Reefer Madness: Cannabis drove UK mother insane and to suicide!
If you haven’t followed the War On (Certain British Subjects Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs going on “across the pond”, then you’re missing some Reefer Madness reminiscent of the days of Harry J. Anslinger and warnings of marijuana being more frightening than Frankenstein and the devil’s tool to make Negroes kill white men and rape white women.
The tactics are familiar. Anslinger took “cannabis” and “hemp”, which almost every early-20th Century American knew to be a common medication and a source of rope and canvas, and re-branded it “marijuana”. That way he and his buddy, William Randolph Hearst, could spread sensationalist lies about cannabis in Hearst’s newspapers, and the scary, Mexican-sounding word helped frighten people about weed in a way that scaremongering on “cannabis” and “hemp” would not.
But the British version of this, happening right now in the 21st Century, is to re-brand the popular herb as “skunk”, with the addition of the scaremongering “this ain’t your father’s pot” rhetoric (”’skunk’ is fifty times more potent than the ganja of the 1960s!”). And this time, it’s not the Negroes coming to hurt whitey, but rather the patently false claim that ’skunk’ triggers psychosis and schizophrenia.
Here is a typical article, from The Argus in the UK…
A mother driven insane by cannabis stabbed herself repeatedly through the chest with a carving knife after claiming she was spoken to by a dog.
Julie Cross told friends the animal was “trying to tell her something” before picking up the 5in blade and ramming it at least five times into her chest and abdomen.
An inquest was told the former receptionist, from Goring, used speed and cannabis on a daily basis and in the weeks running up to her death had slashed her wrists and smeared her blood across a crucifix and also hung a noose from her attic.
Cannabis and speed! Do ya think, perhaps, the speed had more to do with the psychosis? That’s a link that has substantial basis in research and plenty of anecdotal evidence that I’ll testify to as a former club musician who’s seen his share of tweekers.
And yet the headline is “Cannabis-smoking mum stabbed herself to death”.
Katie Leason, spokeswoman for mental health charity Rethink, said the case further proved that cannabis causes severe mental illness. “We don’t believe there is any doubt about it now. There is a proven link between the drug and psychosis,” said Ms Leason.
Hmm… a mental health charity asserting that use of the most popular illicit substance will create more clients for a mental health charity… interesting.
The hearing, at Worthing Town Hall, was told that Miss Cross, from Limbrick Lane, had drug-induced psychosis diagnosed in 2006.
It had led to her spending much of her last year in and out of the Mill View psychiatric hospital. The inquest heard that during what was described as a “very difficult life” Miss Cross had made repeated attempts on her own life, starting at the age of 14.
So, then, she’s diagnosed with drug-induced psychosis at age 39, yet she’s been actively suicidal since age 14. Yeah, it’s gotta be the cannabis, er, excuse me, the ’skunk’ that did it, even though they didn’t have the ’skunk’ back in 1981 when she first attempted suicide. (The article doesn’t mention whether she’s smoked cannabis since age 14, but I kinda doubt it.)
Tags: psychosis, schizophrenia, skunk, UK
