Schizophrenia and the tragic story of Moby Grape

 celebrity, heroes and inspirational figures, mental health, music, Psychology, substance abuse  No Responses »
Sep 162012
 

Recently, after several years without a turntable, I treated myself to one and started digging out LPs I hadn’t played in years. Among the delights I rediscovered was the music of Moby Grape. Moby Who? I hear you say.

Well, for 6 months or so back in 1967, Moby Grape were the ‘next big new thing’ for the record companies starting to take a serious interest in the burgeoning hippie music scene of San Francisco. Unfortunately Moby Grape’s star did not rise for very long, crashing down in a tragic welter of legal disputes, drug abuse and ‘madness’.

RCA already had an album out by Jefferson Airplane by late 1966. Warner Bros had signed the Grateful Dead but didn’t quite know what to do with them. Quicksilver Messenger Service were just getting going and Janis Joplin was beginning to find her feet in Big Brother & The Holding Company.

For most A&R men/talent scouts filtering into the San Francisco Bay Area, the local hippie bands, with to some extent the exception of the Airplane, were just weird. They didn’t understand the music business. Moreover, in their insular, stoned way, most of them didn’t want to understand that music was a business! Most of the local bands just wanted to play whatever music they and their friends fancied, without the slightest thought of whether their songs could ever be made into hit singles.

The Airplane understood – or at least some of the band’s members did! – that music was a business and that their sense of art sometimes had to be compromised if they wanted to make serious money from their music. Unsurprisingly then, the Airplane were the first of the San Francisco hippie bands to make a record and the first to have hit singles. That band’s ability to balance art with commerciality kept them on the charts for around 25 years while continuing to earn critical accolades right into the late 1970s as the renamed Jefferson Starship before they lost most of their sense of art in the pursuit of money during the 1980s.

Back in late 1966 Moby Grape had a similar ethic to the Airplane – this ethic coming in part at least from sharing one Matthew Katz as manager. (The Grape can also be seen as the first of the many Airplane/Starship spin-offs as singer/guitarist Skip Spence had previously spent around 6 months as the Airplane’s drummer.) While the Grape, with a 3-guitar attack, would jam for 20 minutes just as readily as the Grateful Dead, they understood that pop records needed shortish, hummable tunes with distinctive arrangements. Moreover, unlike some of the local bands, they polished their singing until they could produce the best male vocal harmonies this side of The Beach Boys.

The video below of the Grape performing ‘Omaha’ and ‘8:05’ live on The Mike Douglas Show in 1967 gives a little flavour of the range and quality of the band’s music. Left to right, the band are Spence, Jerry Miller (vocals/lead guitar), Bob Mosley (vocals/bass) and Peter Lewis (vocals/guitar), with singing drummer Don Stevenson behind them.

Play Video

While Warner Bros pondered just what they had signed with the Dead and Quicksilver laughed contemptuously at the men in suits who talked to them about recording deals, Columbia Records loved what they got in Moby Grape after a short but fierce bidding war.

And they thought they knew exactly what to do with them.

Too commercial for their own good…and too badly behaved!
What happened to the Grape is a legend among those who know.

What some rock critics still describe as the best of the San Francisco hippie band records, ‘MOBY GRAPE’, was sabotaged by Columbia releasing almost the entire album simultaneously as singles, thus confusing deejays as which one to push. A substantial section of the ‘underground’ press thought the album was too poppy – too commercial – and declared it ‘unhip’.  Attempts to promote the album nationally were sunk by the Grape themselves who got thrown off a tour supporting The Mamas & The Papas for bad behaviour such as ‘mooning’ the teenage girls in the audience. In spite of all this, the album still made the Top 20.

The recording of the Grape’s second album was moved from Los Angeles to New York City after Columbia released the band were spending more time partying than recording. In New York, however, the band began to fracture, with Peter Lewis walking out to fly home, and some of the partying reached truly epicurean levels. After consuming large quantities of LSD with a self-declared black witch, Skip Spence decided Don Stevenson needed saving from himself and tried to chop down his hotel room door with a fire axe to kill him.

Spence was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and spent 6 months in Belle Vue psychiatric hospital before being released to cut an offbeat solo album, ‘OAR’, regarded by some as a ‘psychedelic masterpiece’ of sorts.

The Grape’s second album, ‘WOW’/’GRAPE JAM’ – though it certainly had its moments – was, unsurprisingly, a disjointed, indulgent affair. However, some of the underground press actually praised the psychedelic effects and the strangeness of some tracks. Still there was enough buzz about the Grape for it to do even slightly better on the charts than the debut.

With Spence incapacitated, the remaining quartet regrouped, recorded the engaging, country-oriented ‘MOBY GRAPE ‘69’ and set about some heavy touring schedules. In spite of this, the album didn’t sell well – and then Bob Mosley quit to join the Marines! At a time when American youth culture was convulsed with antagonism to American involvement in the Vietnam War, Mosley becoming a marine was seen as both bizarre and a betrayal. However, Mosley wasn’t a marine for long, being court-martialled out of the Marines after assaulting an officer and being diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic.

Lewis, Stevenson and Miller made the more than marginally-interesting ‘TRULY FINE CITIZEN’ as a contract filler before going their separate ways.

And that should have been it…but in 1971 the band reunited with all 5 members. Such was the interest in a fully-fledged Grape reunion that the band were able to spurn the Airplane’s new Grunt Records vanity label, to sign with Warner Bros. Unfortunately the resulting ‘20 GRANITE CREEK’ didn’t have quite enough killer tracks to make it a winner and the short tour to promote it was marred by uneven performances.

The band members then found themselves unable to use the Moby Grape name as Matthew Katz, ex-manager now for a couple of years, claimed ownership of the name. The band began a 30+-year battle to regain it.

Various further reunions have taken place since the early 70s and a handful of interesting but unsuccessful albums have been made for minor labels, usually using some variation of the name, to avoid Katz suing. Spence was involved in some of the reunions, usually just for a short while; sometimes Mosley has not been involved in the reunions.

It would appear Mosley coped better with having Schizophrenia than Spence did – though the latter compounded his mental health problems by significant substance abuse (alcohol, heroin and cocaine). Spence spent long periods of time in residential mental institutions or transient accommodation. Both Spence and Mosley were homeless at times in the 1990s, with Mosley homeless again in 2006 when Peter Lewis picked him up from the side of a San Diego highway to tell him the band had finally won their name back from Katz. That, however, was way too late for Spence who had died in 1999 just before his 53rd birthday.

Moby Grape reformed in 2006 partly to help Mosley but news of  a new legal injunction from Katz the following year reportedly led to a partial relapse.

The story of Moby Grape is indeed a tragedy – partly self-inflicted, of course – but no less a tragedy for that. When I think of Spence and Mosley, I must confess that it does irk me that men who have made such outstanding music and given me so much pleasure should have suffered so much.

20% of a group have Schizophrenia?!?
The incidence of Schizophrenia in the general population is around 1%. Even among dizygotic (non-identical) twins who share 50% the same genes, the concordance rate found in most sample groups is less than 20%  – eg: Irving Gottesman found a rate of 17% in 1991. So it is quite remarkable that Moby Grape had a 20% concordance rate among their 5 genetically-unrelated members.

It could, of course, be a huge coincidence. Or, it could be that something in the way the Grape conducted themselves precipitated the onset of Schizophrenia in Spence and Mosley.

While research in recent years has moved the emphasis away from purely psychological explanations for Schizophrenia more onto biological causes, the concept of diathesis-stress (Joseph Zubin & Bonnie Spring, 1977) is still widely accepted amongst psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. In other words, you may have a genetic diathesis or predisposition to develop Schizophrenia – in the same way some people are more likely to develop cancer or heart disease – but it still needs some kind of ‘stress trigger’. For some people with the predisposition, this can be a single, emotionally-overwhelming life event such as the death of a spouse. For others, the stress trigger is more the accumulative effect of certain, dangerous lifestyle choices.

The Grape, certainly in the first flush of money and fame, were notorious for indulging in a party lifestyle. And, in San Francisco in 1967, a party lifestyle almost certainly included vast amounts of cannabis and frequent use of LSD. While the concordance rate linking the onset of Schizophrenia with cannabis use varies from study to study – with the age of the user being a significant variable factor – the association between the 2 is now well-established and generally-accepted – see: Time to turn against Cannabis!

There is almost no available research on whether the use of LSD is linked to the onset of Schizophrenia – though a number of experts have posited, from case studies, that it looks like a connection exists. Certainly, besides Spence and Mosley, there are a number of other high profile rockers from the 1960s who appear to have had Schizophrenia triggered by LSD use – most notably Roky Erickson of The 13th Floor Elevators, Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac and The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson – though Wilson’s illness was later reclassified as Manic-Depressive Psychosis (Bipolar Disorder). (There’s enough similarity between the features of Mania and Paranoid Schizophrenia to perhaps understand how Wilson’s psychiatrist made the misdiagnosis.)

It is, of course, dangerous to generalise from case studies but it is certainly tempting to use them to link Schizophrenia with LSD. So-called ‘acid casualties’ are largely a by-product of the late 1960s. The reason for this may be that LSD declined dramatically in popularity in the early1970s. Even in San Franciso, centre of the hippie culture, the preference switched to a different type of drug. (The Dead’s Jerry Garcia and the Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen both became heroin addicts; while Kaukonen’s bandmate Paul Kantner was just one of many well-to-do rock stars who went into rehab on numerous occasions in an attempt to kick cocaine.) While LSD enjoyed some revival in popularity in the club and ‘rave’ scenes of the 1980s and 1990s, it has never regained anything like the widespread and frequent use it enjoyed in the late 1960s.

Individual differences and risk
It is probably safe to assume the almost de rigueur heavy cannabis use amongst San Francisco musicians put Spence and Mosley at risk – and frequent LSD use may have increased the risk factor. That they developed Schizophrenia and the other 3 didn’t may well be due to Spence and Mosley having the genetic predisposition while the others didn’t.

That Mosley appears to have coped better with Schizophrenia than Spence was probably due to many factors, particularly social and support networks. However, their Grape bandmates – Peter Lewis in particular – have often been credited as supporting both men, as friends and by seeking to involve them in the various reunions. Undoubtedly heavy substance abuse will almost certainly have contributed to Spence’s continued decline.

Individual temperament may well have been a factor too. Spence seems to have been more of an extravert while Mosley, offstage at least, seems to have been more of an introvert – something of a reflective loner. Lewis’ descriptions of Spence trying to lure teenage girls to his trailer in the 1980s smack of the compulsive ruthlessness of Psychoticism. A temperament high in Extraversion and Psychoticism (Spence) would, according to Hans & Sybil Eysenck (1976), be more likely to facilitate the acting out of Paranoid Schizophrenia than a temperament inclined more to Introversion and Neuroticism (Mosley).

Much of this is, of course, speculation in trying to understand how Schizophrenia could blight the lives of 2 key figures in a band who could have been a major force in rock music in different circumstances.

As I close this blog post with a video below of the 4-piece Grape miming to Mosley’s sublime ‘It’s A Beautiful Day Today’ (from the ‘69’ album), I find it poignant to note that such glad-to-be-alive lyrics came from such a troubled mind.

Play Video

Dawn to dawn a lifetime
The birds sing and day’s begun
The heaven will shine from dawn to dusk
With golden rays of sun  

People on their way
Beginning a brand new day
I love (a-)hearing people say
It’s a beautiful day today

People in the streets
Rushing everywhere
Moving fast and how I know
They got to get somewhere

People on their way
Beginning a brand new day
I love (a-)hearing people say
It’s a beautiful day today

Lyrics copyright © 1969 South Star Music & Blackwood Music

Is Britain really broken?

 celebrity, community, crime, government, morality, politics, prejudice & discrimination, racism, religion, society, Spiral Dynamics, spirituality  6 Responses »
Jan 222010
 

 As part of his pre-election manoeuvring, Conservative leader David Cameron, according to the BBC, has today accused Labour of ‘moral failure’ and presiding over a country in both economic and social recession.

He has said the UK rewards parents who split up and is a place where professionals are told to follow rules rather than do what is best.

As an example of what he calls ‘broken Britain’, Cameron talked about the case of 2 brothers sentenced today for brutally attacking 2 other boys in South Yorkshire.

The brothers, aged 10 and 11 at the time, attacked their victims in Edlington, Doncaster, last April. They threatened to kill their victims, then aged 9 and 11, stamped on them and attacked them with broken glass, bricks and sticks. The brothers admitted causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

While stressing that the case is not typical, Cameron cited it as a shocking example of what he calls Britain’s broken society, one of the key themes of the party’s campaign but a diagnosis rejected by the Government which said the Doncaster case was “uniquely terrible and extremely rare”.

In a book of interviews with him by GQ editor Dylan Jones, published this week, Cameron is quoted as saying: “I’m going to be as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer, and radical social reform is what this country needs right now.

“Margaret Thatcher in her time realised that the big challenge was reviving Britain’s economy, and we should recognise that the challenge for the modern Conservatives is reviving our society.

“It’s dealing with the issues of family breakdown, welfare dependency, failing schools, crime, and the problems that we see in too many of our communities.”

In fact, the ‘broken Britain’ theme is not new. Several years ago, Cameron tasked former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith with creating a ‘think tank’ to investigate and report on what was wrong with Britain, with a particular emphasis on social factors. Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice has produced several very interesting reports since and has been using the term ‘broken Britain’ since at least July 2007. The concept began to capture headlines in a big way in February 2009 when Duncan Smith used the outraged headlines around 13-year-old Alfie Patten fathering a child by 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman to hold up the under-aged parenting as prime example of “what’s wrong with broken Britain”.

So is Britain broken?
Well, our kingdom has a hell of a lot of problems – just think:-

  • Struggling to make any sustainable progress out of recession when many other comparable countries are clearly on their way to recovery
  • Saddled with a national debt, the paying  back of which will take decades long-term or, short-term, cripple much of the public sector through severe cuts and/or hamstring the private sector through raised taxes
  • High rates of petty crime, drug addiction and alcoholism compared to the rest of the EU
  • The highest teenage pregnancy rate in the Western world
  • Unsustainably high rates of male unemployment
  • A growing problem with gun crime and knife crime
  • Rising ethnic tensions as multi-culturalism is acknowledged to have failed and the Government fails to deal with high rates of immigration – see the Blog: ‘Is restricting immigration discriminatory?’
  • The gap between rich and poor being acknowledged by the Office of National Statistics to be greater now than it was when Labour came to power in 1997
  • Politicians widely perceived as corrupt for lining their own pockets via the public purse and permitting the bankers to outrightly rape the public purse to pay their own bloated bonuses
  • The very union under attack as the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish campaign for more powers for their devolved governments

But is it worse than it was? It’s interesting to note that in 1996 Tony Blair used the James Bulger case to attack the Conservative government of John Major in a similar way to Cameron attacking Labour today. Blair said: “We hear of crimes so horrific they provoke anger and disbelief in equal proportions … These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name.”

Qualitatively, I doubt that Britain is more ‘broken’ than it was when Blair cited Bulger but quantitatively maybe…. There have always been horrible, shocking crimes against children – just think of Ian Brady, Myra Hindley and the ‘Moors Murders’ back in the early 1960s. There have always been ruthless, brutal criminals – again, think the 1960s and the Kray Twins. Under-age pregnancy and alcoholism are millenniums-old problems and highly-addictive recreational drugs have long been available, if you knew who to ask. And racism, at root, is just a manifestation of tribalism.

2 things, though, have changed dramatically over the past 50-60 years:-

  • Firstly, the sheer scale of these problems across Britain is mind-blowingly larger than it was back in the 1950s. While Britain’s post-war, pre-Americanisation ‘Golden Age’, as depicted so charmingly in the Ealing films of the era, was a manufactured myth, the scale of crime, corruption, substance abuse and teenage pregnancy we experience today would have been unbelievable to most British citizens of the time.
  • The wide-scale spread of these problems – once largely the sinful preserves of the more wealthy classes – has permeated right through the ‘ordinary’ people – what used to be considered traditionally the working and lower middle classes. These ‘salt of the earth’ types generally held higher moral codes than many of their so-called social betters. I’m making huge mythical generalisations, of course; but, as generalisations and allowing for many exceptions, they pretty much hold true. For example, when I was a snobbish middle-class teenager in the late 1960s, my friends and I thought it was ‘cool’ and ‘groovy’ to smoke cannabis. However, our working class peers thought it was disgusting and anything to do with hippies was morally depraved. Nowadays, the use of cannabis amongst working class teenagers is commonplace. Whilst the older brothers of my working class peers considered it good sport to bonk a girl in the alley outside her parents’ house late at night, they thought the middle-class hippie couples living together openly without being married was going to lead to societal meltdown!

Where’s the morality gone?
Back in 1999, when I was involved in putting together the HemsMESH project under the watchful eye of Spiral Dynamics ‘guru’ Don Beck, I remember Don talking about how the British churches didn’t do BLUE any more. In other words, they weren’t projecting strong moral codes on how people ought to live, treat each other and relate to society. In Don’s view, the British churches had become dominated by liberal GREEN thinking, with its motif of whatever fulfils the human spirit and doesn’t overtly harm others is OK.

If that sounds similar to some of the hippie mantras of the 1960s or rave lyrics of the 1980s and 1990s, then you’re hearing the same codes in action. GREEN undermines BLUE disciplines and releases RED to indulge as much as it likes without restraint, aided and abetted by ORANGE technology facilitating unlimited internet gambling and beaming uncensored violence and explicit pornography into your 10-year-old’s bedroom. It seems like an absurdly simple diagnosis of the causes of our ills – and there is, indeed, much detail to fill in – but, as an overview, it’s as simple as that.

Don Beck, from ‘Bible belt’ Texas, would, of course, be highly sensitive to the failings of the British churches; but the United States is generally acknowledged to be a much more religious country than Britain. Of course, the US has many of the same problems we have and often in more extreme versions and concentrated pockets – East Los Angeles makes Brixton look relatively idyllic! However, as percentages of national populations, the problems are on nothing like the same, overwhelming scale as here. The American churches by and large make a good fight against the ‘sin’ – though it’s clear GREEN is starting to undermine BLUE in the controversy over the ordination of gay bishops in the East Coast Anglican Church.

But, in seeking to resolve Britain’s problems, we can’t just re-engineer large-scale religious BLUE and expect it to work.

You only have to look at the opposition to the so-called ‘Islamification’ of Britain. It’s all but impossible, of course, but if you could factor out the extremists and their ideologies and discount the racist antipathy towards Islam simply because most of its practitioners have brown skins… then Islam offers much the same kind of solid BLUE values for living that Christianity traditionally has.

And a very sizeable part of the British people simply don’t want that. The proverbial RED-GREEN harmonic of it’s-good-for-you-to-do-as-you-like is now too embedded in British culture. As an example, for all that The Sun moans and whinges about Britain’s moral decay, it’s not prepared to do away with its page 3 girl or stop publishing photographs of various celebrities in indiscrete poses. Why? Because that’s what a sizeable number of people want, as verified by the paper’s sales and visits to its web site. There’s enough BLUE left in society at large to recognise the mess; but not enough to embrace the disciplines necessary to get out of the mess.

So, what Spiral Dynamics calls a 2nd Tier approach is needed – the ability to look at all the competing codes and their values and take action in the interests of the whole, meeting all needs as far as possible within that paradigm but even being prepared to sacrifice some freedoms to establish the paradigm.

David Cameron is to be praised mightily for putting his party’s emphasis on social factors. But, if he simply wants to bring back certain disciplines, it’s going to mean as little to current British culture as John Major’s (PURPLE-BLUE) ‘back to basics’ campaign did in 1997 against Tony Blair’s (RED-ORANGE) ‘let’s make money and live the good life’ ethos.

Time to turn against Cannabis!

 community, education, mental health, Psychology, society, Spiral Dynamics, substance abuse  13 Responses »
Jul 282007
 
The dangers of cannabis use are back on the front pages thanks to a report just published in The Lancet from a team led by Theresa Moore & Dr Stanley Zammit. From their meta-analysis of 35 studies from around the world, Moore & Zammit inferred that any use of cannabis – which means even taking the drug just once – was associated with a 41% greater risk of experiencing some form of psychosis – and possibly even developing full-blown Schizophrenia. People who smoked the most cannabis were the most likely to suffer a psychotic breakdown; for frequent users, the risk rose to between 50% and 200%.

Overall, cannabis could be to blame for one in seven cases of Schizophrenia and other life-shattering mental illness. With up to 40% of teenagers and young adults in the UK believed to have tried cannabis, the researchers estimated that the drug could be behind 14% of cases of Schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses.

Perhaps fortuitiously Gordon Brown announced on 18 July that the status of cannabis was to be considered as part of a wide-ranging drugs review commissioned by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

The Brown-Smith move was initiated a week after former Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith called for reclassification of cannabis from ‘C’ back to ‘B’ in the ‘Breakthrough Britain’ report of his policy group on social breakdown. Duncan Smith’s call was trailed and endorsed several days before the report’s publication by current Tory leader David Cameron.

The basis of Duncan Smith’s call was the already-large body of evidence linking the development of various psychoses – especially the onset of Schizophrenia – to the use of cannabis. However, Cameron focussed more specifically on ‘Skunk’, the genetically-modified development of ‘the weed’ containing approximately 3 times the amount of the active ingredient THC as ‘standard’ cannabis.

To some extent, in differentiating between standard cannabis and Skunk, Cameron was following the lead of the Independent on Sunday (IoS) newspaper which campaigned right up to and beyond then-Home Secretary David Blunkett’s 2004 reclassification for the complete decriminilisation of the use, storage and selling of cannabis. (The IoS has been one of the most prominent pro-cannabis voices in recent years and the paper’s influence amongst leading thinkers and parliamentarians on the issue is thoght to have been significant.)

However, in ordering a review of the classification of cannabis per se, Gordon Brown is treating all varieties of the drug as potentially warranting a more ‘dangerous’ classification.

As evidence has grown dramatically in the past few years of just how dangerous cannabis can be, so the likes of the IoS have been caught on the backfoot, overtly supporting the legalisation of a truly dangerous drug. It, therefore, suits them to draw a huge distinction between ‘standard’ cannabis and Skunk; the IoS argument is that it only campaigned for the ‘more or less harmless’ standard cannabis and the paper is totally against the use and distribution of Skunk.

As regards David Cameron’s own record on cannabis, it may well suit his agenda to follow the IoS distinction between standard cannabis and Skunk. He has all but admitted that he has used the drug himself by refusing to deny reports this February that he had been punished for smoking cannabis during his schoolhood at Eton; his office have also allowed stories to circulate that he was an occasional user at university. Only the month before (January 2007), the Tory leader had said publicly he opposed making cannabis legal but would be “relaxed” about legalising it for medicinal use if there was evidence of health benefits.

Hopefully the rash of Government ministers who have admitted recently to indulging in mild cannabis use during their younger days - including Alistair Darling, Ruth Kelly, Hazel Blears, John Hutton, Yvette Cooper and Jacqui Smith herself – will lessen the potential impact on political careers of *owning up* and this will enable a more mature debate on the issue.

Unfortunately many, many people have been caught in the trap the IoS and Cameron have found themselves in. For decades users and research scientists have said that cannabis was less harmful than alcohol and tobacco and, therefore, the argument against legalisation on health grounds simply didn’t stand up. How now do the politicians who supported such propositions reconcile their ‘service for the public good’ with their support for a drug some increasingly consider as dangerous as heroin or cocaine…?

The Skunk-’Standard Cannabis’ Fallacy
While there is no doubt that Skunk is a much more potent drug than standard cannabis, to draw such a distinction between the two varieties is at best disingenuous. Moore & Dammit certainly do not let standard cannabis off the hook and the science appears not to support such a distinction – at least in terms of the serious long term psychological effects.

Zammit personally led an earlier study, published in 2002, which looked at 50,000 Swedish conscripts from 1970 through to 1996. Those who had tried cannabis by the time they were 18 were 2.4 times more likely to receive a diagnosis of Schizophrenia. Those who had used cannabis more than 50 times had 6 times the usual risk of developing Schizophrenia. Zammit and his colleagues then estimated that 13% of Schizophrenia cases could be averted if all cannabis use were prevented.

Another study of almost 5,000 subjects in the Netherlands replicated the findings, and also found that cannabis users were more likely to be diagnosed with Schizophrenia during the study’s 3-year follow-up period. Other studies suggested that participants who used cannabis in their early teens were more likely to be diagnosed with Schizophrenia by their mid-20s.
 
In 2005 Netherlands researchers reviewed 5 studies and concluded that the use of cannabis approximately doubles the risk of developing Schizophrenia. Because the studies excluded anyone with a history of psychosis and controlled for the use of other drugs, they were “able to show the specific effects of cannabis”.

Also in 2005 research by Robin Murray of the London Institute of Psychiatry – eg: Marta DiForti & Robin Murray – found that those who smoked cannabis regularly at 18 were 1.6 times more likely to suffer serious psychiatric problems, including Schizophrenia, by their mid-20s. For those who were regular users by 15, the risk of mental illness by the age of 26 was 4.5 times greater than normal.

Further Dutch, German and New Zealand studies have all found a relationship between regular cannabis use and psychosis, with heavy cannabis users doubling or tripling their risk of psychosis.

Critically a Department of Health spokesman summed up much of the emerging evidence in January 2005 thus: “There is medical clinical evidence now that there is an important causal factor between cannabis use and schizophrenia – not the only factor, but an important causal factor. That is the common consensus among the medical fraternity.”

Clearly, while there are minor variations in the percentages of risk, ‘standard’ cannabis is a very dangerous drug. Compared to Skunk, it isn’t at all harmless in the way pro-cannabis lobbyists like the IoS have suggested. It is simply that Skunk is a genetically-engineered more powerful version of a naturally-dangerous drug. Robin Murray, in commenting on the Moore-Zammit findings, possibly put it best: “My own experiences suggest to me that the risk with Skunk is higher. Therefore their estimate that 14% of cases of Schizophrenia in the UK are due to cannabis is now probably an understatement.”

Why does smoking cannabis cause Schizophrenia in some but not others?
Irving Gottesman’s 1991 large-scale study is generally taken as the ‘gold standard’ for evidence that a substantial number of people have a genetic predisposition to develop Schizophrenia. He found a concordance rate of 48% for monozygotic twins – in other words, if one identical twin develops the illness, there is a 48% likelihood the other will - reducing down through 17% for dizygotic (non-identical) twins), 6% for half-siblings  and 2% for the nephew/niece-aunt/uncle relationship, set against the 1% risk of developing the illness in the general population. So, basically the more genes you share with someone with Schizophrenia – ‘genetic relatedness’ - the more likely you are to develop the illness. Genetic predisposition to develop a very serious illness is a pretty scary proposition. However, it doesn’t mean that having a genetic predisosition automatically means you will develop the illness. It’s an example of the Diathesis-Stress model; in almost all such cases, it will need a damaging lifestyle or significant ’life event’ to trigger the onset of the illness.

For people with the genetic predisposition, smoking cannabis can be that trigger.

People without the genetic predisposition may get away with prolonged heavy use of cannabis without developing a psychosis.

So how do you know if you’ve got the genetic predisposition? Since the scientists have yet to isolate the gene(s) responsible, they can’t test for it. Clearly, if you’ve a close relative who has or has had pschotic episodes, you’re at risk. However, there being no apparent mental illness in the family is no guarantee that someone doesn’t have the genetic predisposition since the predisposition can be passed on through several generations via recessive genes without it being obvious.

If someone is high in the Psychoticism Dimension of Temperament, then it might be logical to assume that person (usually male) is more at risk. However, for all there being some similarities in the behaviour of psychotics and those very high in Psychoticism, Hans J Eysenck – Hans Eysenck & Sybil Eysenck, 1976 – went to great lengths to emphasise that Psychoticism and psychosis are not the same thing.

From the research we considered earlier, it seems that using cannabis during adolescence may be a significant influencing factor. (The shortest development history on record so far is of a boy who started smokin the drug at 14 and was a full-blown schizophrenic by 17.)

The results of a 2007 study by Xiaobo Li et al at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York may have found a degree of explanation for this. They found that heavy use of cannabis caused the same type of abnormalities in certain areas of the brain as were found in the brains of people with Schizophrenia, and these abnormalities were the most pronounced in schizophrenics subjects who regularly smoked cannabis.

The abnormalities occur in a brain pathway related to language and auditory functions which is still developing during adolescence.

Thus if a young person is genetically at risk for Schizophrenia, the research suggests the use of cannabis can cause the same kind of damage the Schizophrenia would cause, which could bring on the illness when it might otherwise have not have emerged, cause earlier onset, and/or worsen the condition.

The ‘Harm’ Fallacy
Although Gordon Brown is said to have “a personal instinct” that cannabis should be reclassified back to ‘C’, there is no guarantee that will happen. It certainly didn’t when then-Home Secretary Charles Clarke first reviewed predecesser David Blunkett’s 2004 decision in January 2006.

However, Clarke’s decision was influenced substantially by a report from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs which found alcohol (significantly so) and tobacco to be more harmful than cannabis. However, the Council’s findings related primarily to 3 classes of harm: physical harm, dependence and social harm. What they don’t appear to have considered (at least in sufficient depth) is the nature and depth of psychological harm.

There simply is no ‘cure’ for Schizophrenia. It is a serious and debilitating illness, with nearly a third of sufferers deteriorating progressively until they require full-time care and supervision. (The archetypal insane!) According to a 2004 study led by Delbert Robinson & Margaret Woerner, just 13.7% of diagnosed sufferers make an effective recovery. (However, since the illness is not well understood – there is a growing body of professional opinion that we should revert to Eugene Bleuler’s original 1908 proposition that the schizophrenias (plural) were a group of distinct psychiatric illnesses with some key similarities – it is difficult to be precise about what consitutes ‘recovery’.) The majority of sufferers will require a lifetime of managing the illness via medication and/or psychotherapy.

While the problems caused by alcohol misuse and tobacco use should never be under-estimated, it is surely a fallacy to say they are more harmful than cannabis. Even the argument about scale of use is becoming flawed. While the level of alcohol misuse is rising, tobacco use is continuing to fall while the rate of cannabis use, especially amongst teenagers, is on the rise.

In 2005 some 10,000 11-17-year-olds required medical treatment of some kind as a result of cannabis use. As researcher John Macleod told The Times in March this year: “…the number of cases of Schizophrenia will increase significantly in line with increased use of the drug.” No wonder that paper concluded we are sitting on a ‘cannabis timebomb’.

Should Cannabis be reclassified to ‘B’?
The Association of Chief Police Officers responded with some dismay to Gordon Brown’s 18 July announcement for all the reasons they lobbied for the original reclassification in 2004 – ie: large amonts of resources wasted on chasing smalltime perpetrators of what the general public largely percieved as a ‘non-crime’. (It is worth stating that there have been a notable minority of senior police officers who have consistenly disagreed with ACPO’s position.)

Which is where the views of Paul Corry, the public affairs director of Rethink,show us at least some of the way forward. (Rethink is a mental health charity which, amongst many other worthwhile activities, has campaigned vociferously for more research into establishing the causes of mental illnesses. In particular, it has campaigned for research into the effects of cannabis use on mental health.)

Corry wants education in schools about the dangers of cannabis use, directed from the Department of Education & Skills (DfES) so programmes are mandatory. Cleverly, he also wants young people who have suffered mental health problems as a result of cannabis use to be a key part of delivering the programmes on the grounds that teenagers are more likely to listen to other young people than teachers and police officers.

On an annecdotal note, I can certainly see Corry’s point. In teaching a class of disaffected Year 9s (the 14-year-olds) recently, I overheard 2 students discussing ‘blow’. When I asked them if they knew anything about Schizophrenia, one of them said he had an uncle with it. When I explained the link between cannabis use and Schizophrenia, they (and their mates!) wanted to know more.

In their kinds of communities (traditional working class/former mining), where the traditions and the superstitions associated with the PURPLE vMEME dominate culturally, mental illness still tends to attract real stigma. These young people viewed Schizophrenia with abhorrence; they don’t want to have anything to do with mental illness or anything that causes it. The kind of educational programmes Corry is proposing may well have a major impact with this kind of teenager.

(Incidentally, when asked what was a ‘safe’ level of cannabis use, I gave the Department of Health 2005 guideline of 50 joints (average cannabis content) per year.  One student went white at this while his mates laughed at him, one of them saying, “Fuck me, you must do 50 a week!”)

Importantly Paul Corry and Rethink are against reclassification on the grounds that it will criminalise what they believe should be perceived as a health issue.

Simon Heffer, in an otherwise-heavy handed piece in the Daily Telegraph, made the point that reclassification would give the courts a wider and more stringent range of penalties, particularly for use with traffickers.

If we aimed to implement both Corry’s and Heffer’s proposals but also looked to address Corry’s concerns…

# Firstly, the DfES would implement programmes in both primary and secondary schools to educate children and teenagers about the dangers of cannabis (and other drugs). Children will pass some of this on to their parents. (Perhaps, given the likely cost to the National Health Service of more people developing psychoses, perhaps the Department of Health could fund anti-cannabis educational campaigns in the media…?)

Secondly, reclassification would encourage and enable the police and the courts to tackle the dealers and traffickers. If the general public are being made more aware of the dangers of cannabis use, then the police should receive more support in directing their resources this way.

Thirdly, as Rethink is campaigning for, the NHS should put much more resources into identifying and helping people with mental health problems. At the same time the Ministry of Justice can issue regulations directing police to treat personal use levels of possession either as a cautionary offence (as under the current ‘C’ classification) or to seek a conviction requiring medical treatment, if appropriate.

While I was never much of a cannabis user – never a smoker, so very uncomfortable with that method of ingestion! – I freely admit I have ‘dabbled’ at times in the past. (Since I’ve yet to develop any form of psychosis – at least I don’t think I’m psychotic!! – I can only thank God I don’t seem to have the genetic predisposition which makes cannabis a near surefire route to Schizophrenia.). Until recently I approved of the Independent on Sunday’s legalisation campaign. I whole-heartedly approved of Blunkett’s 2004 decision. Today I have friends who are users. I have no wish for my friends to be criminalised. On the other hand, we need to recognise cannabis for the highly dangerous drug it is, deglamourise it and deal very harshly with those who deal and traffick in it.

I’ve had to deal with Schizophrenics. Believe me, if we can prevent some people from developing the illness, it’s most definitely worth it.