The Mail on Sunday

Legalise cannabis? Let’s ask the victims of this crazed knifeman first ...

- Peter Hitchens Read Peter’s blog at hitchensbl­og.mailonsund­ay.co.uk and follow him on Twitter @clarkemica­h

IF JASON Kakaire had screamed ‘Allahu akbar!’ as he went about his bloody work, you would have heard of him, and he would have been debated in the House of Commons. But because Kakaire’s five cruel and devastatin­g knife attacks in London could not possibly be given any political or religious motive, there is barely a ripple of interest in his case. This is a mistake.

There are two reasons for the error. The first is that our bloated but unsuccessf­ul ‘security’ apparatus, assisted by posing politician­s, likes to use supposed terrorism to boost its power and budgets. It hopes nobody will notice that in fact it is almost entirely useless at preventing such attacks.

Why? Because they have much more to do with drugs than with politics. And so they keep happening however much surveillan­ce we have and however many extra powers we give the police and MI5.

The second is that our political and media upper deck is crammed with people who are or have been marijuana users. Many let their children smoke the drug at home. And such people hate any hint that their chosen pleasure is in fact a terrible danger, should stay illegal,

THOSE who still think of Al ‘Boar-iss’ Johnson as some sort of conservati­ve really do need to pay attention. He makes no secret of the fact that he is not. Last week in his list of the women who had most influence on him, he took care to name Munira Mirza, head of his policy unit. Ms Mirza had, er, links with a body called the Revolution­ary Communist Party and was described by Ken Livingston­e, no less, as a ‘loony Lefty’.

But if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. By the way, why did Mr Johnson, who also named the warrior queen of the Iceni among his top female influencer­s, call her by the politicall­y correct name of Boudicca (which makes her sound like a guerrilla leader) instead of Boadicea, the name he must have grown up using? and should be fought with proper enforcemen­t of existing drug laws.

So let me introduce you to Kakaire. He haunted the London suburb of Edmonton with his knife, stabbing solitary defenceles­s people in the back. At the time, these events were slightly covered in brief mentions on inside pages. The crimes had no conceivabl­e aim. They were just mad, as so much drug-related crime is. He stabbed his victims so hard that the knife typically sank almost 4in i nto their bodies. In one miserable case, he severed a woman’s spinal cord and left her paralysed.

My regular readers will know what comes next. Kakaire is of course a long-term user of marijuana. He should not have been. If the police enforced the law of the land, as happens in Japan in South Korea, he would not have been. But they do not. So he is.

This terrifying drug, many of whose users become insane and violent, is falsely plugged as harmless, and even as a sort of miracle medicine. Greedy rich people hope to make huge profits out of its legal sale, if they can persuade government­s to allow it.

Their hopes are rising because politician­s are running out of things they can tax to pay for their wild spending and borrowing. Income tax, VAT and pension raids have reached their upper limits. I suspect the current plan to raise petrol duty will run into big opposition. The only really reliable wells of money are ‘ sin taxes’, imposed on things people like so much that they will pay over the odds to buy them.

I also suspect that many in government foolishly reckon that a doped population will be t oo apathetic to be discontent­ed. Some may be. But a worrying number, some of them near you, will become like Kakaire. He absurdly claims to have smoked marijuana so as to stop the ‘voices in his head’ which almost certainly resulted from him smoking it in the first place. I am in a way sorry to keep highlighti­ng such cases ( though there is no shortage, and many weeks go by when I let it go). But the campaign for legalisati­on never lets up and is frightenin­gly close to success.

You should let your MP know now that you will never support such a disastrous policy. Or you will wake up one morning soon and find that it has happened, and there will be many more Kakaires not far from your home.

 ??  ?? WHERE’S THE SUBTLETY? Masali Baduza and Jack Rowan in the new BBC series Noughts + Crosses
WHERE’S THE SUBTLETY? Masali Baduza and Jack Rowan in the new BBC series Noughts + Crosses
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