The northlondonhippy

· Claims that super-strength vari­ety dom­i­nant rejected
· Cannabis researchers analysed seized samples

Alan Travis, home affairs edi­tor
Mon­day Sep­tem­ber 17, 2007
The Guardian

The unpub­lished results of author­i­ta­tive research into cannabis con­firm the “skunk” now on sale in Eng­land is stronger than it was a decade ago, but demol­ish claims that a new “super-strength skunk” — which is 20 times more pow­er­ful — is dom­i­nat­ing the market.

Two stud­ies due to be pub­lished later this year, which together analysed nearly 550 sam­ples of skunk seized by the police, both con­clude that the aver­age con­tent of the main psy­choac­tive agent in skunk strains of cannabis, THC, has dou­bled from 7% in 1995 to 14% in 2005.

But the find­ings of the two stud­ies to be reported in Druglink, the drugs char­ity mag­a­zine, con­tra­dict recent claims that most of the skunk on sale in Britain now rou­tinely has a THC-content of more than 30%. One of the stud­ies showed that only 4% of the skunk that had been seized by the police had a strength level higher than 20%.

The claims ear­lier this year that a new strain of “super-strength skunk” cannabis that was up to 20 times more potent was dom­i­nat­ing the British drug mar­ket and trig­ger­ing men­tal health fears led Gor­don Brown to order a new review of the legal sta­tus of the drug in July.

The home sec­re­tary, Jacqui Smith, asked the government’s advi­sory coun­cil on the mis­use of drugs (ACMD) to look at the cur­rent evi­dence on the use of stronger forms of the drug in the light of con­cerns about the poten­tial men­tal health effects.

The ACMD last looked at whether to regrade cannabis as a class B rather than a class C ille­gal drug 18 months ago. It con­cluded that the strength of cannabis resin and “tra­di­tional” imported herbal cannabis had remained unchanged over the past 10 years but that the aver­age potency of skunk or sin­semilla seizures had increased more than twofold.

How­ever, the ACMD chair­man, Pro­fes­sor Sir Michael Rawl­ins, came down against tight­en­ing up the penal­ties for using cannabis, say­ing there was too lit­tle infor­ma­tion about the pat­tern of use of dif­fer­ent strength cannabis prod­ucts by con­sumers to change the law.

Recent evi­dence has shown that although there has been an explo­sion in cannabis farms and “home-grown” plants in Britain, lit­tle of what is pro­duced is “super-strength skunk”.

The major­ity is less potent but has higher yield­ing varieties.

The ACMD is due to give its new ver­dict in April next year.

The first of the two unpub­lished stud­ies which appear to con­firm those find­ings was by Leslie King, the for­mer head of the Foren­sic Sci­ence Service’s drugs intel­li­gence unit. He tested 299 sam­ples col­lected by foren­sic sci­en­tists and his find­ings are to be pub­lished later this year by the EU’s drug agency, the Euro­pean Cen­tre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

The par­al­lel study by researchers at Kings Col­lege, Lon­don, analysed skunk sam­ples seized by police in Der­byshire, Kent, Lon­don, Sus­sex and Mersey­side. This study found that far from a new strain of 30% plus “super­skunk” dom­i­nat­ing the mar­ket only 4% of the cannabis seized had a higher potency level than 20%, with the strongest sam­ple con­tain­ing 24% THC.

The Kings Col­lege researchers found that the more tra­di­tional non-skunk strains of herbal cannabis on sale in Eng­land seized by the police con­tained only 3% to 4% THC — unchanged from a decade ago.

A move to have higher sep­a­rate penal­ties for pos­ses­sion of the stronger “skunk” strains of cannabis was ruled out two years ago in the face of the prob­lem posed for the police of iden­ti­fy­ing dif­fer­ent types of cannabis dur­ing street searches.

In num­bers:
20 — Claims that a new ‘super’ skunk is 20 times stronger are demolished

30% — Most skunk on sale had been said to con­tain more than 30% THC

550 — The num­ber of seized sam­ples of skunk analysed in the two studies

14% — Aver­age THC con­tent in samples