My Riposte to the Twitter Twisters and Cannabis Comment Warriors

Perhaps Twitter should be renamed ‘Twister’. The cannabis comment warriors were busy yesterday deliberately misunderstanding my article about cannabis. They posted such things as  ‘Peter Hitchens says cannabis causes terrorism’  or ‘Peter Hitchens blamed the Lee Rigby murder on cannabis’, then mocked the claim I didn’t actually make.

 

Perhaps my mistake was in giving my readers information intended to make them think. I am very tired of the weary drivel about the supposed Islamist threat, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘lone wolves’, usually accompanied by demands from MI5 and the politicians for more powers, and more money with which to enforce them.

 

Now, there are plenty of Islamist blowhards in this and other countries, who mutter privately or publicly about beheading the infidel, or who propagate Judophobic verbal sewage. And from time to time there are dreadful incidents in which such people get hold of weapons (or in some cases simply use cars for their purpose – shall we ban cars?) and kill.

 

I believe we should examine these events rationally. Can we prevent them? Possibly we can prevent some of them, though not by turning this country into a secret-police surveillance state , with every mosque monitored, every campus meeting checked for ‘extremism’  every e-mail and phone call logged and listened to. I do not think these things are organised by some central group, be it the fictional ‘Al Qaeda’ or the actually existing but very localised IS.  There’s never been any evidence that the killers in Ottawa, Sydney, Copenhagen, Paris or London were under instructions from anyone but their own drug-frazzled and irrational minds.

 

In a rare break from the standard rhetoric, Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said last week that there was ‘no indication that Copenhagen shooting suspect Omar El-Hussein was acting on behalf of a larger terrorist network. 

 

She added, in words that must have infuriated securocrats from Washington and London; ‘“He was known by the police for several criminal acts, including severe violence, and he was also known to be linked to a criminal gang in Copenhagen. But I want to also make very clear that we have no indication at this stage that he was part of a cell.’  

 

It was soon afterwards that it was revealed that he had twice been arrested for cannabis offences.  As I showed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/01/what-do-we-know-about-the-paris-outrages.html this was also true of the Paris murderers, and of several other recent killings, including the murder of a soldier in Ottawa. I recently discovered that the culprit of another soldier murder in Canada (this killer, like Lee Rigby’s, also used a car to make his first attack) was also a long-term marijuana user. I am fairly sure that the Sydney killer was, too. His bizarre record of crime, fantasy and erratic, wild irrationality stretched back for years, and Iran, from which he fled to avid fraud charges,  has severe problems with drug abuse. But nobody has bothered to find out because of the desire, in Australia’s media and political worlds,  to explain this purely as an Islamist event. And I cannot investigate it at this distance.

 

Am I saying, by pointing this out, that cannabis is the *cause* of these actions? No. First, it is people who commit crimes, not drugs. But I am pointing out an intersection, between crazy jihadism and heavy cannabis use, which seems to me to be to so prevalent that it *must* be worth investigating. At the moment, the authorities are not interested. After a recent school killing, I strove to find out if the culprit was a cannabis user.

 

 But the police involved were very unwilling to answer the question, and I was left with the impression that they had never investigated it. Why should they?   My interest in the dangers of cannabis is not shared by most of the media or by the state. My main aim now is to make sure that they are at least interested, and that this factor is at least looked into in all cases of severe violence.

 

Someone will always pop up on these discussions and tell me I am seeking to ‘excuse’ militant Islam. I am doing no such thing. Intolerant ideologues obviously play their part in putting these terrible desires into the minds of impressionable young men. But I doubt whether they would often get to the point of action if drugs were not involved.

 

Sane people don’t usually want to spend the rest of their lives in prison, or to be shot by the police. Sane people also usually see the problems involved in killing a fellow human being. Mad people don’t.

Which is why this also affects non-Islamists, as I showed with the case of Jared Loughner, in the case of the Sheffield  church organist, Alan Greaves, and as I showed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/high-and-violent.html in a selection of court cases where violent or otherwise irrational offenders were stated in evidence to have been cannabis users. Like the Rigby killers, some of these attacked or destroyed with cars, others with sharp blades.

 

Finally, I reproduced the testimony of Matthew Parris and Jon Snow, who recounted the unexpected powerful effects of cannabis on them (and in Mr Parris’s case, mentioned the personality changes undergone by his respectable middle-class friends who were cannabis users) . I did so because I suspect many people are still beguiled by the drug’s image as ‘soft’, when in facts its immediate effect on the brain is violent and severe. Does it really seem unlikely that repeated exposure to such experiences render the user permanently damaged? And yet people still dismiss the correlation, saying that cannabis sue is no more likely to send people mad than drinking tea, growing a moustache or using a certain type of computer software.

 

We can now add to this the recent experience of the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd ( a policeman’s daughter), who bravely tried legal cannabis in a candy bar, so as to deepen her research into marijuana legalisation in Colorado.

 

She wrote

'I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

‘I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

‘It took all night before it began to wear off, distressingly slowly. The next day, a medical consultant at an edibles plant where I was conducting an interview mentioned that candy bars like that are supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices; but that recommendation hadn’t been on the label.’

 

Yes, I know which bit of that the comment warriors will seize upon, and so do you. But it is the wrong bit. even in 16 pieces, this is *not a ‘soft’ drug. Later in the article, she said: ’But the state is also coming to grips with the darker side of unleashing a drug as potent as marijuana on a horde of tourists of all ages and tolerance levels seeking a mellow buzz.

 

‘In March, a 19-year-old Wyoming college student jumped off a Denver hotel balcony after eating a pot cookie with 65 milligrams of THC. In April, a Denver man ate pot-infused Karma Kandy and began talking like it was the end of the world, scaring his wife and three kids. Then he retrieved a handgun from a safe and killed his wife while she was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher.

 

‘As Jack Healy reported in The Times on Sunday, Colorado hospital officials “are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana” and neighboring states are seeing more stoned drivers.’

 

The whole article can be found here http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/dowd-dont-harsh-our-mellow-dude.html?_r=0

 

Yet we do not simply face complacency over this. We face aggressive abuse and distortion of any attempt to combat it. That is something many of us will live to regret.