[quote]The phone call from British Transport Police came one night in the summer of 2005. It was about my son, the officer said. He told me that Henry had jumped on to the Tube line at Baker Street in the thick of the rush hour and my legs buckled under me. The officer explained they had rescued him just before the train had come in and was now with the police at Goodge Street station in central London. Why had he jumped? It was weeks before Henry told me about the voices in his head that had urged him to. He had leapt from the platform on to the track, and as he lay there waiting for the train, he imagined he was in heaven. A psychiatrist judged him well enough to come home. I felt trapped by fear and hopelessness. I did not know how to protect my son. Nine years on, I still don't. For Henry - my beloved only child - endures a life bereft of purpose or meaning. Nine years ago, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Since then his promising young life has been on hold. For the past two months, he has been locked in a secure ward at a psychiatric hospital in South-West London because he was failing to take his medication. Each day when I visit, Henry, now 28, paces the room like a caged animal. He still talks to the imaginary voices that bedevil him. He must be persuaded to drink, to wash, to clean his teeth. He is thin, ashen-faced and as dependent as a baby. What breaks my heart is that it could have been prevented. His psychosis was caused by that most pernicious of drugs, skunk cannabis, and psychiatrists have confirmed it. Henry was a sporty, academic teenager before he started to smoke skunk. But his development was arrested when, at 16, he started smoking cannabis, and became mentally ill. The precious years when he should have been studying for a degree, dating and embarking on adult life, have all been denied him. His is not an isolated case: psychiatric wards are full of people like him. Henry now suffers from schizophrenia: A doctor said cannabis use contributed to his psychosis. This is why I was enraged by Nick Clegg backing a report that suggests the Government should legalise cannabis. The Deputy Prime Minister has endorsed a paper from the London School of Economics that condemns the war on drugs as a costly failure and recommends experiments to legalise it. I would first urge him to read my son’s story and consider how dangerous it would be to send out a message to children that cannabis is not harmful. It has destroyed my son's life, contributed to the breakdown of my marriage and turned my once happy life into one of constant stress and anxiety. Henry was a cherished and privileged child. My husband Lloyd - Henry's father - had his own household and hair products company and we had glorious homes in London and Monaco, where my work with charities brought me into contact with royalty. Henry could not have been more loved. Happy, well-adjusted and sensitive, he was also artistic and musical. When he was nine he sang at a charity event I organised at London's Savoy Hotel. I still remember blinking away tears of pride as an audience of the great and the good gave him a standing ovation. Henry wrote wonderful poems, too and every Mother's Day card contained a little verse he’d written for me. He hated being separated from us, and when Lloyd and I toured the Far East for a few weeks, and Henry, then five, stayed with his granny, he festooned the house with balloons and a 'welcome back' banner for us. I remember how he launched himself at me and squeezed me until I was breathless. He loved acting, was a brilliant mimic, I thought one day he might be an actor.[/quote] Don't inject those marijuanas kids.