Strengthened and Enforced

Peter Hitchens writes:

Nobody has seen any significance in the fact that Michael Adebolajo’s life changed utterly when, as a teenager, he began taking drugs, especially cannabis.

Use of this drug, particularly when young, is closely correlated with irreversible mental illness. That’s also when he embraced the barmy version of Islam that seems to have him in its grip.

There are plenty of other young drug-users roaming our streets. Most of them couldn’t even spell ‘Al Qaeda’ and won’t embrace Islam. But many of them will become mental patients.

Some of them, alas, will be ‘released into the community’ to commit awful acts of unhinged violence that barely make the local TV news.

No Prime Ministers will fly back from Paris. No Whitehall committees will meet. No noble statements of defiance will be made.

And yet, if we strengthened and enforced our drug laws, instead of watering them down to nothingness as we have done, much of this would be preventable.