Recent labelling of cannabis as a major ‘problem drug’ may surprise those who have smoked the odd joint in the past. But a new, highly potent strain now being grown in Ireland is more harmful than the drug’s benign image would suggest.
Ireland's Fastest -growing problem drug is not being sourced from the poppy fields of Afghanistan or remote Moroccan hillsides. It is not arriving into the country in steel shipping containers or being dropped off at remote harbours in the dead of night.
It is growing mostly behind the calm facade of suburbia, inside rented apartments or houses, in affluent and poorer neighbours alike. Homes which have often been stripped of furniture to build indoor grow houses are turning out fresh crops of high-strength herbal cannabis every 15 weeks or so.
Hash, based on cannabis resin, has traditionally been the main form of the drug in Ireland. But increasingly, grass or skunk – produced from dried plant material – is taking over on the streets. The level of cannabis’s main psychoactive chemical, tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, is several times higher in grow-house skunk compared with hash.
Source: Carl O'Brien, Irish Times, 07/01/2012
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