Tell Your Children

The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

Alex Berenson

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781982103682
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política cultural

In "a brilliant antidote to all the…false narratives about pot" ( American Thinker ), an award-winning author and former New York Times reporter reveals the link between teenage marijuana use and mental illness, and a hidden epidemic of violence caused by the drug—facts the media have ignored as the United States rushes to legalize cannabis. Recreational marijuana is now legal in nine states. Advocates argue cannabis can help everyone from veterans to cancer sufferers. But legalization has been built on myths—that marijuana arrests fill prisons; that most doctors want to use cannabis as medicine; that it can somehow stem the opiate epidemic; that it is beneficial for mental health. In this meticulously reported book, Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter, explodes those myths, explaining that almost no one is in prison for marijuana; a tiny fraction of doctors write most authorizations for medical marijuana, mostly for people who have already used; and marijuana use is linked to opiate and cocaine use. Most of all, THC—the chemical in marijuana responsible for the drug's high—can cause psychotic episodes."Alex Berenson has a reporter's tenacity, a novelist's imagination, and an outsider's knack for asking intemperate questions" (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker ), as he ranges from the London institute that is home to the scientists who helped prove the cannabis-psychosis link to the Colorado prison where a man now serves a thirty-year sentence after eating a THC-laced candy bar and killing his wife. He sticks to the facts, and they are devastating.With the US already gripped by one drug epidemic, Tell Your Children is a "well-written treatise" ( Publishers Weekly ) that "takes a sledgehammer to the promised benefits of marijuana legalization, and cannabis enthusiasts are not going to like it one bit" ( Mother Jones ).

PART ONE

THEN AND NOW

ONE

MADNESS ON TWO CONTINENTS

A century ago, India and Mexico didn’t have much in common.

India was the world’s second most populous country, with 330 million people in 1900. It was mostly Hindu, was a British colony, and had a long history of cannabis use. Taxes and fees on the plant, which the British called Indian hemp, were a major source of government revenue.

Meanwhile, Mexico had a mere 13 million people. It was Catholic, independent, and new to cannabis. The plant was not native to the Western Hemisphere. Spanish colonizers had brought it, though they were largely unaware of its potential as a drug. They used its fibers for rope and ship rigging. Cannabis wasn’t a major industry. Many Mexicans thought of it as a drug used mainly by soldiers and the poor.

Nine thousand miles separated the two countries. They had few connections.

Yet as the end of the nineteenth century approached, both struggled with the same question: Could the drug that Indians knew as bhang, ganja, or charas, and Mexicans called marihuana or Rosa Maria cause mental illness and violence?

The people of both India and Mexico were certain the answer was yes.

In 2012, Isaac Campos, a University of Cincinnati professor, wrote a book on the history of Mexican attitudes toward cannabis. The marijuana lobby in the United States portrays the drug war in Mexico as an outgrowth of American drug laws. Legalizers say the United States has exported its prohibitionist attitudes south.

The theory sounds good. It’s become the conventional wisdom. There’s only one problem. It’s not true.

If anything, the opposite is the case. In his meticulously reported history, Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs, Campos found that in the late 1800s—a period when few Americans had heard of marijuana—people in Mexico believed it caused mental illness and crime. Mexican newspapers portrayed marijuana users as prone to violence and self-injury.

In 1901, for example, a newspaper reported on a man who attacked strangers on a street and then “turned on himself and with bites he tore apart his own arms until a straitjacket could be put on him . . . he was crazy under the influence of marihuana.”

Campos found hundreds of articles offering similar tales. Mexican doctors of the time who researched the drug agreed with the premise. None “rejected the basic view that it caused madness and violence.”

Poor Mexicans were more likely to smoke marijuana than the wealthy. But fear of the drug did not stem from class prejudice. Poorer Mexicans were also concerned about marijuana’s effects. The negative attitude toward cannabis was striking because people in Mexico had experience with psychotropic plants, including peyote and salvia, a type of sage that can produce hallucinations. They had no cultural reason to view marijuana negatively.

Yet they did. As marijuana’s use spread, Mexicans viewed it as different from other drugs. It didn’t merely cause users to hallucinate, like other psychotropics. Or excite them, like cocaine. Or disinhibit them, like alcohol. Instead, especially in large doses, it produced all three effects at once. It led to a delirium indistinguishable from insanity and often accompanied by violence. Newspapers regularly referred to criminals “as either a madman or a marihuano,” Campos wrote.

Year by year, opposition increased. Mexican criminal defendants regularly claimed marijuana had driven them temporarily insane and that they shouldn’t be held responsible for their actions. In one notorious case, the governor of Mexico City claimed in 1913 he had been high when he murdered a political rival.

Finally, in January 1920, the Mexican government found that marijuana was “one of the most pernicious manias of our people” and “not a medicine.” On March 2, 1920, Mexico banned the sale of marijuana, along with cocaine and opiates. The latter two drugs were already becoming the subject of international narcotics control policies. But cannabis was still largely under the radar in Europe and the United States, Campos noted in his book. “Marijuana’s inclusion was clearly Mexico’s own contribution.”

• • •

On the other side of the globe, Indians and their British overlords also worried about the effects of the pungent weed.

Indians prepared cannabis in three ways. They ground the plant’s leaves and stems into a low-THC paste called bhang, which they then mixed into milk shakes—bhang lassi—which they drank at Hindu religious festivals.

Bhang was the most common drug made from cannabis. But Indians also smoked the plant’s flowers, which they called ganja. Enterprising farmers in India had discovered the key to growing potent cannabis was to destroy the male plants in a batch. The remaining plants, all females, would try to attract males by growing larger flowers coated with a sticky resin high in THC. Farmers and smokers knew the resin was the most psychoactive part of the plant. (Across the globe, Mexican cultivators had reached the same conclusion. They called their high-potency marijuana sinsemilla, Spanish for “without seeds.”)

Even more potent than ganja was a paste called charas, the Indian equivalent of hashish. Farmers made charas by rubbing resin from the flowers. Charas was usually smoked, though it could also be eaten.

British colonial records offer fascinating detail about the way Indian hemp was farmed and traded. The plants required careful handling to grow their resin-coated flowers. In Bengal, the biggest province, seedlings were planted in September. In October laborers weeded the fields and in November pruned the seedlings to encourage their growth. Then a “ganja-doctor” arrived to separate the plants by sex. Harvesting and pressing the flowers to produce smokable ganja took place in February and March.

Cannabis cultivation was the lifeblood of the economy in some rural areas. It gave poor farmers the chance to raise a cash crop for sale, while provincial governments took their cut with taxes and licenses.

British colonizers took little notice of India’s cannabis habit at first. In this neglect, they mirrored attitudes at home. In the nineteenth century, cannabis was hardly used in the United Kingdom. The British were far more interested in opium and its derivatives, like laudanum. Those drugs were popular, despite concerns about their potential for addiction and overdose.

But that hands-off attitude began to change by the 1860s. The British had brought what they called lunatic asylums to Indian cities.

And before long the British army doctors running them noticed that many patients had something in common. They or their families blamed their insanity on cannabis.

The trend became clear to colonial officials, too. Like all good colonizers, the British loved bureaucracy and record-keeping. Asylums published patient rosters that included the causes of admission, and “ganja” was commonly listed. In 1873, the government’s financial department wondered if it should restrict cannabis use. It asked provincial officers if they had seen a connection between cannabis, insanity, and violence.

On December 17, 1873, the department published the survey results, providing what is probably the first official link anywhere between cannabis and mental illness. The report found “habitual use does tend to produce insanity.” Still, the British officials called prohibition impractical. Instead, they recommended higher taxes “to discourage the consumption of bhang and ganja.”

But the issue refused to go away.

The hospital rosters piled up. So did reports of brutal crimes. By 1891, a British politician asked for an investigation of whether cannabis might be more dangerous than opium. On July 25, 1893, in response to the criticism, the British government convened a seven-member group to examine cannabis in India. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission included four British officials and three Indians, a breakdown that ensured that the colonizers would control its findings.

The commission heard testimony from 1,193 witnesses. It checked asylum reports and cultivation methods. It even asked a doctor to examine the effects of ganja on a rhesus monkey—who at first resisted being forced to enter a smoke-filled chamber but quickly became “restless and uneasy” on days when he wasn’t allowed inside, and twice escaped his cage and tried to enter the chamber on his own.

On August 6, 1894, the commission issued its report, a massive document—361 pages plus six volumes of appendixes. It found that the link between cannabis, insanity, and violence had been overstated. Some cases that asylum records reported as cannabis-related stemmed from opium and alcohol.

The report found that India should not prohibit bhang, ganja, and charas. Instead, the government should tax and regulate the drugs. One hundred twenty years later, marijuana advocates still cheer the commission’s findings. Cannabis Digest, a Canadian site, wrote in 2014 that:

Marijuana historians and activists rightly regard this commission as a high point in cannabis scholarship. Published in seven volumes, and featuring interviews with a wide range of Indians plus others, it spoke with the voice of reason. It concluded that when used in moderation, ganja, as the locals called it, was benign.

Not exactly.

The British commissioners were happy to keep cannabis—and its tax revenue—legal. But two of the three Indian members disagreed. The sharpest dissent came from Lala Nihal Chand, a Punjabi lawyer. In a 120-page critique published on September 13, 1894, Chand took apart the commission’s report. The commission had failed to distinguish between bhang, the low-THC product made from cannabis leaves, and high-THC ganja and charas, he said.

Of course, Chand never referred to THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient. Chemists would not discover THC’s exact structure until 1964. They would not find the brain receptors it affected until even later.

But everyone agreed that bhang was far less potent than the other preparations. The testimony before the commission also proved that Indians used bhang differently too, Chand wrote. Ordinary Indians drank bhang lassi during occasional religious festivals, enjoying the mild intoxication the milk shakes produced.

On the other hand, ganja and charas smokers were often daily users. Other Indians viewed them with disdain. Chand counted 638 witnesses who had testified against the two drugs. Only 26 had favored them. He even placed in the record folk sayings about the drugs: He who smokes ganja forgets even his own father’s name. He is a charas smoker; you can’t depend on him.

Chand then turned to the question of whether the drugs could cause mental illness. The committee’s majority report had emphasized the fact that when it reexamined 222 cannabis-related asylum admissions in 1892, it had found that the real number was only 98. Asylum officers felt pressed to come up with a cause for admission and misclassified cases, the majority said.

But Chand pointed out that in almost half of all admissions in 1892 the asylum reports listed the cause of insanity as “unknown.” That fact alone suggested officials hardly felt pressure to insist on a cause when they couldn’t find one.

In reality, statistics consistently showed that 20 to 30 percent of asylum patients were ill because of cannabis, he wrote. Chand also noted that about 20 percent of the “criminal lunatics” in the Bengal asylums had a diagnosis of cannabis-related insanity, far more than those whose mental illness was attributed to alcohol or opium. He quoted doctors, police officers, and judges—both Indian and British—who linked the drug to violent crime.

“I know of a case in which an excessive ganja-smoker killed a friend of his with a lathi (a bamboo stick) without any apparent cause,” one said. Another reported on a man “who consumed charas in considerable quantities, took a boy and deliberately chopped off his head. When kept out of the way of any hemp drugs, this man seems to behave fairly like a rational being; but whenever he gets charas, he gets violent and dangerous.”

Chand disagreed with the commission’s British majority. Low-potency bhang should remain legal, he wrote. But he called for ganja and charas to be prohibited, following a transition period to allow users the chance to quit the drugs.

A second Indian commissioner, Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy, agreed. “The prohibition of the use of ganja and charas would be a source of benefit,” he wrote. But Chand and Roy couldn’t overrule their colonial counterparts. All three forms of cannabis remained legal.

Even then the debate in India didn’t end. British physicians kept seeing cases of mental illness and violence linked to the drug—and they refused to stay silent.

In 1904, Dr. George Francis William Ewens, the superintendent of the Punjab Lunatic Asylum, made an extraordinary thirteen-page report to The Indian Medical Gazette. Titled “Insanity Following the Use of Indian Hemp,” the paper began:

There is a special form of mental disease met with in India usually classed as Toxic Insanity which seems to have a direct relation to the excessive use of hemp drugs . . . The symptoms are almost entirely mental, among the large number I have now seen, unlike the results of alcohol, arsenic, etc.

Ewens was both a stiff-upper-lip British military officer and a dedicated physician-scientist. Born in 1864, he received his MD from the Royal University of Ireland in 1888. Three years later, he graduated from the British Army Medical School and was appointed a surgeon in Bengal.

He spent the rest of his life in the army’s Indian Medical Service, becoming a lieutenant-colonel in 1911. He died on September 9, 1914, in Lahore, a dusty city in the northwest corner of British India (now part of Pakistan). He’s buried there, under a long white gravestone. “Erected by his brother officers of the Indian Medical Service in token of their affection and esteem,” his memorial reads.

Ewens seems to have devoted his life to his work; there’s no record of his ever marrying or having children. In 1900, he became the superintendent of the asylum in Lahore. He ran it for a decade, getting a close look at insanity in all its forms. The emerging science of mental illness fascinated him. So did the relationship between mental illness and crime.

In 1908, Ewens wrote a 400-page book—in the preface, he charmingly called it “this little work”—called Insanity in India: Its Symptoms and Diagnosis, with Reference to the Relation of Crime and Insanity. He dedicated the book to a professor at King’s College London—which coincidentally is now home to some of the world’s top research on cannabis and mental illness.

But even before his “little work” in 1908, Ewens contributed to The Indian Medical Gazette. The Gazette was an English-language journal where officers and physicians reported on everything from “An Extraordinary Series of Outbreaks of Plague” to “Operating Rooms in the Tropics.” (Until a few years ago, the Gazette would have been effectively lost to history, available only in a few university libraries. Today its issues are online in searchable PDFs.)

In the Gazette’s November 1904 issue, Ewens wrote to detail the relationship he had seen between cannabis and mental illness. Ewens knew the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission had criticized hospitals like his for blaming cannabis for insanity. His response was exceedingly British.

He lauded the commissioners for their “sincere conclusions,” then added that “the smallest practical experience of insanity” proved them wrong. His hospital officers double-checked cases after admission. “There can be little mistake as to the fact of the habit; one often verified by the statements of friends and relations and confessed to by the man himself.”

Patients whose insanity was due to cannabis also looked and acted different than others, Ewens wrote. “The cases of insanity attributed to hemp drugs excess show always a wonderful and most striking uniformity of symptoms.” Those included hallucinations, delusions, and incoherent speech, which Ewens classified as “mania” and modern psychiatrists would call psychosis. He regularly saw cases of patients who recovered, were discharged, used again, an...