‘PRESIDENT Trump blamed last week’s shooting at a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility on “deranged radical leftists” who are “constantly demonising Law Enforcement”. The 29-year-old shooter, Joshua Jahn, certainly left a paper trail indicating deep hostility toward ICE agents.
‘But many who knew Jahn say he didn’t seem especially political. He was more interested in marijuana and videogames. So what possessed him to go on a shooting spree before taking his own life?’
Thus opened an opinion article in the Life Science section of the Wall Street Journal a few days ago.
What’s notable about this article for a mainstream outlet is the attention it draws to the fact that the gunman was far from alone in using marijuana heavily before committing serious acts of violence.
It continues: ‘Increasing studies show that frequent use of marijuana, especially at high potency, is associated with violent behaviour, schizophrenia, psychosis and suicidal thoughts — not to mention heart attacks and strokes. These associations hold when researchers control for demographics, mental and other illnesses, and use of other drugs.
‘Correlation doesn’t prove causation. But the primary factors that scientists look at to demonstrate a causal effect — consistency and strength of association, dose response, plausible biologic mechanism, coherence between lab and observational finding, and experimental evidence — all suggest cannabis use can trigger psychosis and violent inclinations.’
Indeed. Why then, one is led to ask, is this association between cannabis use and ‘derangement’ routinely ignored by public health authorities, politicians and commentators?
Why are not the governments of the West focused on this risk to public safety?
The answer lies I believe in the long term influence of a political and media establishment pro-drug left progressive and libertarian elite – from the think tanks (the IEA and the Adam Smith Institute) to the politicians (William Hague, Nick Clegg, and Vince Cable and more latterly Sir Sadiq Khan to name but some) to career commentators like Simon Jenkins, Matthew Parris and Ian Birrell, all of whom have promoted policy ‘reform’. Liberalisation might serve their notions of freedom. Yet it is not they who would suffer from it but ordinary people and public safety in general.
The Wall Street Journal article describes Jahn’s far-from-alone descent into cannabis ‘zombyism’.
‘As a teenager, Jahn often posted on a Reddit forum for cannabis users,’ the article says. ‘In April 2016, he pleaded guilty to a felony count of trafficking marijuana. The following year, he moved to Washington state — one of the first states to legalise cannabis for recreational use — to work on a pot farm.
‘“He was all about the weed. He wanted to be part of the scene. He lived in his car while he helped,” the farm’s manager, Ryan Sanderson, told the New York Post. “There are people who work, and there are people who go through the motions. He was one of those guys. He didn’t work that hard, probably because he was too high.”
‘He later drifted and became socially isolated, logging more than 10,000 hours playing games like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2. The latter game involves shooting masses of violent zombies. Might a deadly cocktail of marijuana use and violent video games have turned Jahn into a zombie?’
As we have frequently reported in these pages cannabis-induced psychosis is a well-documented psychiatric disorder, and more common among people who start to use pot at a young age (under 17) and suffer mental illness.
In 2014 we reported a then new study of adolescent cannabis use, in which almost 3,800 people took part. Its objective was to find out more about the link between the frequency of cannabis use before the age of 17 and seven outcomes up to the age of 30, such as completing high school, obtaining a university degree and cannabis and welfare dependence.
It found that teenagers who smoked cannabis daily were more than 60 per cent less likely to complete school or get a degree than those who never had. They were also 60 per cent less likely to graduate college, seven times more likely to attempt suicide, eight times as likely to go on to use other illegal drugs, and 18 times more likely to develop a cannabis dependence.
Sadly it omitted to look at violent crime.
However in this country two men have done the researchers’ work for them. Journalist and commentator Peter Hitchens has documented literally hundreds of cases in which one lone wolf terrorist after another has turned out to be a dope user while Ross Grainger has made it his life work to monitor and record all cases where the attacker used cannabis. He is the creator of Attacker Smoked Cannabis, a catalogue of suicide and psychopathic violence in the UK and Ireland.
Grainger also detailed the astonishing number of cases of psychopathic violence committed by men against women where cannabis was a factor in this article for TCW. The powerful psychoactive pleasure drug common to all these crimes is cannabis, and in all the cases they document copious amounts smoked over many years.
This mirrors the WSJ’s findings: ‘Robin Westman, the transgender man who shot up a Minneapolis Catholic church last month, blamed his pot habit. “Gender and weed f— up my head,” Westman wrote in a note found by investigators. “I wish I could stop vaping but I can’t! If I could stop vaping, I could stop myself from doing this attack, but I just don’t want to.”
‘Mass shooters Nikolas Cruz, Jared Lee Loughner and Devin Patrick Kelley were found to be heavy pot users. There are plenty of other examples of apparent cannabis-induced violence that have drawn less media attention: a 42-year-old Minnesota man blamed a bad reaction to a THC seltzer drink for his alleged attempt to strangle and drown his 64-year-old mother and 25-year-old sister in a lake this summer.’
And so it goes on. It is indeed, as the author says, too bad that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has not yet faced up to this scourge on Americans’ physical and mental health.
This, however should not be instead of but in addition to his focus on the risks to public health posed by mandated child vaccines, the necessity, safety and efficacy of which remain in question.
Editor’s note – This article was written before yesterday’s appalling news of the Manchester synagogue attack broke. There seems little doubt that this is where shamefully ‘sanctioned’ anti-semitism on Britain’s streets has led. With pro-Palestinian anti-semitic campaigners publicly and confidently stating they ‘don’t care’ about the Jewish community even just hours after two Jewish worshippers were killed, I use the word ‘sanctioned’ advisedly.
Whether the attacker in this case was also fuelled up by cannabis or any other drugs, as has often proved to be the case in the past, as the article above reports, we may only find out when the suspect finally comes to court.
