Study points to increased risk of harm from cannabis across Europe

Stupid People are Banned from Reading This Article

Every so often I step above the parapet, in my trusty slime-proof suit, to endure streams of stupid abuse, defamation and wilful misunderstanding.

I could give this up. It is not even as much fun as it looks. It brings me into direct contact with some of the most stupid people in Britain, who denounce me madly as an apologist for Islamist terror, or some such. These, as I know, are impervious to facts or reason. It will only make them unhappy if they read it, and it will cause needless wear and tear to my slime-proof suit (these are expensive, and have to be imported from Russia) .

So, stupid people are barred from reading this article. If you are stupid, please stop now, return to the beginning, turn left past the tins of striped paint and the pile of long weights, and leave by the exit marked ‘Stupid People’ in big red letters. The men in blue baseball caps, stationed there, will help you to the car park, just past the garden centre. While there, why not buy one of the charming dwarf Upas Trees, on special offer this week?

But I carry on doing it because I have earned that any sort of dissenting view will be treated in this way; and because I believe that without dissent there can be no thought. And without thought, we can learn nothing, and will continue, for instance, to treat illness with ineffectual or damaging medicines, respond to crimes with inefficient or useless methods, send children to schools where they cannot hope to learn anything useful, bring children up in such a way that their future lives will be blighted, kill innocent persons, destroy stability and peace, throw hard-earned money away, etc.

My contention is that the media and politicians have both gravely misunderstood the growing number of unhinged rampage killings, using guns, motor vehicles and knives.

There are at least two parallel misunderstandings, which exist independently of each other in two very similar parts of the world — Western Europe and North America. To keep the point as straightforward as possible I shall leave aside various mass killings in Japan and China, though they do not contradict my theory.

Fascinatingly, the surprisingly strong media divide between the two zones means that these greatly similar events are not treated as being of the same sort, even though they plainly are.

There are for instance, school shootings in Europe (e.g Scotland, Finland, Germany). There are vehicle rampages in the USA (one took place a some years ago in Times Square, New York City). There are killings by Muslims in North America, notably the murders of two Canadian soldiers, and massacres in San Bernardino and Orlando, whose culprits were Muslims.  There are mass shootings by non-Muslims in Europe, such as Anders Breivik.

But European countries in general think they have tackled the issue of gun control, and do not therefore blame lax gun control for gun massacres in European states. Instead, their politicians, quite unable to do anything to limit the growth of Islam in Europe, like to look  tough by making bold statements about the Islamist threat, and proclaiming endless states of alert and emergency in response. These often involve the public acceptance of assaults on habeas corpus, the creation of embryonic secret police forces, the licensing of intrusive surveillance, deployment of armed troops on the streets of countries where such things have been unknown for centuries.

The exception to this is the school shooting at Dunblane, but this took place before the belief in a vast Islamist conspiracy against the West, as the default explanation for all mass violence, took root in this country, and it would be very hard to maintain that the perpetrator was in any way connected with the Muslim religion, or that he shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar!’ as he committed his terrible outrage. People have also now forgotten the once-noted incident in which the brave and self-sacrificial Lisa Potts (Now Lisa Webb GM, a very well-deserved award) defended children in her care against an unhinged person with a machete, in a Wolverhampton primary school in July 1996. The attacker was described as having suffered from ‘paranoid schizophrenia’. And was not imprisoned but detained indefinitely in a secure mental hospital. I would be interested to know if he had a history of marijuana use, and unsurprised to find that he had. But at the time I did not know to ask, and did not pursue the matter.

In the USA, where the Muslim population is far lower than in Europe, the belief in an Islamist threat tends to focus on the sort of attack carried out in Manhattan on 11^th September. The great majority of massacres in the USA have no Islamist element. So they are addressed instead, almost always, as arguments for ‘gun control’.

This is in my view at least partly mistaken, as gun control in the USA is in fact considerably greater than it was 50 years ago, yet the instance of such attacks has greatly increased (indeed, only really came into existence) during the last 50 years, and so rationally requires a different explanation. Gun control has also not prevented such events on this side of the Atlantic. There may be a case for gun control (though I regard it as impracticable in the USA). But this is not it.
I have written many times here of the fact that almost wherever the question has been investigated, these killings on both sides of the Atlantic have one thing in common. The perpetrator was using mind-altering drugs, generally of three types — ‘antidepressants’, e.g, at least one of the Columbine killers, the German Wings pilot who murdered his passengers by flying them into a mountain, the killer of Jo Cox MP;  steroids , e.g., Anders Breivik in Norway, Omar Mateen in Orlando, plus the Westminster and London Bridge killers in London ; and marijuana, Lee Rigby’s killers, the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan killers, the Brussels killers, the Nice killer (though it is hard to find a drug he had *not* taken) , the Sousse killer, The Rouen killers,  the attempted killer on the Thalys train, the murderer of a soldier in Ottawa, the murderer of a soldier in Quebec, and the perpetrator of the Tucson massacre of January 2011, the Oklahoma City mass-killer Timothy McVeigh. A number of these on both sides of the Atlantic used vehicles as weapons, either to kill or to make their initial attack.

But several powerful lobbies have, to put it mildly, no interest in pursuing this.

The first is the Securocrat lobby, which has for years been using the supposed terrorist threat as a pretext for abolishing the liberty of the individual, expunging tedious Bills of Rights unwisely (in their view) conceded by the executive in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, whittling away the provisions in Western legal codes which limit government power, and of course building vast unaccountable empires of secure employment for its members.

The second is the Billionaire Big Dope lobby, on the very brink of achieving victory in its 50 year campaign to fool the political class into licensing this dangerous drug for open sale.

The third is the pharmaceutical industry, very wary of any suggestions that its vastly lucrative investment in ‘antidepressants’ may actually be medically and scientifically dubious. Even though it obviously is.

For complete article https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/01/stupid-people-are-banned-from-reading-this-article-.html