82 MEN’S HEALTH
FOOD STYLIST: JOHAN VAN DER MERWE AT HERS | PROP BUILD BY MANDY MODEL MAKER | ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY | *YOUGOVfrom Alaska through Canada, then
Washington and Oregon to California, and
in all of these places, recreational cannabis
is freely available to adults. In Europe, we’re
only just making the move from drug to
medicine, but the tide is moving one way.”
A group of cross-party MPs predicted
in July that marijuana will be legalised on
these shores within five years, but it took
the high-profile cases of Alfie Dingley in
England and Billy Caldwell in Northern
Ireland – two children suffering from
severe epilepsy whose seizures were only
brought under control by cannabis oil –
to convince Home Secretary Sajid Javid
that it has legitimate medical uses. He
relaxed the laws last November, meaning
doctors are free to prescribe it. But, so far,pro-cannabis
marketing flooding out
of the US, not to mention the
CBD craze here in the UK. And to
say we should stop criminalising kids
for smoking weed isn’t the same as saying
we should remove all restrictions.
Research suggests that THC (the
illegal cannabinoid that gets you high)
may benefit sufferers of chronic pain,
inflammation, nausea and conditions
ranging from multiple sclerosis to HIV.
CBD (the legal one that mellows you out)
can treat types of epilepsy and could be
useful for diabetics. But when you review
the evidence for cannabis’s benefits
more closely, one thing stands out: there
isn’t very much of it. Millions of people
use cannabis for all sorts of afflictions- so it does something – but as for
randomised, double-blind clinical trials
and peer-reviewed papers, well, we’re still
waiting. A 2017 report by the US National
in November 2016, weed smokers
could have been forgiven for checking
the contents of their bongs. California
was soon followed by Canada. It was
a watershed moment. As the comedian
John Mulaney remarked: “This is the first
time I’ve ever seen a law change because
the government is just like, ‘Fine.’”
I was living in Los Angeles during
the “green rush”, and there was a heady
sense of possibility in the air. I went to
marijuana Tupperware parties; I visited
a feminist cannabis collective; I marvelled
at the billboards for green tech start-ups
that lined motorways; and I reassessed
the drug I had written off as a bad thing
in my early twenties. My way back in was
a chic, golden vape pen made by Beboe,
the “Hermes of marijuana”, which now
has a concession in luxury department
store Barneys. The high became high-end.
My wife – a lifelong weed refusenik – took
to dabbing cannabis-infused coconut
powder, one of many products aimed at
people who would never have considered
rolling a joint. When we returned to
Britain in 2017, the nation felt backwards.
“Cannabis is on a global journey from
drug to medicine to lifestyle,” says Gavin
Sathianathan, founder of Alta-Flora,
a British biopharmaceutical start-up.
Sathianathan made the transition to the
cannabis industry in 2015 after 10 years
in tech. At first, he says, announcing you
worked in cannabis was a conversation
killer. Now it’s a starter. “You can travel
down the Pacific coast of North America,few do. “It’s not that
doctors don’t want
to prescribe it. It’s
more that they
don’t know what to
prescribe for which
indications,” says
David Badcock, CEO of
DrugScience, which campaigns for
a more evidence-based drugs policy in
the UK. “There are hundreds of thousands
of people suffering unnecessarily, and
that’s not morally acceptable.”Smoke and Mirrors
When it comes to recreational use,
however, there are reasons to be cautious.
To say that cannabis should be available
to doctors is not the same as saying
it’s good for you – but you could easily
get that impression from the deluge ofAcademy of Medicine
concluded: “Very little
is known about the
efficacy, dose, routes
of administration,
or side effects of
commonly used
and commercially
available cannabis products.” There’s
more evidence for its harms – specifically,
the link between high doses of THC and
psychosis. You might wonder, then, how
a drug that has been strongly linked with
schizophrenia has suddenly become
promoted as a panacea, with the full
weight of Silicon Valley behind it.
Will Lawn, a post-doctoral researcher
at UCL studying the effects of cannabis
on teenagers, finds the 180-degrees flip