By Peter Hitchens As the sickly-sweet stench of marijuana spreads ever further across the once-civilised Western world, there is one universal result. There are more crazy people. Some of them are dangerous.
Many of them are crazy because they have fried their brains with skunk. Some are crazier still because baffled doctors have added to the cocktail with various poorly understood prescription drugs.
But the chances that you will meet such a person grow daily, as our leaders refuse to enforce the laws against marijuana possession. They will grow still more if they are stupid enough to bow to the billionaire campaign to legalise this poison.
Yet last week I wrote to a prominent political figure to seek his help in fighting this mistake, and he said he was too busy. This may be deeply unwise. Amid the usual emotional and incurious coverage of the latest US rampage killings, the news has quietly leaked out that the Dayton killer, Connor Betts, was (as I knew he would be) a marijuana user. His girlfriend Lyndsi Doll has told the Washington Post that the shooter suffered hallucinations and menacing voices in his head, and feared he was developing schizophrenia. Why would that be?
The latest shooters
There’s a clue in the logo of Betts’s repellent rock band Menstrual Munchies. It is a marijuana plant. But would you like more?
Well, another former friend told the Post that Betts’s group of friends had a reputation at Bellbrook High School as ‘the outcast kids that the cool kids didn’t really like’. And what did they do at weekends? Why, they smoked marijuana. I have no doubt that something similar will eventually emerge about the alleged El Paso shooter, too. Sometimes it takes months, even years, but it always does. And it’s not just in the USA. You might wonder what role marijuana had in several violent episodes in Britain recently, and you would be wise to do so.
View from Washington State
A correspondent recently wrote to me from Washington state, which went soft on users in 1971, fell for the ‘medical pot’ scam in 1998, and ended up legalising it for recreational use in 2012. What happened? He describes matters: ‘Seattle has hundreds of people who live on the streets who have been completely relieved of their mental capacity. They have no cognitive functions left apart from shouting incomprehensible nonsense.
‘I write this while one such person is wandering up and down the aisle of the bus I’m riding, screaming at the top of his lungs and banging on the windows.’
If only that was all they did.
Taken from a column in the Daily Mail, August 10, 2019