A teenage rugby player cut off his own penis and stabbed his mother while high on skunk, his father has revealed, as he called for the drug to be reclassified.
The father, named only as Nick because he wants to remain anonymous as his son is rebuilding his life, is backing Lord Nicholas Monson’s campaign to have skunk reclassified from a class B to a class A drug and for the traditional weaker form of cannabis to be decriminalised.
Lord Monson launched his call following the suicide of his 21-year-old son Rupert, who was addicted to skunk.
Nick, speaking for the first time in an interview with Radio Five Live, said his son, a county rugby player, started smoking “weed” when he was around sixteen and a half before switching to skunk because of “boredom”.
That was the beginning of what Nick said his son would describe as “two and a half years of hell” which culminated in a psychotic episode.
His son went from a “very bright, bubbly lad” to a “waste of space”. The teenager became delusional and paranoid, including sleeping “with a tennis racket in his bed because he thought people were living in the walls”.
Describing the horrific incident when his son attacked his mother and inflicted “incredibly deep self harm”, Nick said it had been a “perfectly normal day” before his son woke in the middle of the night ranting and raving.
“It was absolutely devastating, you can’t imagine anything of that nature happening…the whole episode was just surreal, I remember looking back its almost as if I’m peering in through a window and it’s happening to someone else.”
Nick’s son was in a mental institute for around 6 months, and in total spent almost two years in prison following the incident.
He has undergone surgery, and will have more operations to repair the damage, though Nick said he couldn’t say whether his son would be able to have children. He is clean of drink and drugs, but Nick cautioned that even being around other people smoking skunk could trigger another psychotic episode. His ex-wife has recovered, and has fully reconciled with her son who, Nick said, is “actually in really good form.”
“We recognise that this was an illness… he was totally oblivious, actually has no real memory of anything that happened, even now,” Nick said. “Maybe that’s for the best.”
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