At the age of 14, Jake Hanrahan was a regular cannabis smoker like around 17 per cent of British teenagers. But his world changed the first time he tried skunk, a high-powered cannabis hybrid which Jake believes caused a psychotic episode lasting six months. In this film Jake, now a 23-year-old journalist who has never touched cannabis since, looks at how skunk has transformed the world of cannabis, turning a drug which (although illegal) has long been regarded as relatively harmless into a serious threat to mental health – particularly for its young consumers.

Skunk – a cannabis hybrid which was created in the 80s, developed in the 90s and which has transformed the marketplace over the last decade – is now effectively a super-powerful, highly-addictive, market-leading superbrand. In 2000, around 80 per cent of the cannabis consumed in Britain was hash or cannabis leaf – smuggled in from overseas and containing not just far lower levels of THC (the psychoactive ingredient of cannabis) but also containing a complementary balance of CBD (the therapeutic element also naturally present in cannabis, and long associated with positive medicinal benefits).

Skunk has turned that picture on its head: 80 per cent of the cannabis consumed in the UK is now high-grade skunk, grown in the UK and engineered for strength, containing up to five times more THC and virtually no CBD. In other words skunk is designed to get you sky high while doing nothing to counter its own highly psychoactive effects.

During the same period in which skunk has effectively taken over the market, transforming the tastes and expectations of successive generations of young cannabis smokers, Jake discovers that a new mental health issue has emerged: cannabis-induced psychosis is particularly harmful to skunk users – and to young skunk users in particular. The most recent research, published by Dr Marta Di Forti at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, suggests that while regular cannabis use doubles the risk of psychosis, heavy skunk users increase their risk by up to seven-fold.

‘I was totally paranoid, I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing,’ Jake says now of his own skunk episode. ‘It felt like I was I was living in a different dimension.’

Source:  bbc.co.uk  25th Sept. 2014