THE SILENCE OF THE DRUG CZAR

You’ve probably never heard of Victoria Atkins, the MP for Louth and Horncastle. She’s a former barrister, a youngish (42) Tory high-flyer and the minister who runs the department responsible for legislation on drugs. She has been vehemently opposed to any softening of drug laws but you won’t hear a word from her about the current debate over the medicinal or social use of cannabis.

In the past few days Canada has decided to legalise weed for personal use and, after taking a consignment of the plant oil away, the UK Government belatedly allowed – for 20 days only – the use of it in the treatment of the epilepsy suffered by 12-year-old Billy Caldwell. But Atkins has kept schtum. She has recused herself from any discussion or vote over cannabis.

Why? Because her husband is a cannabis farmer (or at least runs the company which grows it in the UK) and the product, the non-psychoactive variety, is used in a drug for combating childhood epilepsy. No prizes for spotting the irony.

British Sugar (the MD is Mr Atkins, aka Paul Hayward), has kicked out tomatoes from its 18-hectare greenhouses operation in Norfolk (the size of 23 football pitches) and is growing cannabis. In fact the company is the world’s largest supplier of medicinal cannabis, selling to the biotech company GW Pharmaceuticals, which is developing an experimental drug called Epidiolex, to treat epilepsy.

I’m not going to get into the argument about legalisation but I am going to promote the use of cannabis, a plant which, if it won’t save the planet, could help mitigate the effects of our desecration of it. Hemp, which comes from the non-psychoactive cousin of the banned one and looks the same, can be used as a substitute for just about any other material.

It can be made into bricks, replace plastic – there’s a US sports car whose body is made out of it – it’s edible and nutritious, it’s eco-friendly and it grows on any kind of soil and without pesticides or insecticides in three months. During the growing cycle it also requires very little water, it absorbs C02, doesn’t cause deforestation and replenishes the soil with its nutrients. It’s harder wearing with three times the strength of cotton. You can buy hemp-woven clothes in specialist shops and online, and stylish they are too. It’s a bit like what Brian Wilson and his chums have done to popularise Harris Tweed. So why aren’t farmers growing it? Because you need a licence, no other reason.

There’s also a world first in Edinburgh where young Sam Whitten’s company Hemp Eyewear has produced a line of cannabis sunglasses. It started as a university project to find and design glasses with the most sustainable material in the world, hence hemp, which replaces plastic in the manufacture. If the sun ever comes out again I’m off to buy a pair.

LEGLESS AND ARMLESS IN KILLIE

The term “poverty porn” was coined eight years ago when The Scheme – an everyday tale of drug-taking folk in Kilmarnock’s Onthank estate – aired on BBC. It was a hit and even won a Bafta, some kind of luvvie award, although it enraged the Ayrshire town’s abstemious folk (person?) and even Killie football manager Steve Clarke, then in England, thought it badly misrepresented the place. Well, he’d been away for a while. Since then the main characters have moved on, to prison in many cases. Marvin has been in and out, so has former love Dayna, who was also working for a time as a prostitute, although I understand in these PC times we have to describe it as sex work. Marvin’s dog Bullet was knocked down and lost a leg but he has now been re-homed in London (although he could be dead, I haven’t checked!).

The first episode introduced the Cunninghams, Gordon and Annie (or Caddis), whose son Brian was being jailed for eight months for racially abusing a shopkeeper. Another son, Chrissie, has a heroin addiction and recently escaped another prison sentence because of his mum’s serious illness. And it was serious. In what you might call the Curse of The Scheme (or Bullet Redux), Annie was taken into hospital in April with what appeared to be a kidney stone, but whatever could go wrong did go wrong. After the operation she developed sepsis and both legs were amputated and then her right arm. Annie’s been fitted with new legs but her daughter Kimberley is crowdfunding to raise cash for a bionic arm. The target was £15,000 but it’s not going too well, with just £1,045 raised after a month. So here’s the scheme, dig into your pockets kind readers and help Annie become whole again.

SOD 'EM AND GOMORRAH

Aberdeen was an unlikely location for the godfather of an Italian crime cartel but it was here that Antonio La Torre set up base with his Scottish wife to run a multi-million pound mafia operation behind the front of two restaurants he owned, the Sorrento and Pavarotti’s (obviously) which had a reputation for a fine seafood risotto and nothing to do with sleeping with the fishes. His brothers Augusto and Tiberio were his accomplices. All of them were members of the Camorra, the Naples-based clan which makes the more well-known Sicilian Mafia look like a benevolent institution.

The Camorra, as the journalist and writer Roberto Saviano, detailed in his brave and brilliant 2006 book Gomorrah, infiltrate every vein of not just Italian but international business, from the Naples docks to creating Angelina Jolie’s dress at the Oscars. The Camorra is a fairly devolved business, with many Neapolitan crime families uniting in a common interest in drugs, prostitution, protection, milking companies, all for tax-free profit. The La Torres, as the then 26-year-old Saviano revealed, accrued loans which they didn’t repay, bankrupted companies and all the while used their malign influence across the sea to extort from local businesses in Naples. They were all eventually jailed.

If you haven’t watched the brilliant Italian TV series, Gomorrah, loosely based on the book, you really should. As a result Saviano had a contract put out on him by the Camorra and, since 2006, has lived under police protection, like a Salman Rushdie but with real mettle. Last week he hit out at the Italian Government, principally the deputy Prime Minister (and head of the right-wing Lega) Matteo Salvini and the refusal to take refugees from the rescue ship MS Aquarius, which had plucked 629 drowning souls from the sea off the coast of Libya. Salvini’s response was what amounts to a death threat, warning that Saviano’s police protection would be “evaluated”. Perhaps some MSP, or even the Scottish Government, might condemn this. But I’m not holding my breath.