" Mental oblivion "

"I felt absolutely terrified," recalls Nicky, a divorced mother-of-three, thinking back to her first experience just over a month ago.

"Paranoia set in, and I felt as if I was having a panic attack. At one point, I was simply too frightened to get out of my chair.

"I had a feeling the drug had unlocked some sort of paranoia in my head that would never go away again - I suddenly felt everyone hated me. Without doubt, that was one of the worst moments of my life."

It has been well over 20 years since Nicky first smoked cannabis, which she tried as a student.
But for this investigation she has spent the past month in Amsterdam, where she smoked around a joint of cannabis - which two years ago was downgraded from a class B to a class C drug in Britain - every day.

Controversially, she also allowed herself to be injected with pure THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the active ingredient in cannabis.

Her aim was to discover the true effect cannabis had on her mind and body - and conversely on the millions of Britons who now smoke it regularly.

While some will question Nicky's wisdom in committing herself to such an experiment when she is a mother of three young children, there is little doubt that her experiences are both enlightening and cautionary to anyone who might think cannabis is harmless.

At one point during her investigation, scientific tests proved that, thanks to the drug, she had developed a level of psychosis well above that seen in individuals with schizophrenia.
It is estimated that 15 million people in the UK have tried cannabis, and up to 5 million smoke it on a regular basis.

In the UK, cannabis use has increased 1,000 per cent since the Seventies, and according to a recent Unicef report, the UK has the third highest rate of young people smoking cannabis in the Western world.