China and drug law executions

On 29th December 2009, Akmal Shaikh, a British citizen, was executed by the Chinese authorities by means of lethal injection. Mr Shaikh had been in custody since 2007, when he was arrested for carrying 4 kilos of heroin into China. Despite last minute appeals for clemency by his family and the British government, and protests from around the world, China has stubbornly defended its actions and its independent right to punish as it sees fit.


There’s a colonial and imperial background to this: in China, the memory of the opium trade from British India, which was carried on against the express wish of the Chinese government, and against Chinese law, is still fresh, along with the “Treaty Ports” system that allowed the writ of European law to run in Chinese centres of maritime trading.

In this context, one might expect that intervention on the part of the United Nations would have been more effective. However, Professor Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on summary and extra-judicial executions, wrote to the Chinese asking them to explain the rationale behind Mr Shaikh’s sentence, pointing out that he suffered from a mental illness. His letter was ignored.

This intervention from the UN is welcome. However, the stream of rhetoric coming from the UN drugs agencies, as well as from British and other politicians around the world, helps to maintain the climate that is used to justify the execution. The Chinese embassy in London stated that, “The amount of heroin he brought into China was 4,030g, enough to cause 26,800 deaths, threatening numerous families.” The question of mental illness aside, China regularly executes people for drugs crimes, and the extreme and exaggerated account of the danger that drugs pose lies at the root of the reasoning involved. The ‘War on Drugs’ may be a rhetorical device, but the bodies are real.

Cannabis, Skunk and Psychosis

Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry in London have published a study looking at the impact of cannabis use on psychosis, which has been a hot political topic in recent years. The research had a specific focus on high-potency, “skunk” varieties of the drug. It compared patients admitted to hospital with first episodes of psychosis with a group of people from the nearby community. There were no differences between the two groups in terms of the proportions of their ever having used cannabis or age at first use. However, amongst the cannabis users, patients with psychosis were nearly seven times as likely to smoke the high potency skunk varieties as the second group. Researchers suggest that the apparent greater risk involved in the use of skunk is linked to its higher THC content and low cannabidiol (CBD) content, two of the main chemicals in the drug. In the traditional resin hash preferred by the control group, levels of THC averaged at 3.4%, with similar levels of cannabidiol. Skunk, by contrast, contains 12-18% THC and 1.5% CBD. It appears that cannabidiol may help to protect against psychosis.

The lead researcher, Dr Di Forti said, “Our study is the first to demonstrate that the risk of psychosis is much greater among people who are frequent cannabis users, especially among those using skunk, rather than among occasional users of traditional hash.” It is unclear whether the researchers are suggesting that heavy skunk use causes psychosis, or whether there is merely a correlation, in which case it may be that those already troubled by symptoms of mental illness are using stronger varieties of cannabis to alleviate symptoms. What is clear is that production of the skunk varieties has been driven by commercial factors in an unregulated market where profit is the sole governing principle.