This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column In this case, the substances are an anabolic steroid called stanozolol, combined with an amphetamine-like drug called ephedrine, plus caffeine to make the mixture really fizz. I found these facts in Breivik’s vast, drivelling manifesto simply because I was looking for them. The authorities and most of the media are more interested in his non-existent belief in fundamentalist Christianity. I doubt if the drugs would ever have been known about if Breivik hadn’t himself revealed this. I suspect that mind-bending drugs of some kind feature in almost all of the epidemic rampage killings that Western society is now suffering. Anabolic steroids were also used heavily by David Bieber, who killed one policeman and tried to kill two more in Leeds in 2003, and by Raoul Moat, who last summer shot three people in Northumberland, killing one and blinding another. Steroids are strongly associated with mood changes, uncontrollable anger and many other problems. In my view, this link remains formally unproven only because no great effort has yet been made to prove it. A serious worldwide inquiry should be launched into the correlation between steroid use and violent incidents. Likewise with so-called ‘antidepressants’, whose medical value has recently been seriously questioned in two devastating articles in The New York Review Of Books by the distinguished American doctor Marcia Angell. Her words ought to be reproduced and circulated to all doctors. I pointed out some time ago how many shooting incidents involved people who had been taking these suspect pills. Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland school shooting, and Jeff Weise, culprit of the 2005 Red Lake High School shootings, had been taking ‘antidepressants’. So had Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 Wakefield massacre in Massachusetts. So had Kip Kinkel, responsible for a 1998 murder spree in Oregon. So had John Hinckley, who tried to murder President Ronald Reagan in 1981. They were also found in the cabin of the ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski, of whom more later. Then there are the dangerous illegal drugs that are increasingly common since the State stopped bothering to prosecute users. Jared Loughner, who smiled so beatifically (like the equally unhinged Breivik) after murdering six people in Arizona, had been a heavy smoker of cannabis for much of his youth. The use of this allegedly ‘soft’ drug is increasingly correlated with mental disturbance, often severe. All these poisons have their defenders, who will, I know, respond to the facts above with a typhoon of rage and spittle. This is because they all have their selfish or commercial reasons for preventing a proper inquiry into their effects – which is all I am calling for here. Shame on them. They are disgusting. The rest of us must consider more wisely. The human brain is a delicate and mysterious organ, of which we know amazingly little. But we do know this. Several drugs, especially the testosterone that is in steroids, the SSRIs such as Fluoxetine that are in ‘antidepressants’ and the tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is the main ingredient of cannabis, have potent effects on brain chemistry. Anyone can have unusual or unconventional ideas. Unkind conservative Americans used to play a game of guessing whether various alarmist statements about the environment had been written by the Unabomber – who lived in a forest hut and murdered people by sending them letter bombs – or by Vice President Al Gore, who lived in the Washington National Observatory with a Secret Service guard. It usually turned out that the wilder ones had been penned by Mr Gore. And I have no doubt that the eloquence of writers can move people to action. William Butler Yeats feared that his patriotic poems might have set some Irishmen on the path to Easter Rising violence in 1916. But it is rational action. Nobody but a madman – and steroids have in my view made Anders Breivik mad – could believe that mercilessly slaughtering the flower of Norway would advance any cause His opinions were eventually judged so bizarre and embarrassing, even by a Labour government that winked at the covert decriminalisation of supposedly illegal drugs, that he was removed from that committee.
One more mass killer, one more drug-addled mind
It's the drugs, stupid. In hundreds of square miles of supposed analysis of the Norway mass murder, almost nobody has noticed that the smirking Anders Breivik was taking large quantities of mind-altering chemicals.22 July 2011 1:53 PM
‘I am a Scientist! You Will Obey!’ Professor Nutt speaks again
Sunday, 31 July 2011
Many readers will recall my various clashes with Professor David Nutt, the noted Neuropsychopharmacologist and former Chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs.
I suspect they were worried that he was drawing attention to the establishment’s covert acceptance of drugs in our midst. I suspect that many more serious people on the drugs decriminalisation side view the Professor as an embarrassment. I wouldn’t blame them.
He has enjoyed the notoriety ever since, becoming a bit of a hero to many decriminalisers. I’ve attacked him for it. And now, in an article on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ site
he makes a direct attack on me. Actually, this isn’t the first time. Last December he gave an interview to The Guardian in which he assailed me for my alleged ’baseless alarmism’ about drugs.
Now I must do so again. It is important that Professor Nutt’s contributions to the drugs debate are judged on their merits, not protected from proper analysis by his scientist’s white coat.
Professor Nutt’s latest ‘Comment is Free’ article is as cavalier with facts as his claim on the radio that 160,000 people were subject to criminal sanctions for cannabis possession. The majority of them ( as I have shown) were not punished at all, merely given unrecorded warnings without legal force.
The problem with the Lancet report that began our quarrel is that it is a curious hybrid of natural science and social science, known as ‘Multicriteria Decision Analysis’ . Measurable chemical or physical factors such as ‘intrinsic lethality’, and physical damage, are assessed in the same document alongside such things as Family adversities, ‘Extent to which the use of a drug causes family adversities—eg, family breakdown, economic wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, future prospects of children, child neglect’.
Or 'International damage, Extent to which the use of a drug in the UK contributes to damage internationally—eg, deforestation, destabilisation of countries, international crime, new markets'; or 'Community - Extent to which the use of a drug creates decline in social cohesion and decline in the reputation of the community'; or 'Loss of relationships. Extent of loss of relationship with family and friends'. In effect, it claims to consider, in the same package and with the same objectivity, both stomach ulcers and deforestation, sociology and also psychology, chemistry and neurobiology. That is the point I strove to make. In the weighting of all these things against each other, some subjectivity must be involved. The claim that science has somehow established that one drug is more damagaing than any other is, to say the least, questionable *on scientific terms*.
I also pointed out that the report didn’t seem to take into account the difference made to alcohol’s impact by the fact that it is legally on sale, whereas most of the other drugs examined are at least technically illegal. Decca Aitkenhead (no political ally of mine) made the same point in her interview.
By omitting these facts Professor Nutt gives the impression that the clash was one between a cool, objective scientific mind and a raging tabloid hack. This is highly misleading.
Finally, but very significantly, Professor Nutt asserts ‘the BBC issued a statement saying that they would not use him [me] again.’
They issued no such statement. This is pure fiction. His account of my subsequent encounter with the ‘Feedback’ programme is also misleading in several significant ways. I didn’t protest about ‘censorship’. I complained about having been attacked at length on air on a supposedly impartial station, without being given any opportunity to defend myself. And I had to make very considerable efforts to secure the fair hearing that I eventually received.
I can only hope that Professor Nutt’s science is better than his journalism. But if he wishes to claim that his scientific standing gives him some special right to pronounce on this subject, it would seem to be incumbent on him to use the most basic scientific method in his own work – factual accuracy.
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