The families torn apart by teenage skunk epidemic
It is the end of a taboo: articulate, middle-class parents are speaking out about the nightmare of seeing their children spiral into drug abuse and, all too often, mental illness. Many blame themselves for staying silent, assuming that modern strains of cannabis were little different from the pot that baby boomers smoked at college. The reality is very different
Man Smoking Joint
A model poses with a cannabis cigarette. Photograph: Falko Updarp/ Falko Updarp/zefa/Corbis
In the front room of a stucco-fronted three-bedroom home in Chiswick, a deeply middle-class suburb in comfortable west London, Susanne apologises for the smell of the recently walked dog, but it is the sweetly oppressive stink of skunk cannabis that lingers most strongly among the plumped-up Ikea cushions.
"It does reek," said the 52-year-old mother-of-two, sniffing. "That bloody boy has been smoking that stuff down here when I've been out with the bloody dog." She puts her head in her hands. "The smell gives me such a headache."
John and Susanne were happy to talk about life with a son who regularly uses cannabis, but changed their minds about giving their real names or occupations after watching the fallout that has engulfed author Julie Myerson, whose estrangement from her cannabis-smoking son Jake was deepened when she wrote a book about his behaviour that culminated in him being thrown out of the family home.
The couple's own 17-year-old son, also called Jake, insists on the use of his name. "I'm not ashamed, you know. I have looked it all up and read a lot of research and I am quite well informed," he said. "Actually, all my friends are; it's the so-called adults who have forgotten that they did a bit of this themselves when they were young – a long time ago," he added with a sarcastic grin at his mother.
"He reads what he wants to read, hippy websites mostly," said his mother, who has a whole folder of clipped-out newspaper articles and internet printouts full of research and opinion on cannabis that she regularly tries to get Jake to read. It sounds like a well rehearsed exchange between the pair.
"We certainly have had these discussions again and again for two years. Paradoxically, it's when he's stoned that he actually engages," she said.
