In Fact At War

Peter Hitchens writes:

Are we in fact at war with Russia? Has our ambassador to Moscow, Nigel Casey MVO CMG, been quietly warned to have his bags packed and his passport ready for a rapid departure? Will his beautiful residence be shuttered? Will the residence’s Union Jack – visible from the Kremlin across the Moscow river – be pulled down after almost 100 years of annoying whoever rules Russia?

How would we know? Nobody actually declares war any more. This country was the last nation to do so. In 1942, we declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Since then, such formalities have gone out of style. So it might in fact have happened.

The former head of the British secret police, MI5 (well, they’re not spies, so what else are they?), Eliza Manningham-Buller, seems to think so. She has mused publicly that Britain may already be at war with Russia.

She thinks this is because of the depth and intensity of cyber attacks, sabotage and other hostile activity orchestrated by Moscow against the UK. Fiona Hill, the White House’s chief Russia adviser during Donald Trump’s first term, also recently argued that Russia is at war with Britain.

Then there was the curious event at Gatwick airport on September 27 when the former MP George Galloway was detained by ‘counter-terror’ police as he returned, via Abu Dhabi, from a visit to Russia.

Now I have many times clashed with Mr Galloway on public platforms, especially on his readiness to defend gruesome regimes such as Cuba or the old Soviet Union. And he once made a personal attack on my late brother which was so ferociously rude that it would always prevent me from being on friendly terms with him.

But this still looks like the heavy hand of the state to me. If the police have any evidence against Mr Galloway, let them put it to the CPS and, if necessary, the courts.

That is what happens in free countries. What they did to Mr Galloway looks more like what they do to dissenters in, well, Russia. The powers revealed are quite frightening.

I was glad to see the former Tory minister Jacob Rees-Mogg was equally disturbed, saying on Twitter: ‘It is important to defend free speech for people with whom one very strongly disagrees.’

Police said Mr Galloway was stopped under schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019.

This is another of those fishy catch-all laws Labour and Tory governments have slipped through Parliament on the pretext of fighting terror, since 2001. It allows an officer to stop, question, search and detain a person at a port to determine ‘if they have engaged in hostile activity’.

It gives me the creeps, alongside the similar tyrannical sanctioning of video-blogger Graham Phillips, another man I do not like, for holding the wrong opinions on the Ukraine war. Have we quietly crossed a line from peace to war?

I preferred the days when our leaders had to declare war and explain why they were doing this dangerous, hard, uncertain thing. I suspect they do not do so because they do not really know why.

I confess that I do not know why either, and I have tried to understand the reason for many years now. What are the air raid sirens like in your town these days?

And:

Apart from being against murder, I refuse to have any detailed opinions about the Manchester synagogue atrocity.

Police, and most media, remain brainlessly uninterested in the worldwide correlation between rampage attacks and growing use of marijuana. So they don’t investigate it.

If it is present here, we may never know. But others are waking up. In The Wall Street Journal last week, reporter Allysia Finley joined some dots. The recent Dallas shooter, Joshua Jahn, was a marijuana user.

‘He often posted on a Reddit forum for cannabis users. In April 2016, he pleaded guilty to trafficking marijuana. Next year, he moved to Washington state – one of the first to legalise cannabis for recreational use – to work on a pot farm.’ Likewise Robin Westman, who attacked a Minneapolis school church service, worked in a marijuana dispensary. Mass shooters Nikolas Cruz, Jared Lee Loughner and Devin Patrick Kelley were heavy marijuana users.

Yet, as Ms Finley bitingly pointed out, everyone is worrying about the supposed ill-effects of paracetamol. ‘That’s just as well for the Big Pot lobby.’

As Kathy Gyngell writes:

A study published in June that I have just come across provides unsurprising but nonetheless devastating and irrefutable evidence linking increased cannabis use with rising rates of breast and testicular cancers in young Americans.

The study covers the period between 2000 and 2019. The aim was clear: to test the hypothesis that the increasing incidence of testis and breast cancer in adolescent and young adult (AYA) Americans correlates with their increasing cannabis use. Its conclusions are stark: that North America has evidence which implicates cannabis as a potential etiologic factor contributing to the increasing incidence of breast carcinoma in young females and testis cancer in older adolescent and young adult males, and in most races and ethnicities. Temporal correlations suggest that a carcinogenic effect of cannabis is rapid, leading to cancer within a few years after cannabis exposure. You can read this extremely detailed and careful study here.

Its overall study design involved comparing breast and testis cancer incidence trends in jurisdictions that had and had not legalised cannabis use. In the US, both breast carcinoma in 20- to 34-year-old females and testis cancer in 15- to 39-year-old males had annual incidence rate increases that were highly correlated (Pearson’s r = 0.95) with the increase in the number of cannabis-legalising jurisdictions during the period 2000–2019. Both were significantly greater during the period 2000–2019 in the cannabis-legalising than non-legalising states. (My italics)

During the period 2000–2019, registries in cannabis-legalising versus non-legalising states documented a 26 per cent versus 17 per cent increase in breast carcinoma and 24 per cent versus 14 per cent increase in testis cancer.

In the same age groups, the study (predictably) found Canada had an even greater increase in both breast and testis cancer incidence than the US. A UNICEF study on the well-being of children had already confirmed that Canadian adolescents (aged 11 to 15) have the highest rate of cannabis use among the 29 advanced economies of the world. Of particular concern that legalising advocates would do well to note is the considerable percentage of the Canadian youth who are daily or weekly users – approximately 22 per cent of boys and 10 per cent of girls. And that amongst the older 16-19s the upward trend in use which increased to 43 per cent in 2023 compared with 36 per cent in 2018 follows the country’s nationwide legalisation of cannabis for over-18s in 2018.

This link between cannabis and these forms of cancer should come as no surprise. A report from the American Cancer Society (ACS) in February this year identified non-seminoma testis cancer as the cancer type most closely linked to cannabis use.

More shocking is that this relationship has been known about for years. In 2009, scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle investigated the possibility of a link ‘after learning that the testes were one of the few organs in the body to contain receptors for the main psychoactive substance in the drug, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)’. The same scientists noted that there had also been a rise in testicular cancer cases that had ‘mirrored the rise in marijuana use since the 1950s’.

The 2025 study is of course of a different type and order of magnitude. It was certainly needed. Its findings warrant the utmost attention of our national and local public health authorities which were so zealous to promote child covid vaccination but have remained over the years so strangely silent about cannabis.

This valuable study should also serve as a warning to cannabis legalisers including Sir Sadiq Khan that their endorsement of the drug and indifference to the impact of legalisation on teen health is not just irresponsible but near-criminal. 

Postscript: There are other disturbing elements regarding the underlying mechanisms noted in the study’s findings. These, its authors state, ‘may involve genotoxic effects, oxidative stress, and mitochondrial dysfunction caused by cannabis, leading to genomic instability’. For further elucidation of this a 2024 study published in Addiction Biology provides some key insights into cannabis-cancer pathobiology and genotoxicity. You can read this report here.