Briefly Noted: Reefer Madness

Since this topic has been raised a couple of times recently, I’ll offer these two follow up articles from the NYPost. I’m sure most readers are by now aware that this Crimo III grew up in a very disturbed household environment, and that the father is now parading around talking about holding his head high and feeling no responsibility. No word on reactions on that score from nearby residents, but:

Did reefer drive the Highland Park parade ‘killer’ Robert Crimo to madness?

You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to know that the Highland Park shooter is sick in the head.

His evil act is unfathomable, but he does fit a familiar pattern of mass killers: alienated young male stoners who appear to be in the grip of a distinctively American madness.

Those who knew the 21-year-old suspect, Robert Crimo III, say he habitually smoked cannabis, a habit he appeared to share with young mass shooters, including at Uvalde, Dayton, Parkland and Aurora.

Obviously weed didn’t make them commit their evil acts, but it may have scrambled their brains enough for empathy to take a holiday.

As the country rushes headlong into the embrace of Big Weed, we need to heed the warning signs, not least in the scientific literature that increasingly shows that cannabis triggers psychosis, and in the emergency rooms where mentally ill kids are the living proof of its harms.

The higher the potency of THC, the worse it is, especially for the developing adolescent brain.

But virulent attacks always greet any hint of opposition to wholesale drug legalization. Youth mental illness is a crisis in this country and yet we are not allowed to discuss a scientifically verified ­trigger.

So, let’s report what clues we have about Crimo’s state of mind, talking about “red flags.”

…

For the record, IL’s corpulent governor is heavily invested in Big Weed. He prefers to talk about taking guns from law abiding citizens. Miranda Devine is absolutely correct that this country desperately needs to address the problem of youth drug use. This is a topic that never seems to come up in discussions of youth violence that’s now endemic in our cities—we prefer to think it’s a totally unrelated phenomenon. It’s not. “Conservatives” who favor legal weed have their heads in the sand. Of course in many ways this is a symptom as much as the actual problem, nevertheless sometimes you can’t ignore symptoms. We’re reaping the harvest of the 60s and the Boomer generation.

As one would expect,

Crimo’s drug use was no secret to the cops, and not to the parents either:

Robert Crimo III told cops he was a depressed drug user

Confessed Highland Park shooter Robert Crimo III admitted to cops three years ago that he was a depressed teenage drug user when quizzed about threatening to “kill everyone” in his family, newly released documents show.

A Highland Park police report details why the then-18-year-old alleged shooter was flagged as a “clear and present danger” in 2019 — just a few months before his dad helped him start amassing the arsenal he allegedly used to kill seven and injure dozens at his local Fourth of July parade.

The article goes on to recount how the mother and father both covered for Crimo.