Kew Gardens drugs storm over 'Intoxication Season' which includes talks on mind-altering plants  

Speakers will discuss the uses of marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms

Anti-drugs campaigners last night condemned an exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew where speakers will discuss the uses of marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms.

The Intoxication Season is open to visitors of any age and displays plants including cannabis, the hallucinogen peyote, and poppies, which are used to make opium.

Professor David Nutt, who was sacked as a Government adviser for his views downplaying the dangers of drugs, will give a keynote speech on the ‘chemical underworld of mind-altering plants'.

Other lectures include Seeing Through The Smoke, about the ‘helpful properties' of cannabis, while another event celebrates the hallucinogen psilocybin as the ‘powerful chemical which makes mushrooms magic'.

The three-week exhibition is set to begin on September 20 at the 300-acre Kew Gardens, which receives about half its funding from the Government. It has been given £114.5 million of public money since 2010.

Curators insist that the event, which will display ‘notorious mind-altering plants' in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, will ‘in no way condone the use of illegal drugs'

But last night campaign groups said that Kew, whose patron is Prince Charles, was ‘failing to safeguard youngsters from the dangers of drugs'.

Elizabeth Burton-Phillips, chief executive of the charity DrugFAM, said: ‘The literature from Kew Gardens reads like an invitation for children to come and experiment with drugs. I am sure these people are all experts in their field but I deal with families who have lost children to drugs and my son died as a result of them.

‘The organisers are behaving extremely irresponsibly and not safeguarding youngsters. It's awful a publicly funded organisation is using its money for such a festival.'

Prof Nutt has recently called for users to be given ‘more informed choices about their use of legal and controlled drugs'. He said his lecture would discuss the ‘relative harms of drugs' and possible new treatments using controlled substances such as psilocybin.

‘The regulations controlling psilocybin mushrooms are ten times more strict than those controlling heroin,' he said.

‘It makes no sense. All it does is stop people like me doing research and helping develop treatments. I am not recommending the use of any drug. The law is designed to keep recreational users from harm. If it doesn't do that, but massively impairs research, it is actually doing people a disservice.'

But Mary Brett, of campaign group Cannabis Skunk Sense, said: ‘Kew should not be giving him this platform. Drugs are too serious a subject to be treated in this manner. But they've done it because they know he's controversial.'

David Raynes, of the National Drug Prevention Alliance and a former HM Customs Assistant Chief Investigation Officer, said: ‘Professor Nutt will go anywhere and do anything to bang his drum for the normalisation of drug use.

‘He writes about giving drug users accurate information but those most badly affected by drugs are often young people who haven't developed a risk-judgment mechanism.'

A Royal Botanic Gardens spokeswoman said no illegal drugs would be exhibited at the festival, only ‘the living plants from which illegal and legal drugs are derived'.

These could be viewed only from behind a security barrier.

‘We are aiming to show how plants' identities have been manipulated through time, sometimes portrayed as friend, sometimes as foe, when no plant is inherently a drug, a medicine, or a poison,' she added.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2746457/Kew-Gardens-drugs-storm-Intoxication-Season-includes-talks-mind-altering-plants.html 06/09/2014