It's official: cannabis kills

2004-01-20 14:23

London - Heavy consumption of cannabis has been given as the cause of death at an inquest into a man who had smoked the drug daily for more than a decade, press reports said on Tuesday.

Lee Maisey, 36, smoked six cannabis cigarettes a day for 11 years, the inquest in West Wales heard. His death was registered as having been caused by cannabis toxicity - and has led to renewed warnings about the drug.

"This type of death is extremely rare," John Henry, a toxicologist at London's Imperial College, said after the inquest at Haverfordwest.

"I have not seen anything like this before. It corrects the argument that cannabis cannot kill anybody," the professor said.

According to the Daily Telegraph, the inquest heard Maisey had complained of a headache on August 22 last year. He was found dead at the house he shared with a friend.

Michael Howells, the Pembrokeshire coroner, said Maisey was free from disease and had not drunk alcohol for at least 48 hours. Post-mortem tests showed a high level of cannabinoids in his blood.

Cannabis is to be reduced to a Class C drug - the lowest level of illegal drug - on January 29, despite warnings that new varieties of the drug now being grown in Europe are much more powerful than natural varieties.

Philip Guy, a lecturer in addictions at the University of Hull, said: "Cannabis is not the nice hippie drug it used to be. It has been experimented with to produce stronger varieties."

He said eating the drug - for example after baking it in a cake - was more dangerous than smoking it.

Britons seeking to leave the rat race of the big cities have long sought out the remoter parts of Wales, where many hippies of the 1970s migrated and where many still live.

- SAPA