You Have Been Warned

Peter Hitchens writes:

With infuriating slowness, conventional wisdom is starting to grasp that marijuana is actually a horrible, dangerous drug which should not be legal. Maybe the realisation will come in time to save us from a dreadful mistake. Maybe not.

Last month the self-important New York Times, still very much on the side of legalising this poisonous filth, actively suppressed news that the recent Texas school shooter had been a dope smoker.

Last week, the less grand New York Post recognised that Robert Crimo, the mass shooter in Highland Park, Chicago, was unquestionably a marijuana user, and that this might have influenced his behaviour. 

Well, look at this pathetic individual with his facial tattoos and his air of being broken and deranged. Even before his acquaintances confirmed his drug habit, who could have been in doubt?

Miranda Devine wrote in the Post: ‘He does fit a familiar pattern of mass killers: alienated young male stoners who appear to be in the grip of a distinctively American madness.’

She added: ‘But virulent attacks always greet any hint of opposition to wholesale drug legalisation. Youth mental illness is a crisis in this country and yet we are not allowed to discuss a scientifically verified trigger.’

How true this is, in Britain as well as the USA. My astute and diligent colleague Eve Simmons filed a dispatch from California a week ago about the growing mountain of evidence that cannabis has grave health dangers.

Her article was carefully researched, full of verifiable facts and figures and quoted experts. But she was subjected on social media to a revolting storm of personal insult and abuse. (I have been getting this for years, and am used to it. When you first experience it, it is deeply nasty.)

How much of this is organised, we cannot know. But the huge, rich Big Dope lobby for marijuana legalisation will do anything to silence dissent. It has never been more important that the anti-drug view is heard.

And:

I don’t think anyone even bothers to deny any more that the police have virtually given up pursuing a large amount of crime. Muggers, vandals, burglars, car thieves, shoplifters - nothing much ever happens to them.

Yet Julian Assange is enduring miserable conditions in a cell in Belmarsh maximum-security prison, among murderers and terrorists.

Yes, he jumped bail, but he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for that offence in May 2019, more than three years ago.

Why is it necessary for him still to be held in this especially grim place? He is now an unconvicted prisoner, awaiting extradition to the US for embarrassing the American government.

At the very least he should be transferred to somewhere less gruelling, in which it is easier for him to be visited by his wife and two young children.

But really, he should be released, as the alleged offence is plainly political and no free country should grant extradition on such grounds.

And:

To my bafflement, some people seem to think that Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, would be a good Prime Minister.

Leaving aside her time as a Liberal Democrat, her republican speechmaking, her silly posing in tanks and fur hats, and her wild encouragement of British people to volunteer to fight in Ukraine, and her ignorance of geography in that region, there’s this: in a recent appearance before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (wearing a badge featuring the Ukrainian flag and the Union Jack), she was reduced to long pauses and pathetic evasions when asked how our supposed opposition to authoritarian regimes applied to blood-soaked Saudi Arabia.

She could not, under repeated questioning by Chris Bryant MP, give one example of an occasion when she had raised human rights issues with any Gulf leader. You have been warned.