Far Greater Danger

Peter Hitchens writes:

If I ever feel the need to have several nice cold buckets of slime tipped over my head, I point out that most of the supposed terrorist attacks in this country are, in fact, the work of solitary drug-crazed losers.

The drug involved is most often marijuana, though steroids are also increasingly implicated, as are some prescription medications. 

But it is mainly marijuana, which is just now the subject of a huge billionaire-backed campaign to allow it to be advertised on TV and sold in supermarkets. Yes, that is what legalisation means.

Within seconds one choir of morons will be yelling that I am ‘an apologist for Islamic terror’. No, I am not. I hate terrorism of all kinds and wish we did not give into it so often. 

As I turn to deal with them, a second choir of morons will begin to howl that marijuana has no links with mental illness or crime, is a valuable medicine, and how dare I damage its chances of being legalised? 

They have half a point. It should not be legalised, and I will do all in my power to prevent that happening. 

But that is because there are mountains of evidence of its connections with mental illness and with violence. This danger is getting harder to contest every day.

So here comes the slime, the dimwit screeches and the self-interested squawks. Because the official claim that the dreadful slayings in a Reading park last weekend were ‘terrorism’ is so absurd that it simply has to be countered.

This belief actually leaves us in more danger, not less, because it means we look in the wrong direction and take precautions against the wrong menace.

First is the obvious question. What conceivable cause could have been helped by this frightful crime? None. Anyone identified with it would have earned nothing but hate and fury.

Terrorists have purposes, and all too often attain them. This had no purpose. It is not even very clear what religion the alleged culprit followed. 

Next we must come to this suspect. Of course he may be innocent of the accusation and we must wait for a trial to establish that.

But I am interested in the way that a large part of the Establishment have dealt with the fact that this alleged culprit has been described by friends as a marijuana user. There’s no serious doubt about it. 

Photographs have been published showing him holding what looks very much like a marijuana cigarette, which we all nowadays knowingly call a joint or a spliff, as we have become used to the utter failure of the police to control or suppress this crime. 

Did the Home Secretary mention this in her statement on the Reading killings? I couldn’t find it if so. But she prosed on about ‘poisonous extremist ideology’. Downing Street was the same.

Did police chiefs mention it? Again, I can’t find any trace of them doing so. Several newspapers and broadcasters also failed to mention this key fact about the suspect. 

The Left-wing Guardian [hardly; Hitchens is only doing the liberal elite’s dirty work by so describing it] even managed to publish the picture of him with the joint in his hand, but cut out that part of the photograph. Someone must have decided to do that. 

The ridiculously biased Wikipedia, which really should be renamed ‘Wokipedia’, managed to create an entire entry about the crime without mentioning the suspect’s drugs use.

But all gave plenty of space to the tenuous theories about his supposed connections to terrorism. I promise you that all of us are now in far greater danger from a random attack by a person made mentally ill by marijuana than we are from terror.