Who could doubt this killer had a dope habit?
WITH infuriating slowness, conventional wisdom is starting to grasp that marijuana is actually a horrible, dangerous drug which should not be legal. Maybe the realisation will come in time to save us from a dreadful mistake. Maybe not.
Last month the self-important New York Times, still very much on the side of legalising this poisonous filth, actively suppressed news that the recent Texas school shooter had been a dope smoker. Last week, the less grand New York Post recognised that Robert Crimo, the mass shooter in Highland Park, Chicago, was unquestionably a marijuana user, and that this might have influenced his behaviour. Well, look at this pathetic individual with his facial tattoos and his air of being broken and deranged. Even before his acquaintances confirmed his drug habit, who could have been in doubt?
Miranda Devine wrote in the Post: ‘He does fit a familiar pattern of mass killers: alienated young male stoners who appear to be in the grip of a distinctively American madness.’
She added: ‘But virulent attacks always greet any hint of opposition to wholesale drug legalisation. Youth mental illness is a crisis in this country and yet we are not allowed to discuss a scientifically verified trigger.’
How true this is, in Britain as well as the USA. My astute and diligent colleague Eve Simmons filed a dispatch from California a week ago about the growing mountain of evidence that cannabis has grave health dangers.
Her article was carefully researched, full of verifiable facts and figures and quoted experts. But she was subjected on social media to a revolting storm of personal insult and abuse. (I have been getting this for years, and am used to it. When you first experience it, it is deeply nasty.)
How much of this is organised, we cannot know. But the huge, rich Big Dope lobby for marijuana legalisation will do anything to silence dissent. It has never been more important that the anti-drug view is heard.