A teenager cut off his own penis and stabbed his mother with a knife during a psychotic episode brought on by a potent form of cannabis called “skunk.”

The father of the teenager said the drug triggered a psychotic episode and is sharing the story in an effort to spread awareness about skunk, as it’s called in the United Kingdom. The unidentified man said his son started smoking marijuana when he was 16 but switched to skunk, a more powerful form of cannabis, out of “boredom” and soon “became paranoid,” reports The Telegraph.

The father said the drug turned his son, a rugby player, from a “bright bubbly lad” into a “waste of space.”

“He became delusional, he used to sleep with a tennis racket in his bed because he thought people were living in the walls,” his father told BBC Radio 5 Live. “I remember one instance he was telling us all about the fact that mermaids exist and it was just a whole tragic trip down a hill.”

It culminated in a psychotic episode that hospitalized the teen’s mother and landed him in a mental institute for six months and prison for two years. The father described a normal day and evening, but said his son woke up in the middle of the night in a psychotic state. The teen attacked and stabbed his mother and cut off his own penis.

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“It was absolutely devastating, you can’t imagine anything of that nature happening,” the father told BBC Radio 5 Live. “The whole episode was just surreal actually … it was almost as if peering in through a window and it was happening to somebody else.”

The father is sharing the story in support of Lord Nicholas Monson’s efforts to reclassify skunk from a class B to a class A drug and to decriminalize marijuana in the United Kingdom. Monson lost his son who was abusing skunk to suicide and argues that if marijuana were decriminalized, young adults would be less likely to seek out skunk.

The father said the teen, who continues to recover from the ordeal, has reconciled with his mother and has no recollection of the incident.

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