Tolerance of drug misuse is no longer acceptable

The seminal rap band Cypress Hill, across the gatefold sleeve of their legendary second album Black Sunday, extolled the virtues of smoking cannabis, proclaiming that not one life had ever been lost through its use. The band has continued to sing recurrently about getting high and smoking dope, celebrating its merits and denying any harmful consequences.

At the time of Black Sunday’s release, 1993, this was more provocative than genuinely rebellious. Scientists, over many years, also testified to the relative harmlessness of marijuana, with successive claims that there was no evidence that it produced any lasting negative effects.

Now, however, new research, drawing on data from a longitudinal study going back to 1972, suggests a discernible decline in the IQ of individuals who started using cannabis before the age of 18.

Indeed, the researchers – from King’s College, London and Duke University, North Carolina – point to a deleterious effect on intelligence, attention span and memory.

Such evidence comes hard on the heels of similar evidence concluding that the consumption of any alcohol by those under 18 carries far greater risks than hitherto assumed. This all suggests that we may have to reflect more deeply on the position some of us have held on some illegal drugs and on our somewhat tolerant approaches to young people who get hold of legal “stuff” when they are underage.

Underage now means that brains are still forming, and our understanding of the brain – though sometimes an issue that those keener on social explanations find hard to accommodate – is now becoming far more sophisticated.

The problem is how we go about working with young people now we have these new understandings. Illegal substance misuse by teenagers may have declined a little in recent years, but it is still by no means insignificant. Smoking and drinking remain popular youthful pastimes and a symbol of autonomy and resistance to adult control and constraint.

More rigorous enforcement usually produces more cunning ploys to circumvent regulations and prohibitions. Yet, as the Advisory Council on Drug Misuse reported some years ago, educational measures should not be taken as a substitute for the prevention of use. Although they are more useful for harm reduction in that they encourage safer use, educational programmes do not appear to prevent young people embarking on the misuse of drugs, whether legal or illegal.

Out of ideas
On the other hand, scare tactics have no proven track record whatsoever, and efforts to curtail supply (either through the seizure of illegal drugs resulting from effective intelligence and law enforcement, or through controls of retail sales) invariably produce displacement and new routes of distribution.

So the prevention of substance misuse seems to have ground to a rather ineffective halt at the very time when the evidence suggests that the harm-reduction position favoured in the past is no longer desirable or tenable, certainly in relation to young people. 

Experts may talk about assessing the relative harm done by different legal and illegal drugs, but it would seem now that considerable harm is visited on anyone who uses them, if not immediately then further down the track.

Cypress Hill may have been on to something (or something else!) when they penned their hit song, Insane in the Brain.

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan