Our mental health is going up in smoke

As we creep back into the open, as the Covid wards empty and the mental health clinics fill up, how are we going to tell what’s driven people crazy: lockdown, or what seems to have been a favourite lockdown hobby — smoking weed?

Last week Sadiq Khan, London’s goblin mayor, announced that if re-elected he’ll set up a commission to look into the case for decriminalising cannabis. It’s not in Khan’s gift to decriminalise anything — Downing Street has already issued a response which amounted to: ‘Decriminalise dope? You must be high.’ But Khan doesn’t care. This isn’t about the policy, it’s about the posturing. The race for City Hall is on, and Khan knows which way the wind blows on dope — more than 60 per cent of London residents say they’d back legalisation, and just 19 per cent are against it. If the smell on the streets is anything to go by, the remaining 21 per cent would be in favour too, if only they could speak.

There’s a decent case for legalisation — though decriminalisation seems like a strange halfway house. If cannabis can be regulated and legally sold, the drug-selling gangs might lose their grip, and London’s own Hunger Games, the annual summer knife-crime turf war, might finally end.

But making it easier to get stoned, removing the stigma, is not a risk-free business. There’s evidence that cannabis, in its 21st century incarnation, thick with the psychoactive ingredient THC, can send people clean round the twist. So my hope for Khan’s commission, after his inevitable re-election, is that it looks at the effect of decriminalisation on the most vulnerable: the mad, the anxious and the young.