Attacker Smoked Cannabis: suicide and psychotic violence in the UK and Ireland
"Those whose minds are steeped in cannabis are capable of quite extraordinary criminality."
Daily Mail | 22nd March 2023
The ceaselessly updated website ‘Attacker Smoked Cannabis’ records scores of hideous violent crimes in which allegedly peaceful marijuana has been a feature.
But – in a country far too used to such crime – such events are these days only reported locally.
Mail on Sunday | 30th October 2022
When Freda Walker opened her back door to let her cat out one night last January, she let Hell into her home. It came in the form of Vasile Culea. He seems to have sneaked in while she was not looking[…]
All I can say about that is that the grotesque fury and savagery of his behaviour is horribly like that of many criminals whose merciless actions are listed on the website ‘Attacker Smoked Cannabis’. This is compiled from hundreds of local media reports by Ross Grainger. Yes, our society has always had murderers and thieves in it, but something far more cruel is now in our midst. Who will put this right?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11368907/PETER-HITCHENS-murderers.html
Mail+ | 25th May 2022
My experience in this country is that the police are very reluctant to discuss the role of illegal drugs in violence. This is, I think, usually because I am the only person asking and they do not want to discuss it. So they do not have to. Yet an appalling number of violent crimes are committed in this country by drug abusers, especially marijuana abusers, as Ross Grainger’s website documents in grim and growing detail. Mr Grainger has repeatedly tried to get official inquiries to take note of his survey, but with little success.
Mail on Sunday | 2nd January 2022
‘For some time I have tried to find out if drugs – especially marijuana – may have been involved in cases of apparently irrational violence. This is because the excellent Ross Grainger has compiled the website Attacker Smoked Cannabis, which records the huge number of crazed violent crimes in this country, where the perpetrator has been found to have been taking this drug. I suspect there are many more, where it never comes out.
The police are astonishingly unhelpful in such matters. I think this may be because they are rightly embarrassed about their almost total failure to enforce the law against marijuana possession.
Anyway, you might like to know that when I asked if any investigation had been made into whether the suspect in the recent Windsor Castle incident had used illegal drugs, Scotland Yard refused to answer the question.’
Mail on Sunday | 9th May 2021
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 introduced 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.
In his latest column for the Mail on Sunday, Peter Hitchens, author of The War We Never Fought: the British Establishment’s Surrender to Drugs, asks if, following yet another case of a heavy cannabis smoker committing a terrible act of psychopathic violence, our police and politicians can put two and two together: Here’s a really hard quiz for our media and governing classes : 2+2 =?
As I wrote in my recent piece for Bournbrook magazine (see previous post), stoner logic is more akin to Big Brother’s insistence that two and two can make five, if they so wish: ‘regulate cannabis’, as if that will make it safe; ‘impose a minimum age’, as if that won’t be circumvented; ‘take it out of the hands of criminals’, and put it in the hands of Philip Morris. What nightmare will they find for me in Room 101, I wonder?
This seemingly minor case, ‘Discovery of mystery substance at west London property leads to terror arrest of 16-year-old’, in which police officers found cannabis at the flat of a teenager suspected of ‘terrorist’-related activity, is a suitable excuse to discuss the vital issue of ‘terrorism’ and cannabis.
Peter Hitchens has for many years pointed out that in nearly every case of so-called ‘Islamic’ terrorism – London, Woolwich, Westminster Bridge, Manchester, Paris, Charlie Hebdo, Brussels, Nice, Berlin, Tunisia, Boston, Quebec and others – the attacker, or attackers, smoked cannabis. I do not include such cases on this site because, unfortunately, the question of Islam clouds many people’s judgement, but I shall say here that I think the link is as obvious and important as in all other cases of psychopathic violence. I shall further add, though I wish I didn’t have to, that to say I am no apologist for Islam would be an understatement.
Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, author of The War We Never Fought, has received a lot of abuse recently for pointing out in his MoS column of 7 April that the killer of Jo Cox, Thomas Mair, was mentally ill, not a ‘political actor’, and that his mental state was not discussed at his trial (at which Mair himself did not speak).
This matters a great deal, because those who cannot accept that, far from being part of a ‘far-right terrorist plot’, Mair was simply mentally unhinged, and that this mental illness was likely the result of or exacerbated by psychoactive medication, often equally refuse to believe that the prime factor in a particular act of suicide or psychopathic violence isn’t terrorism, Islam, immigration, austerity, video games, gangs, gun laws, ‘depression’, or racism, but cannabis.
Many have cited the following sentencing remarks of the judge in the Mair case, Mr Justice Wilkie, as evidence that Mr Hitchens is barking up the wrong tree:
There is no doubt that this murder was done for the purpose of advancing a political, racial and ideological cause namely that of violent white supremacism and exclusive nationalism most associated with Nazism and its modern forms.
Those who believe that Mair was a ‘terrorist’ are not open to the possibility that the judge is mistaken, nor aware that his remarks are, as Mr Hitchens points out, unusually political in tone. I wonder, then, what such people would make of these sentencing remarks of Judge Findlay Baker, QC, to a man who stabbed his friend’s father to death with a pair of garden shears: “This was an attack of extreme and persistent violence. And I have no doubt it would not have happened if you had not consumed cannabis.”
Or these, of Judge Anthony Niblett, to a man who punched his girlfriend and burnt down her house: “Those whose minds are steeped in cannabis are capable of quite extraordinary criminality. Your mind has been steeped in cannabis for much of your adult life.”
Or these, of Judge Rosalind Coe, QC, to a young man who attempted to murder his infant son: “If any case demonstrates the dangers and potentially tragic consequences of cannabis abuse, such as you had taken part in for many years, this is such a case.”
I could go on.
By contrast, some judges all but shrug and hold up their hands when trying to make sense of a heinous crime. The judge who sentenced 16-year-old Aaron Campbell, for example, said he had “no idea” why Campbell abducted, raped and murdered six-year-old Alesha MacPhail, even though it was noted during the trial that he was high on cannabis when he committed the crime, and knew the MacPhail family from having bought the drug from Alesha’s father. Some judges, like some people, can see the wood amid the trees. Some cannot.
PS Hot off the presses, here is Mr Hitchens’ review of Tell Your Children, by Alex Berenson: ‘Reefer Sadness’
Attacker Smoked Cannabis: suicide and psychotic violence in the UK and Ireland 