Cannabis message wrong - Noreen

KATIE BOWLER

THE FOUNDER of Burton Addiction Centre (BAC) has hit out at the "mixed signals" from a professor on a drugs advisory group who claimed cannabis did not cause major health issues.

Professor David Nutt, of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), has been widely reported in the media as saying that smoking the class B substance created only a "relatively small risk" of psychotic illness, while those who supported downgrading ecstasy from a class A to a class B drug had "won the intellectual argument".

He accused former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith of "devaluing" scientific research. In 2004, cannabis went from class B to C but was upgraded again by Ms Smith in 2008.

However, BAC founder Noreen Oliver (pictured), who has received an MBE for her work helping addicts, slammed the comments, saying cannabis was a highly addictive drug which led to 'harder' substances.

She said: "It isn't just about mental health. I have worked with thousands of drug users and they all say cannabis is an entry drug. We did research and from our records it showed that 99.9 per cent of the time cannabis leads on to stronger drugs.

"When the tolerance feelings go up, you have to keep increasing the drug or alcohol to keep up with them, then people will look for something stronger to give them a harder hit.

"There is evidence cannabis affects mental health and we haven't had research on what today's stronger skunk effect will have on people in the future.

"I don't know why Professor Nutt is sending out mixed signals to an already hard-hit country with drug and alcohol misuse.

"We should be looking at why people feel they want to feel like this and look at what's missing.

"I would say to Professor Nutt 'come and talk to our users and look at the effects it has had on them their families and the community'. We need to look at the problem - not send out signals to kids who might think 'it's only going to harm me a little'."

Speaking to the Mail last year, Keron Fletcher, consultant addictions psychiatrist for South Staffordshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, said mental health problems had increased even in first-time cannabis users.

He said: "We need to send a clear signal that cannabis is dangerous because, by making it more acceptable, more people will smoke it.

"But we do have a bigger problem with alcohol, which causes 20,000 deaths a year, than cannabis.

"It's very difficult to say which drugs should be upgraded or downgraded but I'd warn against any use of them."