Let's have an Inquiry NOW into the Correlation Between Drugs and Rampage Killings.
Who wouldn't want such an inquiry, and why?
One of the worst things about conventional wisdom is the thick carapace of self-satisfied certainty which protects it from attack. To dissent from the belief that America’s gun crimes are mainly caused by lax gun laws is to risk the most extraordinary level of semi-deliberate misunderstanding.
I say ‘semi-deliberate’ because I can’t think of any other way of describing a refusal to listen or absorb which appears to be a conscious and wilful act, and feels like one. In fact, those who are behaving in this way, often very vigorously and self-righteously, do not know that they are doing it. They know, as do all victims of conventional wisdom, that what they believe is the unmixed truth. Since the abolition of effective death penalties in Anglosphere countries, the liberal response to murderous violence –supposedly a humane alternative to the swift exemplary execution of heinous killers, actually no such thing - has always been ‘tough’ gun law. So, support for ‘gun law’ is not just about policy, but a declaration of allegiance to a particular version of moral rectitude. Thus, anyone who challenges them is wrong, ignorant, stupid etc.
And thus they interpret what they hear to suit this. It is of course quite obvious – so obvious and repeatedly argued that it seems to me not be worth stating - that the mass-ownership of guns, unrestricted by law, has *some* influence on crime , suicide, domestic accidents etc. in the USA. This is beyond dispute. Yet supporters of ‘gun control’ almost invariably respond to what I say by assuming that I believe that such gun ownership has *no* influence on these things. I have no such view. I have not said any such thing. It is a factor. But is it, in the cases with which we increasingly have to deal, the *decisive* or even the most significant factor?
Many also assume that I’m some sort of gun nut, when I neither own nor seek to own any firearm.
They think this because they can then dismiss me as absurd and unhinged. But it’s not what I think, or what I say, or what I do. What I think is that we all need to think, and that to do so we need to escape from this mental cliché. My main opinion is that correlations between drugtaking (legal and illegal) and irrational violence increasingly demand a proper inquiry into whether there is another more powerful and significant common factor in these massacres. And that to obtain such an inquiry, we need to stop going into a thought-free gun law frenzy each time one of these horrors takes place. Doing so prevents serious consideration of the problem.
I might add that the current furore about the flying of the Confederate Battle Flag near official buildings in South Carolina (while undoubtedly an interesting issue) is almost wholly irrelevant to the case, whereas Roof’s drug use is hugely relevant. Yet which of the two attracts more political and media attention? You guessed it.
The question before us is why we are seeing massacres of innocent people by unhinged assailants. None of these massacres is remotely rational. They serve no political purpose, gain nothing material or otherwise for the perpetrator , who in most cases does away with himself at the end. This is a worldwide phenomenon, not restricted to the USA. Nor does it always involve guns. We learn here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010%E2%80%9312) that in China (where gun massacres, such as that in Tiananmen Square, Peking, in 1989, are a state monopoly, and private citizens are genuinely unable to obtain guns) there are comparable massacres involving knives and hammers. We don’t of course know how common this sort of thing is because China lacks a free press, and incidents of this kind could happen without being reported.
People may say that these events are different, and so they are. An unhinged person with a machete , a knife or a hammer is more easily subdued than one with a gun. Even so, he can do a lot of harm beforehand, and the point being made here is that the weapon itself is not the decisive feature of this sort of crime. No state, not even the Chinese police state, could mount an effective ban on ownership of knives, machetes and hammers.
A gun ban in the USA, even if constitutionally permissible, would not be enforceable without the introduction of a repressive state so powerful as to transform the country. Even then it would be difficult because of the existing levels of illegal gun ownership. Legally registered guns might quite easily be confiscated from their owners. But the millions of illegal ones? Various local gun bans in the USA (notably that in the District of Columbia, whose summer nights echoed with gunfire in its eastern segments, after a gun ban was imposed there) have proved ineffectual, to put it mildly, affecting only the law-abiding. So if we are interested in stopping or seriously reducing these events, then we need to look elsewhere.
People tell me that Britain has had far fewer such events. This is perfectly true, and it would be interesting to wonder why. But, having lived in both countries, I can never warn strongly enough against assuming that the USA is just a big Britain. It is different in almost every conceivable way, and for more than a century (mostly the 19th century , a period during which Britain was not famed for gun crime) Britain’s gun laws were more relaxed than those of Texas.
One reason for the difference (out of many) could be that the chemicalising of psychiatry, the replacement of therapy and mental hospitals with bottles of pills, got under way earlier in the USA than it did in Britain, and we are simply behind.
There’s also been a huge lack of interest in the drug issue. I’ve never heard of any serious investigation into the mental state of Michael Ryan, culprit of the 1987 Hungerford massacre, any interest expressed in whether he was taking prescribed psychiatric medication or whether he was a user of illegal mind-altering drugs (by 1987 cannabis had been in common use in Britain for at least 20 years) . Nor have I ever seen any examination of the mental state of Thomas Hamilton, the culprit of the 1996 Dunblane murders, though Hamilton was clearly in the grip of persecution mania. In both cases, media and official responses were entirely directed towards the issue of guns.
The culprit of the 1989 Monkseaton shootings (in which most of the victims survived , and only one died), Robert Sartin, pleaded insanity at his trial, but again I have seen no detail of this insanity, or of what ‘treatment’ he may have had before he dressed in black and went out on a bloody rampage with his father’s shotgun.
The 2010 Cumbria shootings by the taxi-driver, Derrick Bird, remain equally inexplicable if the shooter is assumed to be rational. Only if he was unhinged can the actions be explained consistently. But individual madness is rare in humans who have not undergone severe personal shock and tragedy, or some sort of external physical trauma, physical or chemical. But there was only one hint that he may have sought help for his mental health, oddly in a report in an Australian newspaper, otherwise nothing. At the time I suspected he might have been taking prescription ‘antidepressants’, and asked if this was so. I was told that it wasn’t so, though I am not sure how this was established beyond question. Had I been looking into it now, I would be equally interested to know if he had been using cannabis. In a report that sent a shudder down my spine, it did emerge that he had been prevented from boarding a Thailand-bound flight at Doha because of a bizarre outburst of rage. One report (Daily Mail, 5th June 2010) said :
‘DERRICK Bird was deported back to Britain last year - following a drunken rage at an airport.
Security at Doha in Qatar would not allow him to join his connecting flight to Thailand because they feared he was a 'flight risk'.
Bird was heading for Pattaya on a pre-Christmas holiday with taxi-driving colleagues when he began drinking on the plane before a short stop-over at Doha.
An argument started when another member of the group began teasing Bird about money. Friends say Bird lashed out at the departure gate and had to be restrained.
Police deemed that he was too drunk and worried about letting him get on the plane to Bangkok after his violent behaviour. He was held in a secure location to sober up and then put on a flight back to London.
One friend said: 'I heard that there was quite a lot of banter, like you would expect there to be, and they'd had a few drinks on the plane. When they arrived in Doha, they all seemed to be getting on all right. Then when Birdy mentioned that he loved Thailand because it was cheap someone made a joke about being cheap.
'Birdy saw red and went for him and officials had to step in. The friends had never seen him flip before and it shocked them.'
The outburst is attributed to drink. Perhaps this is correct, though it seems unlikely to me. I wonder whether its real cause was in fact something else. But I doubt if we’ll ever know now.
In the case of Raoul Moat … see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/07/where-was-the-robocop-army-when-mister-moat-was-busy-selling-drugs.html
we do know that he was taking ‘antidepressants’ and steroids. Likewise, though nobody in authority has ever cared about in the slightest, we know that the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik was taking steroids too….
In the 2002 Erfurt school massacre, in which 16 innocent people died in a country (Germany) with pretty strict gun laws, the culprit (expelled student Robert Steinhaueser) is said in some internet reports to have taken antidepressants and LSD, though the information never featured in English-language reports of his crime. As with so many of those cases, because neither police nor media were interested, this aspect of the matter was not investigated.
This interesting essay contains a fascinating summary of the evidence in the case:
http://correctmaple.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/school-shootings-drug-theory.html
Note the very striking point made about the second Columbine shooter, Dylan Klebold, whose medical history has never been revealed. His accomplice, Eric Harris, had undoubtedly been taking ‘antidepressants’. One interesting point made by this author is that the sort of school shooting we now see as common only really began in 1979.
There had been other such incidents before then, but the random shootings of schoolfellows only really begin about 35 years ago. Did guns become easier to obtain in 1979? No, but by then the now-universal policy of ‘treating’ mental illness with powerful mind-altering drugs, instead of admitting the mentally ill to hospitals, was well-established. The widespread prescription of ‘antidepressants’ was also common, and of course, cannabis was circulating freely in schools and colleges.
In Finland, regarded by some readers of this blog as a sort of leftist paradise, whose gun laws might be viewed by liberals as a model for the USA, there was in 2007 a school massacre at Jokela. Pekka-Eric Auvinen murdered eight people before killing himself. Auvinen is said in some accounts to have taken ‘antidepressants’. A Finnish government report also states ( according to this site http://www.drugawareness.org/ssri-antidepressant-2008-finnish-school-shooting-10-dead/
that Matti Saari, perpetrator of another more recent school massacre in Finland (Kauhajoki, ten dead) was taking SSRI ‘antidepressants’ and benzodiazepine at the time of his crimes. I would be interested if any reader can confirm or indeed deny the veracity of this.
According to the Lew Rockwell blog here (without doubt a partisan witness, but judge for yourselves)
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/06/no_author/the-big-list-of-drug-induced-killers/
‘According to a data set of U.S. mass shootings from 1982-2012 prepared by Mother Jones magazine, of 62 mass shootings carried out by 64 shooters, the majority of the shooters (41) were noted to have signs of possible mental illness — the precise kinds of mental illnesses that psychotropic medications are prescribed for.
It is a well-documented fact that in the 1980s, a shift occurred in the direction of treating the mentally ill. Rather than institutionalize them, the preferred method was to “mainstream” them, encouraging them to function in society while being treated with a mind-numbing array of new anti-depressants being developed by the pharmaceutical industry.’
The site then lists a number of relevant cases.
Interestingly, the case of James Holmes, culprit of the July 2012 cinema murders in Aurora , Colorado, turns out to have a drug aspect not widely noted at the time. This, I think, is a characteristic of many of these events. Some time after the event, the drug details are unearthed and given limited media play. But most people remain unaware of this and so do not see the correlation. It is only because I am interested already that I know. This sort of knowledge rarely influences policy.
Police found medications in Homes’s apartment, including sedatives and the anti-anxiety drug clonazepam. They also found the antidepressant sertraline, the generic version of the antidepressant Zoloft. See http://www.denverpost.com/ci_22955988/judge-unseals-warrants-affidavit-aurora-theater-shooting-case
This wasn’t known at the time. Yet I speculated as follows in my blog of 28th July 2012: ‘Another mass killer, another link to drugs
An intelligent person would surely wonder why rampage massacres are becoming increasingly common.
America has always been full of easily obtained guns. But Finland isn’t, and nor is Norway, and nor is Germany – yet these horrible events happen there too.
What’s more, even in the USA mass killings of this type have become common only in modern times.
The other obvious line of enquiry is legal and illegal drugs, from steroids and antidepressants to cannabis. The culprits in these events are often found to have been taking one or more such drugs. The suspect in the Aurora shooting, pictured in court, where he looked physically ill, has been reliably reported to have been taking the prescription medicine Vicodin, which is often abused.
The New York Post quoted one of his neighbours as saying he had seen him smoking cannabis, a drug whose carefully created ‘peaceful’ image is contradicted in many trials of violent or homicidal people.’
I might add to this the strong circumstantial evidence that Kiaran Stapleton, the terrifying young man convicted of the random murder of Indian student Anuj Bidve, is a cannabis-user. This report from the Manchester Evening News contains one of the most astonishing and under-played quotations (about guns and cannabis farms) I have ever seen, and portrays a person who is far from mentally normal and (by his own account) has ready access to cannabis.
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/im-not-bothered-gunman-kiaran-690858
And I should mention the appalling and distressing case of David Leeman, who shot his wife Jennie dead at close range with an (illegal) gun.
An Exeter jury convicted him of manslaughter rather than murder after hearing evidence that he might have lost control of himself due to antidepressants he had been taking.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-18771406
Yet when I call for an inquiry into this increasingly worrying correlation, I am invariably attacked angrily. Why? Because cannabis, antidepressants and steroids are now so widely taken, in some cases by quite influential people, that each drug has a powerful lobby fearful of what such an inquiry might conclude. That is all the more reason to hold that inquiry.
Then there was the Adam Lanza case, at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut. At the time of this unspeakable crime there was no information available on what Lanza might have been taking. There is still some coming and going about Lanza’s drug use, on which I have yet to see a final determination. This (again partisan) site http://ssristories.org/the-antipsychotic-prescribed-to-adam-lanza-has-a-troubled-history-all-its-own-business-insider/
suggests that Lanza was prescribed an antidepressant, which he rejected. Then it refers to a report in New York magazine (based on statements by Lanza’s uncle reported in the New York Daily News) that Lanza had later been prescribed the drug Fanapt
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/12/aspergers-is-a-red-herring-to-explain-newtown.html
If you follow the link you then find this very curious note
Editor's Note: This post originally cited a report in the Daily News that quoted Adam Lanza's uncle as saying he was taking an anti-psychotic drug called Fanapt. The Daily News subsequently deleted the quote. It is now unclear whether Lanza was taking Fanapt.
Then we find this : http://www.infowars.com/state-of-connecticut-refuses-to-release-adam-lanzas-medical-records/
Another highly partisan site whose report ( based on a recording which makes pretty astonishing viewing) I have been unable to find in any mainstream publication. You may judge for yourself what value to give it.
As I was writing this article, the trial of Nicholas Salvador concluded with the Jury deciding he was insane at the time he murdered and beheaded 82-year-old Palmira Silva. Mrs Silva’s family are understandably distressed by this verdict, but there is a good chance that Salvador can now be kept locked up until he dies, which might not have been the case had he been convicted of murder. I also tend to think the Jury were right to attribute his actions to insanity. Consider this. Had the killing had a ‘terrorist’ connection, they might have found it harder to do so, even though the circumstances were identical. They might have been accused of ‘condoning’ or ‘trying to excuse’ Islamic extremism, as I have ludicrously been for my comments on the mental state of the killers of Lee Rigby.
Most but not all of the reports of Salvador’s very distressing trial have mentioned his heavy use of cannabis, but as a sort of side-issue or afterthought. In fact, his appalling and unhinged behaviour reminds me very strongly of the conduct of Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo, on the day when they murdered Lee Rigby. See
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/11/theresas-right-we-do-face-a-dire-new-threat-from-people-like-her-.html
It is also reminiscent of the murder and beheading of Jennifer Mills-Westley, in Tenerife in May 2011. Once again, the killer, Deyan Deyanov, was a known user of marijuana. Cannabis also connects both the recent ‘lone-wolf’ attacks on soldiers in Canada (treated as primarily terrorist by politicans and media), and all the killers in the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ affair and its accompanying crimes.
But these cases are not connected in the public mind or the official mind or the media mind. Nor does anyone attempt to make sense of them, because the various conventional templates of modern concern – Islamic terror, race hate, gun law – actually prevent people from seeing any link. As they do now.
I really don’t know what purpose people think they serve when they oppose my calls for a proper inquiry into this correlation. If I am right, then they are postponing vital action. If I am wrong then what harm will have been done by looking into it?
