I have a close friend who lives with her husband and small children in an end of terrace house. Next door live cannabis smoking - and probably cannabis growing - neighbours. For a whole year now my friend - let's call her Sally for the sake of argument - and her family have been poisoned by cannabis.
Environmental health officers have been called, police have been called. The offenders have been arrested, fined, had equipment confiscated, cautioned and warned. But still the pollution continues.
As Sally says, it would be illegal for her children to be poisoned by cigarette smoke in a public place, yet the authorities seem to be impotent to act to stop them being poisoned by something far worse in their own home.
Sally and her husband have filled in every hole and crack that they can find in the fabric of their house. Their children have a tendancy to asthma but it is made far worse by the effects of the cannabis. The GP confirms this and on many occasions the children have been taken for treatment and received medication.
Frayed tempers, hunger and feeling sick, extreme lethargy - Sally and family all suffer from these side effect of the cannabis poisoning. They notice how well they all feel once they have left their own house and gone out to friends or for a walk in the fresh air. Goodness knows what long-term effect the pollution is having on the small brains of the children.
About six months ago the dog was 'put down' after becoming very ill because it had caught a chill. The dog of course was so much more susceptible to the cannabis fumes. It used to raid the fridge - something it had never done prior to the cannabis problem. It exhibited unusual behaviour which the vet confirmed as being a likely effect of cannabis poisoning. Because it became so distressed when the fumes occurred that Sally put it out in the garden once too often and it got too cold. It's sad they have no dog now, because with their acute sense of smell a dog was the early-warning that the fumes were coming through.
Sally's father came to stay the other day. He got up feeling extremely ill and of course he's been sleeping in the bedroom nearest the neighbours. Sally actually wonders now if she and the family are actually so accustomed to inhaling cannabis that they're becoming desensitised to its presence. That idea in itself is very worrying because if that's so, then they aren't likely to detect low levels of the pollution so well.
There is law that exists in this country to stop people polluting but the environmental health officers don't seem to want to use it. The police don't appear to be able to do much to stop things either. Smoking dope in your own house is apparently not something they can stop.
I'm blogging about this because I'm wondering if Sally is alone. Are there out there hundreds of other families suffering in a similar way? This has been going on for over a year now - simply because there's a large hole into which such anti-social behaviour falls and which means that neither police nor environmental health officers can act effectively. I wonder.
