Her oncologist came and said
the chemotherapy wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.
They were going to recommend us to start considering full body radiation
and a bone marrow transplant.
So that day, we gave her her first dose of cannabis oil.
Six days later, it was in full remission.
When we talk about a war on drugs,
what we’re really talking about is a war on some drugs.
So many of the drugs we now classify as illegal,
from speed to ketamine,
were originally created as medicines.
Aspirin and heroin were first commercially synthesized in 1897,
in the same lab in Germany, just two weeks apart.
And it was heroin that was originally expected to have
the most potential medical uses.
So where is the line between medicine
and the so-called dangerous illicit drugs?
In this episode, we're looking at how, for almost a century,
the war on drugs has prevented people getting the medicines they need,
and caused untold suffering in the process.
[The War on Drugs Show]
[The Drugs We Need]
They used to have me on so many pain pills.
A lot of opiates and muscle relaxers and...
I was on over 40 medications until I started using cannabis.
Now I’m down to two.
The earliest stories we have of cannabis being used as a medicine
date back to ancient China, around 2700 BC.
Since then, weed has been used to treat illness pretty much constantly,
from Islamic doctors in the Middle Ages,
to providing effective, affordable pain relief right through the 1900s.
This all changed in the early 20th century,
with the rise of opiate-based pain medication
and a massively racist campaign by US law enforcement,
which led to cannabis being shut out of Western medical texts.
In 1970,
cannabis was placed in Schedule 1 of America’s Controlled Substances Act,
meaning that despite 4,500 years of evidence to the contrary,
it was deemed to have no currently accepted medical use.
I’ve met a lot of them who... they will tell you,
“I can’t prescribe it, but you should try it.
Don’t tell anybody I’m saying this,” you know.
And that’s a shame because they’re medical professionals...
and their hands are tied.
In the face of massive demand, California broke with federal law
and legalized medical cannabis in 1996.
And Canada became the first country to allow it in 2001.
Currently, 36 states and four territories across the US
allow medical marijuana.
But across the rest of the world, progress is painfully slow.
The UK is the world's biggest exporter of medical cannabis,
but until 2018, actually accessing the medicine in Britain itself
was all but impossible.
And that only changed
thanks to the staggering efforts of a few desperate families.
My son Billy has intractable epilepsy and autism,
and at four months old,
he took his first seizure.
They tried every antiepileptic pharmaceutical,
and they weren't working.
It escalated into having 200, 300 seizures per day.
So I discovered a doctor in Chicago who was an expert in epilepsy.
So Professor Nordli said,
“Have you ever thought about trying cannabis oil?”
September 2016,
he started his journey, basically, on medical cannabis.
He was doing incredibly well until May 2018.
Billy’s GP was taken to a hotel in Belfast by the powers that be
and told not to prescribe any more medical cannabis for Billy Caldwell.
But Charlotte wasn't going to let the government get away with this.
With help from the organization Volteface,
she found a specialist doctor in Canada,
and flew out with Billy to get the medication he needed.
We came up to the customs, and I just... I declared everything.
The guy came back. He said, “I am so sorry. I’m a daddy myself.
I don’t want to take this, but I have to.”
By this point, the optics of Billy being rushed to hospital,
having been deliberately denied the medicine he needed,
was too much, even for the British Home Office.
The decision was reversed almost overnight.
Billy got his medicine,
and the law officially changed a few months later.
It was a powerful testament to what one family can do
when they won’t give up.
Doctors can now write prescriptions in the UK.
That is in law.
Another reason why we’ve launched the “I Am Billy” campaign
is because there is huge barriers around patients in the UK
accessing medical cannabis.
The whole point of Britain’s National Health Service
is that people get the medical help they need
free at the point of delivery.
But with cannabis-based medicine, that’s stopped being true.
Medical cannabis is technically legal,
but only specialist doctors can prescribe it.
People who can afford it can go to private clinics,
but people who don't have the money are shut out.
Meanwhile, recent data shows that 1.4 million people in the UK
are using cannabis illegally to treat their own medical conditions.
We have a government that’s said,
“We’re not going to accept any medical value to this.”
They want the money on this side,
but the people that are sick here can’t get it.
So people who are sick and who want this
have to come to you.
They have to get medicine that’s made on a hot plate.
Yeah. We don’t charge. It’s not about charging, you know.
How much do you give away?
Every week, about 20,000.
But for someone, that could be five to ten days of relief.
And this is why we are actually fighting our government
for the right for medical access.
Because it shouldn’t be people like me,
sitting in a dank little house,
risking my life and my freedom.
Benzodiazepines are minor tranquilizers.
They’ve been around since the early 60s,
and are used to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia,
to alcohol withdrawal.
Diazepam, originally marketed as Valium,
was widely prescribed for decades,
inspiring The Rolling Stones’ song
and the cult movie
But benzos can be dangerous.
They’re addictive, and when mixed with other drugs,
especially downers like opiates or alcohol,
can greatly increase the risk of overdose.
Even before
Scotland was traditionally associated with two drugs,
alcohol and heroin.
But in the past few years, an entirely new crisis has emerged,
pushing Scottish drug death rates to by far the highest in Europe.
And this particular crisis has been almost entirely caused by
how the war on drugs impacts the medical world.
That’s Xanax.
That’s Valium.
For the last 30 years,
I’ve been involved in drugs in one way or another,
from a user, to somebody who’s working now in the field.
And I’ve just never experienced or seen anything
quite like what we’ve got going on just now.
But what happened in Scotland
was less about the dangers of these drugs
and more about the dangers of the government
trying to deal with addiction in all the wrong ways.
The problems really started in 2010.
The Scottish government decided to adopt
a “just say no” approach to drugs,
a move to restrict doctors from prescribing Valium.
Prescription rates declined,
and long-term users had their supplies cut off almost overnight.
But people didn’t just magically stop needing the drugs
because the government said so.
All that the restriction of medical supply achieved
was to open a massive opportunity for dealers on the black market.
There’s no surprise to me that when doctors and prescribing services
stopped prescribing benzodiazepines,
we created this illicit market.
If anybody goes into Glasgow, you literally just need to
stand next to a homeless person for ten minutes,
and then you will get kids as young as 14 or 15 going by,
“Want any street Valium, pal?”
Instead of Valium use going down,
it rocketed up.
And this wasn’t medically controlled under doctors’ supervision.
This was street-level use,
with black market pills cheap and easy to get hold of.
Drug workers who are used to hearing people talk about
taking one or two pills a day
were hearing of them taking one or two handfuls of pills a day.
I’ve got 30 for ten pound.
-Thirty for ten pounds? -Yep.
Thirty pence a pill?
-Are you addicted? -Yeah.
I swallow 80 a day.
Eighty Valiums a day?
Yeah. I’ve had 80 today already.
This is what happens when you move from a regulated medical market
to an unregulated criminal one.
But there was another element of the war on drugs
that helped cause chaos in Scotland.
As well as adopting a “just say no” approach to prescribing,
the Scottish National Party also heavily cut funding
to drug treatment services at exactly the same time.
From 2010, there were decreases in funding every year,
followed by a massive 22 percent cut in 2015.
This all came together to create a perfect storm in Scotland.
And then, in 2015, everything got even worse.
Six friends have died in the space of three weeks.
And that’s not enough to make you stop?
No.
There’s something in them that’s different from normal Valium, that...
well, no, it’s horrible.
-It’s not good at all. -Do you crave them?
Crave?
You’ve got to get them or...
you can’t function right.
The original wave of black market diazepam in Scotland
had been imported from India and China.
It was around 2015
that local gangs realized they didn’t have to go abroad.
They could make the pills themselves.
They also realized they didn’t have to make actual diazepam at all.
Pills pressed in backstreet labs and marketed on the street as Valium
were found to contain a host of other, often much stronger,
forms of benzodiazepines and synthetic opiates.
Most deadly of all has been the explosion of Etizolam.
This has a shorter half-life than Valium,
meaning people use more of it.
Which suits the gangs that sell it just fine.
If you look at this graph of drug deaths in Scotland,
the blue line showing deaths involving Etizolam from 2015
is almost vertical.
Now, that’s a direct correlation between services and GPs.
We’ve got hundreds of thousands of pills
being pressed in Scotland now.
You know, they’re just getting flooded into the streets.
We don’t know what’s in them.
Every single time they get pressed, something different is in them.
What the reality is that a decision needs to be made,
what is more dangerous just now:
the illicit market, which nobody knows what’s in it,
or the prescribed, regulated, controlled medical market?
For me, it’s not rocket science.
If Scotland’s [got] a terrible drug death rate
15 times higher than the EU average,
it’s purely down to bad policy decisions.
In some ways, what happened in Scotland
has mirrored the situation of the opioid crisis in North America.
Restrictions in the medical supply
combined with ineffective “just say no” drug treatment
drive people onto the black market.
Then criminal gangs quickly realize they can make vast profits
by pushing these drugs,
and by using cheaper, stronger chemicals.
And then people start dying.
In Scotland, they’ve impressively managed to produce this outcome
without the added pressure of a massively corrupt
US pharmaceutical industry.
But the underlying problem is the same.
The problem is the war on drugs.
[Morphine]
The pain is like someone stabbing you with a needle
all over your body and joints.
That’s how it feels.
Because of morphine, I am surviving.
Life without morphine, for me, is unthinkable.
Ninety percent of the world’s medical morphine
is used by the richest ten percent of its population.
If you live in Europe or North America
and you get diagnosed with a serious illness,
you should at least be relatively sure
that you’ll be given medication to manage the pain.
But because of the war on drugs, there is a massive undersupply
of medical morphine across the Global South,
meaning millions upon millions of people
are forced to suffer in needless agony.
In 2011, the World Health Organization estimated that
5.5 million terminal cancer patients and a further million AIDS patients
would die without receiving any pain medication whatsoever.
This is the world’s other opioid crisis.
She has severe pain.
She can’t sleep at night.
Fatima’s family says she shouts in agony...
day and night.
But because of strict narcotics laws,
morphine, the gold standard in pain treatment,
is nearly impossible to get in most of India.
Of the 1.3 billion people in India,
less than two percent has access to pain relief.
This situation arose possibly out of a draconian law
passed in 1985 to curb abuse.
It effectively prevented medical access.
Two generations of doctors
have grown up without seeing the efficacy of morphine.
Among the medical professionals,
among the public and among drug regulators,
there’s an unrealistic opiophobia.
In India and in much of the low-and-middle-income countries,
the punishment for “drug offense,” as they call it, can be very harsh.
India is a particularly shocking case.
The country is the world’s largest producer of legal opium
for the pharmaceutical industry.
Yet provision of medical morphine for Indian citizens themselves
is virtually non-existent.
In India, a patient in palliative care
is on average allocated 43 milligrams of morphine.
In Canada, that figure is 68,194 milligrams.
That’s an increase of over 1,500 percent.
There is a significant inequity
in access to healthcare generally in my country,
but it’s very obvious in the case of pain management.
If you break a leg, if you have an operation on the stomach,
if you have a serious accident
or if you have a disease like cancer,
you get prescribed paracetamol, something like ibuprofen, et cetera.
It will be nowhere near enough.
Now, this is horrendous and causes...
unimaginable suffering.
You can trace this mass suffering of patients in India
straight back to the war on drugs.
In 1985, India changed its law to come in line with
the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.
Between then and 1997,
medical morphine consumption dropped 97 percent
to just 18 kilograms for the entire country.
Out of 300 medical colleges in the country,
only five trained doctors to prescribe opioids
as part of palliative care.
And it’s not just India.
Right across the Global South,
millions of people are forced to suffer horrendous pain needlessly,
directly because of the drug war.
Across sub-Saharan Africa,
children with burns all over their bodies
are rarely even given paracetamol.
In Indonesia, people go through chemotherapy
with nothing but over-the-counter painkillers.
If this was happening in any developed country,
there would be outrage.
The war on drugs causes many harms across the world:
imprisoning people, destroying their livelihoods,
and leading to rampant crime and corruption.
But surely, a situation where millions of people
are forced to die in agony,
something that could be so easily prevented,
is simply too grotesque to ignore.