A sad loner is jailed. But the real ‘terror threat’ is still roaming our streets
IT IS astonishing how we cannot see what is in front of our noses when we are blinded by dogma. We cannot, for instance, see that Darren Osborne, t he mosque van killer jailed on Friday, is an unhinged, chaotic nobody, his mind spinning with drugs and drink, who knows and cares as much about politics as I know about football.
More than a dozen times I have pointed out here that almost all rampage killers, all over the world, have one thing in common – the use of mind-altering drugs. I am not trying to exonerate them. On the contrary. But I am trying to prevent these things happening in future by being much tougher on illegal drugs, and much more cautious with legal prescriptions.
Sometimes it is cannabis. Sometimes it is steroids. Sometimes it is prescription ‘antidepressants’ – themselves a scandal waiting to be exposed and understood.
But it’s always there. I look and I find it. Any number of American and European school and campus massacres, the Charlie Hebdo murders, the Japanese care home knife killings, t he Nice t ruck massacre, Anders Breivik, the Lee Rigby murder, the Westminster van killer. These and many more we know for certain. In many other cases we don’t know only because the authorities have never bothered to find out.
These killings are a subset of violent crime, but they are unusually closely studied, which is how we know. My guess is that a huge amount of violent crime is also committed by people who have derailed their sanity by taking mind- al t eri ng drugs. But t he authorities are even less interested in that.
USUALLY I am attacked for saying this by powerful groups. I understand why. The Security Lobby’s huge budgets and well-funded think-tanks depend on the belief that we are menaced by a vast spider’s web of Islamist terrorism, controlled from some cave in the Middle East by a turbaned mastermind. No wonder they hate it when I point out that ‘Islamist’ terror is usually carried out by pathetic, lonely petty criminals with marijuana habits.
The Big Dope Lobby are on the brink of legalising marijuana and making billions from it. They are terrified that the public will notice that cannabis is in fact a deeply dangerous drug that should stay illegal. It could cost them a hoped-for fortune.
And the anti-American BBC snobs who think America’s problems arise solely from legal gun ownership close their minds to this obvious fact: the USA has always had legal guns, but these massacres are new. What else is new? Mass use of mind-altering drugs, legal and illegal, that’s what’s new. And it’s always present in these massacres. But when it comes to Darren Osborne, surely there’s no serious lobby that wants to believe this pathetic drifter was a political actor, when the truth is so much more useful? Is t here? As in the case of the Leytonstone knifeman, Osborne was just trying to dignify his horrible little life by parroting grandiose political views he didn’t understand. Doctors know this is common.
Osborne was, of course, a serious heavy drinker. But that wasn’t all. He had a lengthy criminal record including battering a drinking companion with a bicycle lock ( for which he was jailed), beating his partner and twice assaulting police officers. He had been living rough, mostly in a squalid tent pitched in some undergrowth, for six months before his crime. He was an angry and violent man who got thrown out of pubs and got into fights. He had tried to drown himself.
His sister Nicola said that he was taking ‘antidepressants’ at the time of his crime and – this is, in my view, the real scandal – ‘He asked to be taken into care and wanted to be sectioned but the authorities wouldn’t do it.’
In court, much like the similarly unhinged killer of MP Jo Cox, his behaviour was not sane.
I suspect his absurd not guilty plea had to be taken seriously because the authorities were so keen to classify his crime as political, and so didn’t want him sent to a secure hospital, though I suspect he will end up in one.
At one point in the trial he made the ridiculous claim that he had not even been driving the van in which he killed Makram Ali, saying that the driver had been ‘a guy called Dave’. The claim was so absurd that the prosecutor asked him if Dave’s surname was ‘ Unicorn’. No sane person, on trial for his liberty, would have behaved in such a fashion, or treated a murder trial with such contempt. Amid all the portentous blethers about ‘ radicalisation’, the police admitted: ‘We have found no evidence that Osborne acted other than alone.’
That is because there is no such evidence. But there is evidence that he acted under the influence of mind-altering drugs. And it is high time that an inquiry was held into the strong correlation between such drugs and violent crime.
Why would it be better to deceive ourselves that such people are serious political actors?