Despite the growth in scientific knowledge of the subject, cannabis, a substance situated on the borders of the licit and the illicit, continues to provoke debate. It raises conflicting arguments which are much more of an ideological nature than a scientific one. Even objective data are used in a polemical fashion: either the use of this psychotropic drug is dramatised or, alternatively, its consumption is made to appear everyday.

Joint, shit, grass, resin, hashish, hemp, marihuana, and weed: there are numerous terms to designate the same substance: cannabis. ‘Everything you ever wanted to know about cannabis but were too afraid to ask,’ could be the subtitle of this collective work (1), which presents a dispassionate inventory of the factors around which a consensus has been formed, from an epidemiological perspective as much as from a neurobiological, clinical, psychological and somatic point of view. The richness of the work lies in its interdisciplinarity: it offers different interlinked perspectives on the origins of cannabis use, its consumption and its various effects on the body. It offers elements of a reply to numerous questions in a language accessible to all kinds of readership, from ordinary citizens to professionals, without ever slipping into banal over-simplifications.

Structured in 10 chapters, the collective work offered by Vincent Seutin, Jacqueline Scuvée-Moreau and Etienne Quertemont and the University of Liège’s Drugs Unit allows readers not only to know more about cannabis but also and above all to understand where we are in terms of its effects on human behaviour. Is cannabis as harmful as other psychotropic drugs? How does it act on the body? What is the exact current situation regarding legislation on its use? What care and support provisions are offered to its users? In other words, a whole series of questions to which the researchers have tried to reply, in intersecting their knowledge and experience.

A collective work in which different areas of knowledge intersect

In the 1980s Marc Richelle, at the time the Dean of the University of Liège’s Faculty of Psychology and Education, and a convinced advocate of multidisciplinarity, invited his colleagues from the whole range of disciplines to meet informally to together think through ‘the development of teaching and research programmes in the field of the uses and abuses of licit and illicit drugs.’ A think tank arose from it which rapidly opened its doors to fieldworkers, doctors, educators, healthcare workers and psychology support personnel, etc. In the Spring of 1987 there was published a fascicle of the journal ‘Nouvelles de la Science et des Technologie’ called Drogue – Du neurone au code pénal (Drugs: from the neurone to the criminal code), to which a dozen or so people had contributed. Certain of them are to be discovered in the current work which is inscribed in a precise extension of the work they had done. Regards croisés sur le cannabis brings together disciplines as diverse as psychiatry, with Marc Ansseau, neuropsychiatry with Paul Verbanck, pharmacy with Corinne Charlier, Benjamin De Backer and Jacqueline Scuvée-Moreau, medicine with Pierre Firket, Christiane Gosset, Emmanuel Pinto and Vincent Seutin, the chemical sciences and toxicology with avec Laetitia Theunis, but also the human sciences, sociology with Claude Macquet, criminology with André Lemaître, and psychology with Valérie Antonialli, Sylvie Blairy, Michel Born, Ezio Tirelli and Etienne Quertemont, the public health sciences with Isabelle Heyden and Isabelle Demaret. They come from the Free University of Brussels, the University of Liège or from the hospital environment, the Liège CHU, and the CHU Brugmann. Jean-Baptiste Andries, the Advocate-General at the Liège Court of Appeal, has taken responsibility for the work’s legal aspects. In our times, when cannabis is the most consumed illicit product in numerous European countries and of which Belgium is one of the biggest consumers, the work obviously responds to a need for information.

(1) Regards croisés sur le cannabis, Vincent Seutin, Jacqueline Scuvée-Moreau and Etienne Quertemont (edited), Wavre, Editions Mardaga, 2010.