Was the Tate attacker driven mad by drugs? Don’t you dare ask !

IAM still seething about the official attitude towards the deranged Jonty Bravery, who – after a l ong career of crazed violence well known to officialdom – hurled a child from the top of the Tate Modern. The public were left entirely unprotected from this person. It could have been you whose life he wrecked without a second’s warning. None of us would know if someone similar to him was at large now in our own home towns, though officials would.

The crime makes no possible sense. Nor did Bravery’s many previous recorded actions, bloody, cruel and pointless. Alas, an increasing number of senseless crimes of this type are committed in this country all the time. Some are wrongly classified as terrorism. Others are just recorded and vaguely dealt with, without anyone trying to make sense of them.

But what really infuriated me when I looked into the Bravery case was that it is quite impossible to discover why he might be so crazy, or how he became crazy and so it is also impossible to prevent it from happening again. I get this again and again, from police forces uninterested in drug use by violent offenders.

But this time we had a published report clearly stating that a dangerous person, at large in a busy capital city, had a long record of wild violence. It also stated that he was taking an unnamed ‘medication’.

Two questions arose. How had he become unhinged in the first place? Individual madness is quite rare but it is a sad fact that a growing number of children are i ntroduced to marijuana at younger and younger ages and become permanently mentally ill as a result.

Irish psychiatrists last week reported that marijuana is the ‘gravest threat’ to the mental health of young people in that country. The College of Psychiatrists of Ireland said a combination of ever-stronger strains of the drug and a common public belief that it is harmless ( the same idiocy is widespread here) has had ‘devastating effects’.

I’ll say. Hardly a day goes by without my friend Ross Grainger adding another hideous case of violence committed by supposedly peaceful dope- smokers to his ‘ Attacker Smoked Cannabis’ website.

It is an even sadder fact, wellknown in the US but largely ignored here, that legal mind-altering drugs are also associated with acts of severe violence, including school shootings and similar massacres.

But thanks to dim-witted legalisation campaigns by empty-headed fools such as Sir Richard Branson, the authorities are now so uninterested in marijuana that its possession is no longer prosecuted and so official records of its use are disappearing. And attempts to look into the mental state of people such as Bravery are met with a blank refusal to reveal the facts, on the pretext of medical confidentiality. Surely, once you have throw na child off a high building, you have forfeited medical confidentiality. Does nobody in this country have a sense of proportion any more?

FORGIVE me for not believing the latest Tory promise (full of holes in any case) that British troops will be spared further pursuit over crimes allegedly committed by them during the Northern Irish Troubles. We’ve heard it twice before and it hasn’t happened, for the simple reason the IRA won in 1998 and they have crafty ways of enforcing our surrender.