Peter Hitchens
MailOnline
Far too often, we make the world worse than it is by imposing a pattern on it that has little or nothing to do with reality. I say this though I am a keen pessimist. I know the glass is half-empty unless someone is actually refilling it at the time.
But what a foolish mess we get into over so much of the violence that has recently ripped through our society. For instance, we have been marking the terrible death of Jo Cox, a young wife and mother and a delightful, beloved person missed terribly by all who knew her. It is quite right that she should be remembered. This was a dreadful event. Yet the authorities and the media have decided to insist that her murder was political. I think this is wrong. Her killer was quite obviously a deranged, muttering loner, with no serious understanding of politics.
Psychiatrists know that such people often latch on to political or religious movements to make themselves seem important. Why help him magnify his wretched life, his twisted mind and his cruel violence? I have my own suspicions that, by classifying his act as terror, the authorities closed their minds to other possibilities.
This doesn’t simply mean that they then wasted their time pursuing leads that went nowhere. It meant that they failed to act on or investigate another equally important line of inquiry. It is, beyond doubt, the case that our treatment of the mentally ill is a terrible mess. It is also beyond doubt that much mental illness appears to be linked to legal or illegal mind-altering drugs, now far more common than they were 30 years ago.
This long predates the era of Islamic terror. One of the first cases was in 1992 when Jonathan Zito was stabbed to death by Christopher Clunis, a total stranger (and longstanding drug-abuser) who was severely mentally ill. This horror, oddly enough, took place at Finsbury Park. Since then, many other such incidents have shown that leaving some mentally ill men and women ‘in the community’, relying on them to take drugs which are supposed to treat them, has serious risks for society.
Measure it how you will, you will find a significant number of men and women are killed each year by people who are receiving treatment for mental illness. Ridiculously, it has become harder to say such things, as you will then be condemned by The Guardian for spreading prejudice against the mentally ill or ‘stigmatising’ them. This is just piffle. I have no such prejudice.
But I do have prejudice against those who ignore a real, existing danger or pretend it is something else. The latest case, the van attack at Finsbury Park, is subject to the courts and so it is best to wait for them to find out more and reach a verdict. It is, even so, worth pointing out that the alleged culprit is said by members of his own family to have been ‘on medication’.
The responses I get when I make this point – that mind-altering drugs are involved in almost every alleged terror incident of recent times, as well as in almost every American shooting or rampage killing – are deeply frustrating.
People accuse me of trying to exonerate Muslim fanatics. I never have and never will. They accuse me of trying to make excuses for murder. I never have and never will. They accuse me of claiming that everyone who takes cannabis, antidepressants or steroids is a killer. I don’t think or say anything so dim or ridiculous.
But please note that if I do have a point, several powerful and well-funded lobbies might suffer.
The people who want to take away our liberties and expand the ‘security’ industry by claiming we are the victims of a great terror conspiracy obviously wish I would shut up.
If simply enforcing the cannabis laws (which we don’t now do) could greatly reduce this sort of violence, all this surveillance and ‘anti-extremist’ apparatus may be, at least, overdone. The huge billionaire lobby for cannabis legalisation also hate what I say. If their beloved drug really is linked with criminal murder, then their campaign will fail, and the giant profits they hope for will never be made.
And existing drug manufacturers, who in truth know very little about what their pills actually do, or how they work (if they do work), are understandably annoyed by my arguments as well. I say, too bad. The whole purpose of journalism is to find out and then publicise important facts that powerful and influential people don’t want you to hear.
The fact that I’m regularly smeared for pointing out plain, undoubted facts, and that what I say is so frequently twisted by my critics, makes me sure that I am on to something. If the authorities would stop looking the wrong way, they might actually prevent some of these events in future, something they’re not very good at just now.
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