Illustration: Joe Benke
In the late 1980s I spent most of my time on Ward C4 of the Prince of Wales Children’s Hospital in Randwick, Sydney. I was writing my doctorate on the psychological impact of a diagnosis and treatment of cancer on adolescents. Occasionally, some of the teenagers on the oncology ward used marijuana, often without the knowledge or permission of their treating doctors, to help with their chemotherapy-induced nausea. It was clear from discussions, that while for some it was effective – there were others for whom it seemed not to have worked as well or at all. At the time, I assumed the capricious results were due to the variable quality of street-grade cannabis.
Over the years, my benign view of cannabis began to change. Having moved away from psychosocial oncology into clinical practice as a general adolescent psychologist, it was apparent that adolescent use of cannabis was linked to a range of serious developmental and social problems.
Putting aside the health concerns – notably the carcinogens and the recent claim made by one senior US physician that one cannabis joint is the equivalent of smoking 18 cigarettes – what I observed was a clear association to further drug use, lack of motivation, depression, anxiety, paranoia and psychosis. Hundreds of families with whom I have worked over the years will testify to the fact that the smoking of cannabis can and does profoundly compromise the developmental tasks of adolescence.
The medical use of cannabis was outlawed in Australia five decades ago, in an era when scientific knowledge was still embryonic. But times have changed and once again my view has had to change. Even a cursory scan of the medical literature suggests that cannabis has genuine medicinal utility, which seems to have been disregarded, with research attention in the main being directed towards the risks I observed with recreational use – rather than the benefits of its medicinal use.