It Could Not Be Clearer

Peter Hitchens writes:

Every day, all over the world, scores of parents discover that they have been lied to and so their lives are ruined. Their children have first gone off the rails at school, then become crazy, angry, kicking holes in doors and swearing, sometimes actually violent. Years of careful nurturing, years of education, have come to nothing. Skunk cannabis has wrecked their minds.

But they have nobody to turn to. The NHS does not want any more mental patients, thank you. Its few remaining mental hospitals are quite full enough of marijuana victims already.

There is no cure for the ghastly sickness which has lodged in their children’s heads.

The available treatments are miserable and offer no hope, except that the worst of the craziness may stop.

Some of these tragic cases go on to do serious violence, and even to kill. There are more of them all the time.

We had such a case only the other day, but I will come to that.

The lie, embedded in our culture, is that the drug called marijuana or cannabis or pot or dope or weed is ‘soft’, that it is harmless, that it makes its users mellow but does no damage, unlike the bogeyman drugs such as heroin and cocaine.

TV programmes and movies make light of it. Politicians urge its legalisation, as do billionaire businessmen hoping to make even more money from the misery it brings. Dimwits say it is a medicine and their claims are readily accepted without serious research.

The police treat it as unimportant. Schools, where it is nowadays vaped or sold in the form of sweets to children of 11 or even younger, turn a blind eye to it.

Of course, you’d expect some people to pretend this is not happening. The noisiest of these are the marijuana ‘community’, the logically-challenged, fact-free multitudes of angry potheads who shriek enraged insults at me when I raise this on anti-social media.

Their tweets, the obvious products of fizzing, garbled minds, prove my point. They all gibber that it has never done them any harm. They may not be the best judges of that. But now they have an unexpected new ally. This is the group of Right-wing thinkers who are preoccupied with what they believe is an Islamist terrorist threat to this country. [This alliance is neither unexpected nor new to some of us. Can you even be allied to yourself?]

I do not know why there should be such a threat, now we have helped to instal an actual Al Qaeda government in Syria and recognised a Palestinian state, but there it is. They are outraged when I point out that the Manchester synagogue killer Jihad Al-Shamie was a squalid lowlife with a Class B drug conviction whose behaviour was the act of a crazy person, not of a political or religious zealot.

Terrorists, like the IRA bombers or the 9/11 hijackers, have aims and achieve them (a truth we hide from ourselves).

What possible cause was served by his unhinged, random murder? How did he help Islam, or Gaza or anybody?

Like many crazy people, he wanted most of all to be dead, for even the simplest person knows that if you wear something that looks like a suicide vest, the police will shoot you.

He mauled and scarred and smashed the very cause he is supposed to have been pursuing. And if he had been sane, rather than driven mad by THC, the key ingredient in dope, he would have known that.

So would the similar people, totally non-Muslim, who recently engaged in similar unhinged rampages in Minneapolis and Dallas in the USA.

But they too had been taking (you’ve guessed it) lots and lots of marijuana. The same is true of many non-political violent crimes in this country, where complacent media often don’t bother to report the presence of the drug, blast them.

There is one other thing about crazy people, which all psychiatrists know. They often like to attach themselves to big causes. It makes them feel important and significant.

You will remember the proven maniac Muhaydin Mire, who in 2016 attacked passers-by at Leytonstone Underground station, shouting what seemed to be Islamist slogans. A bystander called out: ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv!’

To begin with, the police and media treated the event as a political attack. But after Mire had been locked up in Broadmoor, it turned out that he was considerably madder than a very large box of frogs.

He actually thought – with literal cold certainty – that Sir Anthony Blair KG was his guardian angel.

His family had long been begging the authorities – without success – to put him away where he could not harm himself or others.

Well, if you don’t want to see any more of these horrible attacks, then join me in calling for the renewed enforcement of the laws against possessing marijuana which are still very much on the books.

Start now and we may get it under control again. Do nothing about drugs, fret and sloganise about Islamism, and you will achieve nothing.

And you will condemn hundreds more parents to the tragedy of watching their children turned into husks of their former selves by this cruel and vicious drug.

And:

A crazy criminal lowlife, his brain fizzing and crackling from many years of abuse of extra-strength cannabis, commits a grisly murder.

How do we respond? We tell ourselves that it is a political offence, a new phase of anti-Semitism, because Jihad Al-Shamie attacked a synagogue.

What a ridiculous country we are, so wreathed in delusions of grandeur that we cannot be troubled to fix a leaking roof or mend a broken window but are experts in every silly theory, political and psychological, known to man. Our heads are in the air. We refuse to see what actually lies at our feet.

There are appalling numbers of these marijuana-inflicted events. We never look at them with any care because so many people want to use them for the various majestic, self-important political causes they back.

Racial bigots have one view. People who think that there is a terrifying Islamist threat have another. Sometimes these overlap. Both will now send me rude letters or insult me on anti-social media, because I don't agree with them.

The potent lobby who want to spend more money and effort on surveillance have a third view. They’re all wrong.

Crazy people are always attaching themselves to political and religious causes. My friend Ross Grainger has compiled a whole book, Attacker Smoked Cannabis, about the numerous cases of mad, unpolitical violence committed by people of all races and colours but who have in common one thing – the long-term abuse of marijuana.

He collected them from local newspapers because they are so common that national media only cover them nowadays if they are particularly horrific.

Often they report the mad violence but minimise, or even omit, the presence of marijuana, not thinking it important. In the USA, the former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson and the Wall Street Journal writer Allysia Finley have begun to look into the same connection in North America.

Yet authority still ignores or belittles it there. In the case of the Uvalde school shooting in Texas in 2022, The New York Times (which favours marijuana legalisation) dropped from its story the fact that the killer was a dope smoker, something its own reporters had discovered and which The Mail on Sunday later confirmed to be true.

In the USA, a different kind of obsession also prevents anyone making sense of the matter. There, campaigners for gun control are uninterested in any other explanation for rampage killings, even though killer after killer is found to be a long-term marijuana user.

In Britain and in other countries where there is gun control, these maniacs tend to use cars and knives as their weapons. One totally unpolitical and non-religious case was that of Nicola Edgington, who was convicted of murder after stabbing a stranger in the street with a 12-inch butcher’s knife in 2013.

Edgington had been in detention for killing her mother but had been freed. Before the stabbing, she told a psychiatric nurse she had stopped taking her medication and had used skunk cannabis.

Another was Nicholas Salvador, detained indefinitely in Broadmoor for beheading an elderly woman with a machete while rampaging through back gardens in North London in 2015. He too was a heavy user of skunk cannabis.

Many people think that Michael Adebowale, one of the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, was politically motivated. In fact, he could barely think, being a long-term smoker of extra-powerful skunk.

In 2016, we had the case of Muhaydin Mire, who attacked passers-by at Leytonstone Underground Station in London. Famously, one of those present shouted at him: ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv’.

He turned out to believe, quite genuinely, that Sir Anthony Blair was his guardian angel. You might have thought that this would be enough to attract the attention of the mental health services by itself. He also thought he was possessed by evil spirits and that he was being followed by both MI6 and MI5 (a pity he was wrong). Psychiatrists ruled that he was beyond doubt mentally ill. His own family had begged the authorities to do something about him, long before his futile crime, and immediately before it. Nobody did anything.

Our mental hospitals, meagre and scarce as they are, are quite full enough as it is, and nobody wants to make them any fuller. But because he yelled, ‘Allahu Akhbar!’, and, ‘This is for my Syrian brothers!’, our media, police and courts and the ‘experts' who opine on these things all decided that he was a terrorist, only later conceding that he was in fact crazy.

Yet here we go making the same mistake again, with heavyweight thinkers declaring that the Manchester synagogue crime has changed their view of anti-Semitism in Britain and made them fear for this country’s Jews more than before.

There may be other reasons to be concerned about that. But the Al-Shamie case is yet another piece of evidence that we need to do something about the spread of marijuana, especially among the young whose brains are most vulnerable to it.

It could not be clearer. But why does nobody act? Duped politicians, showbusiness figures and businessmen continue to campaign for marijuana legalisation. And they are given a respectful hearing instead of being jeered for ignorance and irresponsibility.

The 1971 law, which says possession of marijuana is a severe crime, is still on the books. But the police, who think they know better, long ago gave up enforcing it so that, in some towns, whole streets stink of the drug.

This is a real thing with a real, obvious answer. (Japan and South Korea still prosecute possession of cannabis – as we used to – and have far fewer problems as a result.)

It is part of a raft of problems with simple solutions [oh, dear] which lie spread out before us. Comprehensive schools have failed, especially the poor. Their standards are pitiful, they fail to prepare children for work or life. Why not restore the better system they replaced? [It was not better, however bad much of state education is, and it would in any case be impossible to recreate. But by all means let us have the debate.]

In the last 60 years, the police have stopped preventing crime, as they once very effectively did, and now wait for it to happen and chase after it, a method which (unsurprisingly) has been a complete flop. Why not learn from the mistake and put it right? Liberal prisons, far from being civilised, are now run, horribly, by the inmates [they are in a terrible state, but that is not the reason why]. Why not reimpose the discipline of the past?

Abandoning lifelong marriage and solid families has led to vast misery for children. Why do we persist with this policy?

The more roads we build, the fuller they get. Why not try restoring the railways we madly got rid of?

Freeing pornography has, as conservatives warned, led to ever more pornography, not to relaxed enlightenment. Should we continue to congratulate ourselves for allowing the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that dismal, silly book?

Above all, why do we – the residents of one of the most beautiful, temperate, safe, fertile, happy lands in the world – bring repeated trouble on ourselves by pretending we are a world power and hurrying into every war available?

We are not such a power. While our actual usable defences crumble, our boastful nuclear deterrent is a barnacled museum which probably does not work.

Live within our means [learn how the money supply works]. Guard our shores from danger and uninvited guests. Set right those things which have gone astray. Learn to tell the truly important from the grandiose.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature.

Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

Unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Nigel Farage concurs with the Green Party in wanting to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Are those now the views of Ann Widdecombe and Danny Kruger?

Instead, we need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that include the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.