Author Paddy Doyle has found a drug which relieves the symptoms of his incurable medical condition but his fight to use it has brought him into conflict with the law, reports Roisin Ingle.
Paddy Doyle is stretched on the floor in his Dublin office espousing the medicinal merits of the drug marijuana. The sleeve of his best-selling autobiography, The God Squad, is pinned to the wall.
Paddy Not Smoking
Paddy not smoking for a very long time
Paddy smoking…
Paddy after a smoke
Beside it hangs a droll Oscar Wilde quotation: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” This week, Doyle found himself in the eye of a media storm that was sensational even by Wildean standards. His widely-publicised appeal to be allowed to use marijuana to ease his often violent spasms, one of the symptoms of his incurable medical condition, has added a dimension to what is an increasingly thorny debate.
The Dubliner, a former winner of the People Of The Year award, has suffered with idiopathic torsion dystonia since the age of nine. “I have tried everything,” he says. “Marijuana could be beneficial to me. I should be allowed to try it under medical supervision.” The controversy began when Doyle, severely physically disabled as a result of his condition, recently visited a consultant for a routine check-up. When the consultant saw him he was dismayed by the high level of involuntary movement in Doyle’s body. He is constantly wracked by spasms – one expert concluded that a dystonia sufferer uses up as much energy daily as someone spending 16 hours in a gym.
The packets of calorific powdered drinks on an office desk bear testament to this assertion. “It’s like drinking cement mixer,” says Doyle. “It was me who initiated the idea of using marijuana,” he says. “I had used it twice before at parties and found that the spasms were dramatically reduced.” Alcohol has the same effect, which means sufferers are faced with a choice. “Can I handle this constant movement or should I just have half-a-dozen gins? But, of course, then you are at risk of becoming an alcoholic and couldn’t hold down a job.”
The consultant, who has not been named, took Doyle’s suggestion seriously. He wrote to the Minister for Justice, Mrs Owen, seeking permission to prescribe marijuana to his patient. The letter was passed on to the Minister for Health, Mr Noonan, who replied. “I wasn’t expecting an overtly compassionate response, but the clinically cold letter I got back surprised me,” Paddy Doyle says. In his response the Minister said marijuana was a Schedule One controlled drug under the Misuse of Drugs Acts 1977 and 1984 and that it had no recognised medical or scientific use.
He said clinical research did not support medical claims made in favour of marijuana and that its use could lead to experimentation with other drugs. It was not, the letter concluded, the Government’s stance to change the legal position on any drug including marijuana. Doyle, who is married with three grown up children, was “amazed”. “He didn’t even contact my consultant to inquire about my condition.
The implication was that I would be straight on to heroin if allowed marijuana,” he says. Ironically, the cocktail of prescribed drugs he is on would be the envy of many a hardened drug addict. “I have been prescribed a wide variety of drugs since I was nine and never misused any of them,” he says. Doyle takes a mixture of anti-spasmodic drugs and muscle relaxants, but so far nothing has worked. Meanwhile, he knows of a prominent consultant in the US who notes a “definite improvement” in four dystonia sufferers who were given marijuana.
The drug has also been licensed for use by people with specified illnesses in some US states. Now working in a large nonprofit organisation, Doyle says he does not want to go looking for the prohibited drug “on the streets and pubs” of the capital. “Why should I have to? I don’t want to have to break the law to stop the spasms in my body. If I do decide to do that I will make it known and the authorities can take me to court because I can prove that it is for medicinal purposes only,” he says.
The author of The God Squad is no stranger to controversy, having been pilloried in the late 1980s by those who saw his critically acclaimed autobiography as an attack on Catholic Ireland. “And I know there will be some people who think, `He’s off again, why can’t that Paddy Doyle just leave well enough alone?’,” he says. “Well, the simple answer is that I can’t. I’m not the type to give in. I like to think of myself as a friendly Rottweiler and I will be barking, maybe even snapping, at the heels of the authorities until this issue is resolved.”
Irish Times: Tuesday, April 20, 1998
Fuckem all Paddy ! Hope you’re well (still alive, at least). I miss your website.
Martha
just read the God Squad ( Paddy Doyle) Bloody catholic nuns and priests from years ago.. who inflicted so much suffering on the very vulnerable.. It is not only Paddys book that has highlited all the abuse and horror.. many other peoples writings that I have read have done likewise…
The writer of this comment asked me to post it on her behalf. I’m happy to do so.
I don’t know what is going to get us out of this morrasse. I only know that Noonan is either extremely ill-informed, or lying, if he says a) that marajuana has no therapeutic use and b) that it’s a ‘gateway’ drug. Noonsense. Why would he do it though? There seems to be a large element of fear in even approaching the subject of any drug legalisation apart from alcohol. I imagine that it’s because so much of the economy is skewed around legislation and law enforcement that puts one set of people on one side of a line and the rest on the other, and in that sense I agree with the above comment: racism is one element. Here in Ireland, it’s the strange reverence for gangs, and the assurance that so much of our resources must continuously be poured into that gaping mouth of ‘organised, gangland crime’. Why? Who’s in the pay of whom? Legalisation would be cheaper, would allow us to look at the problem rationally, and would allow us to deal with it, rather than just playing some weird, endless, expensive game of cops and robbers, and ruining all those lives that get caught up in the cogs through the sex industry, human trafficking, gun-running, and so on. It would be wonderful if politicians in this country could, just for once, have enough spine to stand up and take responsibility for this. Agree to look into and legislate for legitimate research into therapeutic effects. And if necessary (as I’m sure it will be) change legislation according to the findings of that research. You’ll free us yet, Paddy!
from Lucy Bingham McAndrew