rosie Boycott wrote in the paper about her own coming-of-age experience smoking cannabis, telling readers:

“I Rolled my first joint on a hot June day in Hyde Park. Summer of ’68. Just 17. Desperate to be grown-up. … My first smoke, a mildly giggly intoxication, was wholly anti-climatic. The soggy joint fell apart. I didn’t feel changed. But that act turned me – literally – into an outlaw. I was on the other side of the fence from the police – or the fuzz, as we used to call them. So were a great many of my generation.”

The campaign was explosive, but short-lived, apparently subsiding when Boycott left to take up her role as Editor of the Daily Express. A decade later, the Independent issued an apology for the campaign. ‘If only they had known then, what they knew now’, was the message of the article, referring to the reportedly damaging impact of the more potent strains of cannabis and its links to “mental health problems and psychosis for thousands of teenagers”.