30-05-2025
Sadiq Khan wants to legalise cannabis. It killed my son
Whenever plans to decriminalise cannabis are mooted, 'my heart sinks,' says Janie Hamilton. So it was again this week when Sir Sadiq Khan backed calls for the partial decriminalisation of the Class B drug, stating that the way it is policed 'cannot be justified given its relative harm'.
This kind of logic is touted only by those who 'really don't know what they're talking about,' believes Hamilton, 73, whose son died in his mid-30s after battling with cannabis addiction for more than two decades.
She recalls spending years visiting locked wards as his health deteriorated and schizophrenia took hold. 'They were filled with people either off their heads or shuffling around like zombies,' says Hamilton. 'The common denominator between them all? Cannabis.'
Hamilton's son, James, first became her window into the drug's harms when he was 14. At the time, the family was living at a prestigious Surrey boarding school where both she and her husband taught.
But as he began to dabble in drugs, she says, James morphed from an adventurous boy who had dreams of becoming a journalist into a 'very rude, arrogant and unpredictable' individual.
'I'd never had a teenager before and, at first, believed the unpleasant things I was witnessing were the result of normal adolescent behaviour,' Hamilton recalls. 'I just thought, 'I love my son, but I don't like him.''
Schoolfriends had given James cannabis, which began having a marked effect both on his mind and his grades. He had been predicted three A-stars at A-Level, but eventually received an A, B and D, losing a place at Durham University. Then 18, instead of trying to secure a new course via clearing, he went on holiday with 'cannabis-smoking friends' while his mother scrabbled to enrol him elsewhere. Just a few months later, she says, 'he came home looking completely lost; he was barely holding it together.'
James then took on a string of low-commitment odd-jobs while his behaviour became increasingly erratic. He would stay in his room all day, often until midnight, when 'he'd come out and go down to the kitchen, turn the light on, turn the grill on, come up to the bathroom and start showering.' He also stripped his room of all possessions – even the bed – until there was just a mattress and sheet on the floor.
James was 20 when, on finishing work on a building site, he returned home one day 'turning in circles saying 'I'm free, I'm free.'' When Hamilton asked him to stop, 'he told me he'd spent all his wages on cannabis.'
The next day, Hamilton called a doctor, who quickly returned with a psychiatrist and a social worker. 'Within minutes they gave each other the nod, and he was sectioned,' Hamilton says.
'And that was the beginning of 16 years of being sectioned, then getting a little bit better, being well enough to come out of hospital and eventually coming off his medication.' But each cycle would only make the next fall yet harder, and James 'became more and more ill'.
What she hadn't understood during his teens was that 'the cannabis was changing his brain, and changing his thinking'. But by the time he turned 20, its impact was clear, as James began to develop paranoid schizophrenia. This was not a genetic condition, Hamilton says. 'It was the cannabis that changed him,' she adds.
Hamilton had been hopeful that his being sectioned would mark a turning point. After his first three-month stint he appeared to improve, moving back in with his family and securing a job as a porter 'in the kitchens of the school where he'd once been a star pupil'. When he decided that his medication had left him 'deadened', however, the progress came to a shuddering halt. He told his mother that he was abandoning the treatment, slamming the door as she pleaded with him to continue.
More erratic behaviour ensued: an ambulance was called after he 'finished up everybody's dregs' during a visit to the pub, and fell off his bike. He blasted music across the grounds of the school they lived at – James's attempt 'to drown out the voices in his head because you can't get away from them,' she knows now. 'We warned and warned and warned him that he'd be re-sectioned, and he took no notice.'
Between inpatient stints, where he would flit between prescribed medication and cannabis, James's paranoia flourished. He had a small scar from a mole removal that he became convinced people were unduly whispering about; he developed body dysmorphic disorder, getting the tip of one ear – which scarcely differed from the other – pinned back on Harley Street.
Of his 16 years in and out of institutions, there was just one spell where 'he got insight, actual insight into what he had done to himself,' says Hamilton. 'He knew it was the cannabis; he suddenly saw what he had put us through, and he apologised.' But then, again, he came off his medication, and the problems began anew.
'Nobody could do anything, that was the tragic part of it,' Hamilton says. She becomes emotional recalling another incident where after more strange behaviour on school grounds aged 21, they moved him to a nearby hostel, his belongings stuffed into a black plastic bag.
He would eat only when his parents brought food over and at one stage, he went missing. 'I remember thinking: he's off his head, nobody's looking after him, he could die… and then I thought to myself, if he dies, he dies. From that moment on I felt there was nowhere else to go but up, because I had faced the worst in my head.'
There were glimpses of the old James at times, Hamilton reflects. She calculates that they went to National Trust properties over 1,000 times; even in his ill state he could fashion a witty one-liner. It all could have been so easily avoided, Hamilton thinks, had he not 'got in with the wrong crowd'.
But in 2015, when James was 36, the psychological issues wrought by his cannabis-taking would become fatal. He had been diagnosed with early stage testicular cancer – something he initially kept from his parents – and refused to accept treatment. There were hospital meetings and even a court case to try and make him see reason. But 'you cannot fight psychosis. It is impossible,' Hamilton says of her son's mental state. 'What they hear in their head and what they see in their delusions are so strong that they believe those, rather than what's said to them.'
It devastates Hamilton that her son's eminently treatable cancer produced the most awful of outcomes in July 2015, when he passed away. 'Cannabis stole his life three times over,' she says: first robbing him of his potential, then potentially triggering the disease (several studies have shown a link between heavy use of the drug and testicular cancer), before finally denying him the 'ability to make a right-minded decision to have life-saving treatment'.
'So in every way it got him, and he did not have to die. He could still be here,' Hamilton adds.
It is for this reason that she fears the dangers of cannabis being downplayed. (In response to Khan's comments, David Sidwick, Dorset's police and crime commissioner, urged that cannabis be considered on par with crack cocaine and heroin.) 'Some people will have done exactly what James did and got away with it – but many don't,' Hamilton says.
Through activism since his death, she has met numerous parents of addicts who have become shadows of their former selves, disinterested in the world beyond their bedrooms and unrecognisable from the promise-filled people they were before. They don't factor into official statistics because they are not in treatment, Hamilton explains, but their distorted lives are proof of the drug's potentially devastating effects.
Hamilton continues to campaign, so that other families don't suffer the same fate she has. 'The fight against cannabis just makes some sense out of James's death,' she says. 'Because I know what it does.'
