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Who Cares if Ariz. Shooter Jared Loughner Used Marijuana?
So Loughner was one of the 1-in-3 people his age who use marijuana? I wonder if he ever drank beer, too?
As you may know by now, in a tragic act of insane violence, Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords was targeted for assassination, but survived the point-blank gunshot allegedly fired by Jared Lee Loughner, a 22-year-old man whose rambling internet paranoia calls his sanity into question. Loughner also allegedly fired into the crowd, killing a 9-year-old girl (born on 9/11/2001, incidentally), a federal Circuit Court judge, a Giffords staffer, and three others, and wounding several more. All of us at NORML are shocked and saddened by the event and our condolences go out to all the friends, family, and colleagues of the victims who are suffering so much at this time.
Palin's tweet to announce this: "Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: 'Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!'"
Much is being made of Sarah Palin’s imfamous “Take Back the 20″ website, where 20 representatives were “targeted” with bullseyes, including Giffords, because they voted for the Obama Health Care Bill yet serve in districts won by McCain/Palin in 2008. In announcing the map, Palin had tweeted “Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!’” and in covering the results of the election, she tweeted, “Remember months ago “bullseye” icon used 2 target the 20 Obamacare-lovin’ incumbent seats? We won 18 out of 20 (90% success rate;T’aint bad)”. Also, Gifford’s opponent, Jesse Kelly, held an event advertised as “Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.” (By the way, not a typo in missing the periods after “November” or “office”.) Others in response say Loughner was just a fringe crazy person whose actions cannot be blamed on inflamed political rhetoric using firearms and battle allusions.
But while “insane loner psycho just lost it” or “violent rhetoric leads to violence” works for most people as an explanation for Loughner’s actions, for some there has to be better scapegoat. Whoever had “less than 24 hours” in the “when will they blame this on marijuana” pool just won:
His exact motivation was not clear, but a former classmate described Loughner as a pot-smoking loner who had rambling beliefs about the world.
High school classmate Grant Wiens, 22, said Loughner seemed to be “floating through life” and “doing his own thing.”
“Sometimes religion was brought up or drugs. He smoked pot, I don’t know how regularly. And he wasn’t too keen on religion from what I could tell,” Wiens said.
And on Huffington Post, we find comments like this in response to the news:
Looks like my neighbors kid. He wears long black rain coats, I’ve seen him strung out on the grass, carries a 357 magnum in hand outside of his house….walks with an attitude, rumors have it that he has been in court for drug possesion.….don’t you love this world. Sad, sad and sad.
“another endorsement for the medical marijuana lobby I am sure.”
If Loughner at age 22 is a pot smoker all that tells us is he is a fairly typical 22-year-old male. Among young adults, 31% will use cannabis at least once this year – almost one in three! 12.4% of people that age will use cannabis at least twice a week. And that’s all young adults, male and female, aged 18-25. If we drill-down to just 22-and-23-year-old males, 56% have tried marijuana, 30% will use marijuana this year, 18% will use this month, and 6% will use marijuana almost every day. (All data from the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which doesn’t identify data for only 22-year-olds.)
Now, Loughner does sound like the kind of person who should not be smoking pot. It’s never a good idea for people with mental illness like schizophrenia to use cannabis. However, locking up mentally healthy adults who use cannabis in Arizona didn’t stop Loughner from smoking pot, did it? In fact, it may have made it easier for him to do so, as he could acquire it from anonymous dealers who don’t care if he’s mentally disturbed instead of being forced to enter a secure dispensary with video cameras and licensed clerks who could be trained to spot mental illness and offer treatment resources paid for by marijuana profits (much like the lotto bars here in Oregon train bartenders to spot problem gamblers, require all such bars to offer gambling addiction literature, and all treatment is free for those who need it.) Unfortunately, Rep. Giffords opposes decriminalization of marijuana for fear of the violent Mexican drug organizations. In the last Congress she sponsored a resolution supporting the Merida Initiative to send more money and guns to Mexico to fight the cartels.
The part that really disturbs me is that just last year, Arizona Gov. Brewer signed a law that allows adults 21 and older to carry a concealed weapon without a permit, joining Alaska and Vermont as the only states where any citizen can be legally packing heat in public at a political rally without any sort of registration or training to do so. Had Loughner been approached by a police officer and that pistol was found in his pocket, legally there would have been nothing the police could have done.
But if Loughner had a joint in his pocket, police could have arrested him and he may have faced six-to-eighteen months in jail. If Loughner had been pulled over driving to the rally and a piss test revealed he had smoked a joint last week, he’d be placed into mandatory 24-hour custody and faced six months in jail.
Arizona: If you look Mexican, we need to see your papers. If you’re smoking pot, we need to throw you in jail. But if you want to take a concealed gun to a political rally, we don’t need to see any papers and we won’t throw you in jail.
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Comments
BANTOBACCONOW
Was he a smoker or other tobacco addict? 90% of crime committed by smokers, of course. They are mentally ill and brain-damaged because of tobacco addiction . More info. at: http://medicolegal.tripod.com/preventcrime.htm
BAN THE ILLEGAL TOBACCO DRUG, NOW!
The problem
is that the Media spins every little detail to see how much mileage they can get out of every facet of information. Some times to the point of exposing a victims personal information.
This Murderer is not Average.
I care
I care because marijuana use is relevant to schizophrenia, a diagnosis that this individual will likely receive. In those with a family history of major mental illness (and about 8% of us have a first or second degree relative in that category), marijuana use increases the risk of schizophrenia by over 400%. The politically correct interviews with psychiatrists that have appeared on the net imply that violence is rare in schizophrenics, meaning only that the majority of schizophrenics do not become violent. However, they are much, much more likely to commit acts of violence than mentally healthy individuals.
raises the risk of schizophrenia 400%?
Horse hockey. It's mind boggling that there are those who swallow the reefer madness lies in the face of the statistical evidence which proves there is no causal factor for schizophrenia. They've been keeping track of the percentage of the population that suffer from the disease. In the last 100 years the rate has held steady at about 1% with perhaps a marginal decrease in the last couple of decades. One does not increase the incidence of a causal factor for a thing without seeing that thing produced.
Most people are aware that the use of cannabis skyrocketed by better than 1000% in the 1960s. Where are all the schizophrenics that were produced by cannabis? With a cohort of 100 million we should be seeing gibbering psychopaths on every street corner in America. Let's not forget to mention the specious claim that cannabis has become some ridiculous increase in its potency by an absurd order of magnitude also that the Know Nothings like to trot out, which also did not result in an increase in the incidence of the disease.
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quoted from Time magazine 7/21/2010 edition:
quote---->“But here’s the conundrum: while marijuana went from being a secret shared by a small community of hepcats and beatniks in the 1940s and ’50s to a rite of passage for some 70% of youth by the turn of the century, rates of schizophrenia in the U.S. have remained flat, or possibly declined. For as long as it has been tracked, schizophrenia has been found to affect about 1% of the population.
“But here’s the conundrum: while marijuana went from being a secret shared by a small community of hepcats and beatniks in the 1940s and ’50s to a rite of passage for some 70% of youth by the turn of the century, rates of schizophrenia in the U.S. have remained flat, or possibly declined. For as long as it has been tracked, schizophrenia has been found to affect about 1% of the population.”
.
.
.
“But when the researchers controlled for other factors known to influence schizophrenia risk, including gender, education and socioeconomic status, the association between disease onset and marijuana disappeared.”
linky:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0 ,8599,2005559,00.html#ixzz1AVpw5Lk3
Toodles!
large studies on marijuana and schizophrenia come from Europe
And as for:
"But when the researchers controlled for other factors known to influence schizophrenia risk, including gender, education and socioeconomic status, the association between disease onset and marijuana disappeared.”
The fact is that the study by Dr. Sevy (quoted in the Time magazine article) was very small (100 subjects) by epidemiological research standards. Compare that number to the 2437 subjects studied in the Netherlands by Henquet et al (2005) where a cause and effect relationship between pot and schizophrenia was demonstrated. Study size matters particularly when many factors are corrected for, because the numbers required to achieve statistical significance become much larger. The trend may still have been there in the Sevy study, but the study was likely "underpowered" to determine if an effect of pot smoking existed or not. I'll find out, as long as the paper is online.
The quality of Time magazine science journalism
Hello Duncan20903 - That Time magazine article citing a constant 1% prevalance gives no reference for where that piece of data came from. The author of the article is a journalist from what I can tell, and what does the average journalist know about schizophrenia? But even a good journalist should reference sources on issues of science . Many medical texts use the 1% figure out of convenience, as it was a fairly good approximation for the worldwide prevalence in the mid-to late 20th century. However, the truth is that the rate of schizophrenia is not constant over time, nor uniform across the world (see Saha S, Chant DC, Welham JL, McGrath JJ. The incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia varies with latitude. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2006 Jul;114(1):36-9.). It is fair to say, based on biological theory alone, that no disease is constant over time and space.
As to whether accurate study has been made of changes in the incidence of schizophrenia in this country over the past 100 years, the answer is emphatically no. If everyone in the U.S. were to smoke marijuana (we're not close to that yet), the number affected by schizophrenia should have doubled, an increase that would probably not go unnoticed. But a lesser increase would likely go unnoticed, particularly if other factors are acting to decrease the rate.
In fact, some of the other environmental risk factors for this disease have diminished in the past 100 years. The key changes include better prenatal nutrition, fewer prenatal infections, many fewer obstetrical complications and decreased reproductive success of families that carry the genetic predisposiion for the disease (more rural societies are typically more tolerant of this disease, unlike here where those affected are socially isolated if not physically incarcerated).
Separating out all the variables is best done in controlled prospective studies, and those concerning marijuana and schizophrenia have been carried out in Europe. Henquet et al. (2005) showed that teens who were smoking pot at study onset were much more likely to exhibit signs of schizophrenia (predominantly psychosis) after 4 years than those who weren’t smoking pot, whereas those who were exhibiting signs of schizophrenia at study onset were no more likely to start smoking pot than those who were normal at the onset of the studies.
Certainly, the vast majority of those who smoke pot do not become psychotic. But the data increasingly show that those who carry the genetic liability for schizophrenia should not smoke this drug (Arendt et al., 2008). For individuals with a sister or brother with the disease, only 1 out of 10 times will they themselves become sick because, as with many diseases ( cancer , heart disease etc.), how they lead their lives can make the difference between leading a healthy life and not. The problem is, not everyone knows exactly why they never met their Aunt Sue or Uncle Joe, and worse than that, many teenagers don't care.
Do mental illness and pot go well together..
Well does pot increase the chance of paranoia?
in case you are stoned, that's a retorical question.
Paranoia is a healthy state of mind...
Paranoia is a healthy state of mind when there really are people who are out to get you. But frankly when the phenomenon does occur it's in neophyte consumers and is transient, just like the short term memory loss that so many Know Nothings seem to think important. Its been close to 3 decades since I've encountered someone who is irrationally paranoid when enjoying cannabis.
sunsea you are promoting yet another straw man fallacy. Conflating transient paranoia with mental illness is analogous to conflating being bummed out because you are disappointed that a pothead led his baseball team to the World Championship and won 2 of the 4 games needed to claim that title, and severe depression which can be a fatal disease.
Guard liberty
It is times like this that we need to guard against the nanny state government and their troops. We will see and hear many pundits calling for limits on free speech and bearing arms. Resist these suggestions because our society is much better off than the society just South of Arizona, where gun rights are non-existent and free speech has been taken away from the people and where evil men rule with AK-47's and stacks of Benjamin.
Clerks/Psychiatrists?
As someone who both suffers from a mental illness and a marijuana user, I find the idea that a dispensary clerk could diagnose a mental illness from a thirty-second conversation with a potential customer completely ludicrous.
I was an IT professional consultant for 30 years. During that time I dealt with executives and managers from several Fortune 500 companies, organized and managed projects, and led groups of programmers and analysts. No one ever suspected that I was mentally ill (or that I was a marijuana user). I never mentioned it because to reveal it would have been professional suicide.
It took three psychiatrists five years to come up with an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment. I doubt that a budtender could recognize my mental illness in thirty seconds.
I agree, but don't need a full clinical diagnosis
You're absolutely right that a 30-second conversation with a clerk isn't going to lead the clerk to deduce a schizotypal personality with paranoid delusions and possible dissociative disorder.
But it might be enough for a clerk to think, "whoa, that guy really seems a bit off-kilter."
Regardless, there would be security cam footage that a pot dealer wouldn't have.
Around the web.
from gogreen420
http://www.marijuana.com/legalization-decriminalization/161792-us-who-cares-if-ariz-shooter-jared-loughner-used-marijuana.html #post1415952
First of all, this could have happened at any time, and especially now. The USA is in a state of political unrest right now: we are still at war with a foreign nation much to the chagrin of the national and international opinion, we have a president who has kept none of his promises and his approval rating is sinking faster than the titanic - and into much colder waters, our economy is still terrible after years and many failed expensive attempts to fix it, a bureaucracy that is out of control and never stops growing (the "Bureaucrazy"), and on top of all that we have an unjust drug war which is raiding the coffers of our society to no end.
I am sure that it was more than just marijuana that led to the shooting of these poor people. You can bet your asses on that. Therefore people need to stop looking at the drug aspect and instead look at the aspects that are staring them right in the face --- the state of US politics is very disheveled.
Whatever
Marijuana, cocaine, heroine, alcohol or whatever have you. It goes well with the territory of any criminal intent.
It will not surprise me at all if he was high on something. Even if he was not, then he should have been in an institution; but is evident that nobody near him cared enough. On the other hand a lot of people as it is the SOP in these case are looking for ways to shift the blame of the crime commited on something or somebody else, other than the one who pulled the trigger.
Shifting responsibility
Isn't that precisely what using the red herring fallacy of reporting the guy to be a pothead is doing? It's no surprise that criminals are willing to enjoy cannabis. It is part of their very nature to not care about breaking the law.
With a cohort of 100 million and 20-25 million Americans who regularly enjoy cannabis it is absurd to entertain the fiction that there aren't going to be significant deviants and whackos. Pick a cohort of 25 million that participate in big religion and you'll definitely find some heinous criminals. For example, Dennis Rader, also known as the BTK killer. Does his perverted existence mean that big religion leads to serial murder? Perhaps it's more specific and it's just the Lutherans that spawn serial killers?
Jeffrey Dahmer was a degenerate addict who preferred drinking alcohol. Perhaps drinking to excess causes people to become cannibals and to attempt to turn people into zombies?
Applying the "reasoning" that some people use with regard to cannabis and criminals demands that the blame for the horrid crimes noted above be squarely placed at the feet of big religion and drinking respectively.
This crime was committed by a single, warped deviant criminal. That he had enjoyed cannabis, played on a little league team or spent a number of weeks on a liquid diet subsequent to being born is irrelevant.
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quote below from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Rader
quote---->"Rader served on both the Sedgwick County's Board of Zoning Appeals and the Animal Control Advisory Board (appointed in 1996 and resigned in 1998). He was also a member of Christ Lutheran Church, a Lutheran congregation of about 200 people, near his former high school. He had been a member for about 30 years and had been elected president[6] of the Congregation Council. He was also a Cub Scout leader. His son became an Eagle Scout.[citation needed] "<----end quote
Rumors
Someone posted on Twitter that the shooter's family said he was on antidepressants.
The Physicians Desk Reference states that SSRI antidepressants and all antidepressants can cause mania, psychosis, abnormal thinking, paranoia, hostility, agitation, etc. These side effects can also appear during withdrawal. Also, these adverse reactions are not listed as Rare but are listed as either Frequent or Infrequent.
Go to www.SSRIstories.com where there are over 4,300 cases, with the full media article available, involving bizarre murders, suicides, school shootings/incidents [58 of these] and murder-suicides - all of which involve SSRI antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, etc, . The media article usually tells which SSRI antidepressant the perpetrator was taking or had been using but sometimes the media article just says "antidepressant" or "medication for depression".
On December 15, 2010, PLoS Medicine released a study which showed that, in regard to prescription medications and violence, the FDA had received the most reports of violence from the SSRI & SNRI antidepressants (except for Chantix, the smoking cessation drug.) The evidence of an association with violence was weaker and mixed for antipsychotic drugs and absent for all but one of the mood stabilizers. Yet, the antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, given for the most serious mental illnesses, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, would be the most likely culprit involved in violence but, instead, it was the antidepressants which had the most reports of violence. They were given to patients that traditionally were the least likely to commit violence, the depressed and the anxious. See:
http://www.ssristories.com/show.php?item=4701