‘Peaceful’ cannabis and its less than peaceful consequences

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While most civilised and law-abiding people were obeying the uncivilised and quite possibly illegal confinement measures imposed over the past six bewildering months, cannabis smokers continued to enjoy their ‘peaceful’ pleasure drug, often with less than peaceful results. ‘

While most civilised and law-abiding people were obeying the uncivilised and quite possibly illegal confinement measures imposed over the past six bewildering months, cannabis smokers continued to enjoy their ‘peaceful’ pleasure drug, often with less than peaceful results. 

On the 20th of June, for example, twenty-five-year-old cannabis smoker Khairi Saadallah allegedly stabbed three people to death, and seriously wounded three others, in an unprovoked attack in a park in Reading. While one could rightly point out the irony of an asylum seeker turning violent, I’m more interested to know if this young man took up his (ostensibly) illegal habit before or after arriving in Britain from his native Libya with his family in 2012. 

While Saadallah’s alleged atrocity made the news only for drearily familiar and irrelevant reasons of ethnicity, nationality and religion, there have been plenty of less publicised though similarly mad and random acts of violence, and convictions for these acts, during this mad and seemingly random period of forced confinement. 

On the 15th of September, thirty-year-old Eltiona Skana is due to go on trial for the murder of seven-year-old Emily Jones in a park in Bolton on the 22nd of March. After being arrested at the scene, Skana, who had no connection to the Jones family, was detained under the Mental Health Act. These facts alone suggest the influence of mind-altering drugs, but it’s also worth noting that Skana is from Albania, and in recent years many dozens of Albanians have been convicted of cannabis-related offences in Britain. Will the authorities put two and two together, and ask if perhaps the influence of drugs played a role in this terrible murder?

Last month, children’s author James Nash was shot and killed by neighbour Alex Sartain, whose father a week before the murder had requested his son be sectioned for what would have been the fifth time. Sartain, thirty-four, who believed his victim was a government spy, and who died in a motorbike crash after fleeing the scene in Andover, had been using heroin for about ten years, was a diagnosed ‘schizophrenic’, and had a number of offences to his name, including driving under the influence of drugs. What drugs, I wonder? 

Finally, there is the conclusion to a hideous act of violence that definitely does involve cannabis. On the 2nd of September, Kiyran Earnshaw, eighteen, and Luke Gaukroger, sixteen, were sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Robert Wilson, fifty-three, outside his factory one night last January. Having nearly cut off the hand of one of Mr Wilson’s colleagues, the pair, outraged that Mr Wilson had called security and sure that he was filming them, stabbed and slashed at Mr Wilson with a twenty-inch sword, inflicting over a hundred separate wounds and nearly decapitating him. Tests done after the arrest show Earnshaw was under the influence of alcohol and cannabis. 

Speaking after the trial, detective chief inspector Mark Bowes said, “Thankfully such acts are a very rare occurrence in today’s society.” Very rare? From the cases I - one amateur, working alone in my spare time - have amassed, such acts of violence occur on average once a fortnight. Add in cases of suicide, along with cases like those above, in which the presence of cannabis, though unstated, can be strongly inferred, if not guaranteed, and instances of cannabis smokers committing violence against themselves, or others, or both, become quotidian. This is the drug many people wish to put on legal sale to eighteen-year-olds- teenagers -like Kiyran Earnshaw.