Another cannabis-crazed killer?

It is a grim statistical probability that another innocent person will soon be savagely murdered by a cannabis smoker.

To a list of death that includes 11th September, 7th July, Dianna Spencer and Michael Jackson I can now add, curiously, it might seem, the name of Lee Pomeroy. 51-year-old Mr Pomeroy wasn’t a celebrity, and nor did he die in a ‘terrorist’ attack. Nevertheless, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard that he had been murdered on the 4th of January this year.

I was waiting for my turn at the barber’s when I looked up and saw on the scrolling news reel a headline about a man being stabbed to death on a train, with the suspect still at large. I immediately knew three things would happen, the first two soon, the third later: the perpetrator would be caught after a pitiful attempt to evade capture; it would turn out that he had stabbed his victim multiple times in a frenzy of violence; and it would emerge during his trial that he was a heavy smoker of cannabis.

This isn’t hard. In the past year or so I have, in compiling and updating my website attackersmokedcannabis.com, read countless stories of deranged cannabis smokers committing psychopathic violence, but one need only read a dozen or so to spot the pattern. The trouble is, scattered across the years and various newspapers (often only local), these stories don’t form a pattern in the mind of the average person, even when that mind is not closed to any criticism of cannabis.

Recently, though, so many devotees and would-be customersof ‘Big Dope’ have committed acts of such appalling savagery that the cannabis zeitgeist has started to shift. In fact, such is the scale of the problem, that on the day 36-year-old Darren Pencille, a daily smoker of cannabis, was found guilty of murdering Lee Pomeroy, two other cannabis smokers were on trial for murder elsewhere in the country.

In one case, a minor who cannot be named was cleared of murder and manslaughter in the stabbing of 17-year-old Yousef Makki, even though he (the defendant, known as Boy A) admits he was holding the knife that penetrated the heart of his ostensible friend. Stoned at the time, the pair had fallen out and grappled following a botched robbery of a cannabis dealer.

In the other trial, on-going at the time of writing, Stephen Nicholson denies the murder of 13-year-old Lucy McHugh, whom he is also accused of raping during his time as a lodger at her parents’ home. Early in the investigation, he was arrested when he refused to grant police access to his Facebook profile for fear they would find details of his cannabis dealing.

Three trials, one day, copious amounts of cannabis.

Lest that seem unusual, here is the tally from last month: a father convicted of stabbing his 10-year-old son to death, and attempting to stab his eight-year-old daughter to death, before attempting to kill himself; a driver in a fatal collision with another motorist; a man sentenced to life in prison for killing a man in a ‘rampage of violence’; a verdict of suicide in the case of a 16-year-old girl who jumped in front of a train; a man convicted of stabbing a colleague at work after becoming convinced that the victim was spreading rumours about him; and a teenager given a suspended sentence for attacking a man in public with a screwdriver.

Do I need to tell you what popular class B pleasure drug they all smoked? And again, that was just one month.

I should also stress at this point that I am one man who searches only online. It is highly likely that the long list of cases I have compiled is merely the tip of the iceberg. Not only are many papers uninterested in investigating, much less reporting, whether a particular psychotic violent criminalsmoked cannabis, but many local papers do not cover and report on Crown courts as extensively as they used to. In addition, to the several hundred cases I have listed I could add an equal number in which a perpetrator was convicted of possession of cannabis, alongside a violent offence or other serious crime, but smoking of the drug was not stated as a fact.

I often tell cannabis smokers that they live in Huxley’s Brave New World, but in fact their stubborn logic is more like that of Big Brother.

Most people who read case after case after case of cannabis smokers committing suicide or psychopathic violence would put two and two together and make four. The morons who wish to legalise cannabis, though, put two and two together and make five. Not only that, they now insist that everyone else do likewise: ‘regulate’ cannabis, as if that will make it safe; ‘impose a minimum age,’ as if that will be respected; ‘stop criminalising youngsters’, as if the drug laws are meaningfully enforced; ‘take it out of the hands of criminals’, and put it in the hands of Philip Morris.

It is a grim statistical probability that another innocent person will soon be savagely murdered by a cannabis smoker. When you read or hear about it, remember where you are.