When Will they See the Link Between Dope and Mental Illness?

After the horrors in Denmark on Saturday, I waited for the information I knew was coming to emerge. It did so on Monday night. The Copenhagen killer, Omar el-Hussein was (as I had been all but sure he would be as soon as I heard the news) yet another low-life petty criminal loser, whose brains had been addled by cannabis use, were the culprits of the Lee Rigby murder, the Ottawa murder of the soldier Nathan Cirillo and the ‘Charlie Hebdo ‘ murders and the other killings linked to that incident. (I suspect that the Sydney killer also falls into this category, but so far as I know nobody has bothered to find out. He was certainly far from sane, and drug abuse is by far the most common predictor of insanity in this age).

 

The Danish newspaper Politiken quoted an acquaintance as saying he was a ‘heavy user’ of the supposedly ‘soft’ drug. Other reports said he had been arrested twice for possession of cannabis, but let off.  Pity.

 

Now the costly PR campaign for cannabis is so powerful that this crucial information was barely mentioned, amid the usual sloshing drivel about radicalisation and Islamic terror.  No doubt el-Hussein (who after a reasonably successful school career developed an uncontrollable temper and was imprisoned for randomly stabbing a commuter on a train). imagined that he was serving some cause. But he was a chaotic violent drifter with an addled mind, not the honed instrument of some global Islamist plot.

 

And if we want to see fewer such incidents we would get a lot further if we realised just how dangerous cannabis is, and acted accordingly, than we will by giving yet more money and power to pretentious and rather sinister ‘security’ organisations, who couldn’t stop a bus, let alone a terror attack.

 

You’d have thought it had been a bad week for cannabis, what with the new report in the ‘Lancet’  strongly linking Skunk cannabis with mental illness. And it might have become even worse, when the BBC favourite and liberal hero Matthew Parris recounted his experiences with the drug (under controlled conditions at the behest of a TV company) in an article (behind a paywall) in ‘The Times’.

 

You’ll have to subscribe to read the whole fascinating thing. I can share with you that Mr Parris wrote : ‘I have too many friends for whom prolonged and heavy use of cannabis has seemed destructive; too many for me to feel entirely at ease with words such as "mild" or "recreational" — or not in their case. Two friends, both in their forties, told me they smoked weed regularly, sometimes even in the morning, with the same result. "I think it changed me permanently as a person," one said.’

 

And also : ‘I have since interviewed friends who have been heavy users and talked to an old friend who was a distinguished clinical psychiatrist, to a younger psychologist she introduced me to and to his colleague in the London addiction centre where they work. I would describe all my interviewees as basically socially liberal, with no axes to grind, no drugs "agenda".

‘There is considerable agreement between all of them, users and health workers alike, that heavy use of cannabis, particularly skunk, can be associated with big changes in behaviour. One friend, a heroin addict now trying to kick the habit, told me that he had been finding it easier to hold down a job on heroin than when he was using cannabis, which he had stopped 12 years ago. Although he was pale and his hands shook, he seemed to be back to his old, pre-cannabis self. He talked about a friend he'd known for 30 years who had never stopped the cannabis and was now paranoid, convinced his neighbours were denouncing him.’

 

The Channel Four news presenter Jon Snow recounted a similar experience (undergone for the same programme) :

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2957957/Smoking-skunk-scarier-war-says-Jon-Snow-News-host-explains-felt-utterly-bereft-taking-drug-experiment-effects-brain.html

 

 

By the time I was completely stoned I felt utterly bereft. I felt as if my soul had been wrenched from my body. There was no one in my world.

‘I was frightened, paranoid, and felt physically and mentally wrapped in a dense blanket of fog.

 

‘I’ve worked in war zones, but I’ve never been as overwhelmingly frightened as I was when I was in the MRI scanner after taking skunk. I would never do it again.’

 

And yet, two and two were not put together by the media. They never are. The current fashion prevents it. Do you think you can manage, or do I have to spell it out?