Yes, Cannabis Can Cause Catastrophic Schizophrenia.

My brother is living proof.


Amelie Bridgewater

Hashish — Cannabis’ Lethal Strain

I loathe my complicity on this one day. I helped my brothers weigh a few kilos of hashish on a brass set of scales designed for the purpose of weighing illegal substances for the onward sale to willing buyers.

I was 14 years old at the time. My eldest brother 18, my middle brother 16.

We are surrounded by their friends at the kitchen table. They are red-eyed, and stupefied — their bodies polluted by too many grams of hash and other class A narcotics et al.

This military process — the weighing of drugs — takes place the morning after a house party we have hosted to what seems like the entire dysfunctional youth of our village. Mum and Dad were somewhere abroad, Dubai I think.

Unbeknownst to my parents, our house last night turned into a venue for what could only be described as a rave, drug fest and gang bang all in one.

The living room was transformed into a DJ shack — decks and speakers adorned the room, and stoned and drugged people limp, swaying in their drug-induced fugues. Depending on their drug of choice, some had the energy to raise arms in the air, lit lighters propping up the ceiling. Others lay comatose on the carpet, chairs, draped over sofa’s, saliva making its way out of the corner of mouths in accordance with the force of gravity.

In the kitchen, zombies were emptying cupboards, searching for fuel, desperate to fill their bellies in deranged substance-generated hysteria. The following morning, our kitchen was scant of any food — drugged hyenas had rinsed our cupboards dry.

Out in the garden people were having sex, the Wendy house had turned into a metaphorical whore’s den. I go upstairs and discover that the stairs to the loft are down — I could smell the hash emanating from downstairs in the kitchen.

As I ascend I am anxious as to what I will find. My two elder brothers have hauled their bed mattresses up to the loft — how I don’t know, but somehow they squeezed them through the tiny loft hatch where about 12 teenagers were polluting their bodies with all manner of class A drugs; Ketamine, Cocaine, MDMA, LSD and who knows what else. Bodies strewn across the muddy mattresses; some looking frankly, like corpses.

Bongs, spoons and straws litter the floor, and foil is everywhere, flickers of light bouncing off their shiny side and creating dimples of disco-ball type reflections on the apex of the loft. Faces droop with the paralysis of the drugs in their bodies — the lights are on, but not one soul is at home.

The pikeys from down the road are in our house. I don’t know why my brothers have permitted their entry into our personal space. We discover the next day that they have stolen all manner of our parents prized possessions, and no surprise, they have smashed all the windows in my brothers and mothers car and stolen the headunit stereo that my brother had saved up so long for.

I don’t feel sympathy for his loss, I think he is stupid and that he deserves it.

I hate the arrogance of how he dishes out instructions for cleaning up the house that is now scarred by the events of last night. Bongs, foil, spliffs, tobacco, baggies, cocaine, cocaine snorting devices; the chaos and filth of it all is contaminating my home and it fills me with deep unease and shame. The carpets, my parents furniture are pocked with cigarette stub marks — holes that can never be filled in. Permanent reminders of this night that I will never forget.

The place is trashed and our parents will be home within the next 24 hours. I wonder how my brother can be so confident that they won’t find out.

Back to the weighing.

We are weighing the drugs at the kitchen table, for my eldest brother — the big-time drug dealer, to sell. To pollute others bodies, to maim and ruin. There’s a conveyor belt arrangement, between him, me, my psychologically vulnerable middle brother, and a few other friends who are still completely fucked from last night.

Military precision.

In between bagging the drugs, my eldest brother smokes one spliff after another — the distinctive odour of hashish filling my lungs and inducing irritating giggles from friends round the table.

I look at my middle brother, and he is heavily dissociated. His eyes are vacant, devoid of life. Staring straight ahead, at nothing whatsoever.

Years after this day, I realise that this was the start of his spiral into schizophrenia. The fluctuations between his anxious and paranoid body movements, and his catatonic state were markers of the early manifestations of the psychotic disorder that would later rob him of his teens, twenties and well into his thirties.

It is my eldest brother I hate for this. He didn’t protect either of us, our big brother — the big shot drug dealer.

After this event, many nights a week for months on end, a dark voice would call our house and at the end of the phone the voice would tell me that he was going to come and rape my Mother and I. These people my brother owed money to, people that wanted his head. This was well after my brother had left our home and was living it up at University; his wild life funded by his drug dealing.

I have no doubt that my generation will yield a host of case studies that will prove the point and I pray that the substance becomes entirely illegal or we will lose so many more people to this chaotic drug — through overdose of harder drugs because they graduated from hashish; suicide, and through behaviour driven by the madness of schizophrenia that ends in foreshortened life.

In the meantime my only hope is that our mental healthcare systems can take this issue seriously, educate our children on the potential ramifications of Cannabis abuse — schizophrenia is a cruel cruel mental disorder that nobody deserves to suffer from..