At medical school, we were told that “to study medicine without books is to sail an uncharted sea, but to study without seeing patients is not to go to sea at all”. The reality of this infuriating advice was that you could almost never leave the hospital or its library, but the point about experiential knowledge was well made. Of course, the deepest form of experiential knowledge for a doctor is to become a patient and a research subject. On Tuesday night, on Channel 4’s Drugs Live: Cannabis on Trial with Dr Christian Jessen, Jon Snow, Matthew Parris and Jennie Bond, I will become both: a research subject because I am entering a trial of the effects of cannabis run by a colleague at UCL, Professor Valerie Curran; and a patient because, however temporarily, I’ll become psychotically unwell.
I know this because I have taken cannabis and other strong hallucinogens before – ayahuasca and iboga while working in remote parts of Peru and Congo, and cannabis last week as part of this trial. The study aims to dissect the differences between hash, the traditional form of cannabis, and the newer, stronger form, skunk. Trial participants take three formulations of the drug: hash, skunk and a placebo. I’ve taken two doses – the third will be live. The trial is blind, but I’m confident one was a placebo and I hope the other was the skunk, because it’s hard to imagine a more negative, less enriching experience than what followed.
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