reefer madness murderers blaming cannabis

As Predicted – Now Murderers are blaming weed for their killings!

THE RETURN OF REEFER MADNESS AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

I knew this was going to happen, I wrote about it, I talked about it on a podcast recently - and like the stoner prophet I am...it happened! What you ask? Another killer used the "Weed made me do it" defense, but this time in Ireland.

Remember the Bryn Spejcher case I wrote about earlier? The California woman who violently stabbed her boyfriend and a dog over 100 times, then claimed "cannabis-induced psychosis" made her do it? She ended up getting just community service. I warned everyone then that by creating such a legal precedent, this "cannabis madness" defense would become increasingly common for violent criminals to exploit. It seems those warnings are now becoming a reality.

The latest case involves a man named Diego Costa Silva in Ireland. He decapitated his wife, claiming he believed she was possessed by a serpent due to "cannabis-induced psychosis" - and that he had to remove her head to kill the snake entity. Two psychiatrists backed up his insanity plea, testifying that Silva genuinely suffered delusions and hallucinations from heavy cannabis use, rendering him legally not guilty by reason of insanity for the grisly murder.

Both the prosecution and defense told the jury the evidence only points one way - that Silva cannot be held criminally responsible for his actions due to the cannabis-induced psychosis. It's a carbon copy of the Spejcher case playbook of using supposed marijuana madness to justify heinous violence.

This is the disturbing trend I cautioned against. If we continue allowing such cannabis insanity defenses, where does it end? Schizophrenics, murderers, and other violent criminals will increasingly lean on this to ease their sentences or walk free altogether. And it provides ammunition for the government to further crack down on cannabis under the guise of public safety.

In this article, we're going to explore these troubling cases in-depth and discuss what we as a society must do to stop this madness from spiraling out of control. The stakes are high - both for justice being served properly and the cannabis movement's hard-fought progress staying on track. This budding legal loophole needs to go up in smoke before it's too late.

Eerie Similarities

Let's first break down the disturbing Diego Costa Silva case in Ireland. Silva claimed he decapitated his wife Fabiola because he was suffering from "cannabis-induced psychosis" that made him believe she was possessed by a demonic serpent that he needed to kill by removing her head.

Two psychiatrists, Dr. Brenda Wright and Dr. Mark Joynt, testified that Silva's heavy cannabis use caused him to develop a legitimate psychotic disorder involving delusions and hallucinations about his wife being a threat. They stated Silva did not understand the moral or legal wrongness of his grisly actions due to his impaired mental state.

Both the prosecution and defense agreed Silva could not be held criminally culpable due to this "cannabis-induced psychosis" - a convenient label that provided him with a legal insanity defense for literally beheading his wife.

The eerie parallels to the Bryn Spejcher case are overwhelming. Spejcher also relied on testimony from psychiatrists who claimed her history of cannabis use caused her to develop a "cannabis-induced psychosis" that compelled her to carry out the frenzied stabbing murders of her boyfriend and a dog over 100 times.

In both cases, psychiatrists were the determiners and enablers of these "weed madness" defenses being successfully deployed to secure enormously lenient treatment for horrific murders. Not behavioral psychologists who study abnormal patterns of thought and action. Not neuroscientists who investigate brain function and chemistry. But psychiatrists - the same professionals who have a financial incentive to legitimize loosely defined "disorders" to prescribe psychiatric drugs as treatment.

Does this sound like justice to you? Weed smokers, does this culture of unhinged violence fueled by the munchies sound familiar? Of course not! These are calculated legal defenses by criminals looking to play the system and get-out-of-jail-free cards enabled by pill-pushing psychiatrists.

The idea that smoking marijuana can induce temporary insanity so extreme that it causes otherwise normal people tolose touch with all moral reasoning and turn into deranged killing machines is patently absurd on its face. It perpetuates the discriminatory "Reefer Madness" myth that cannabis causes mental illness and violence - the exact opposite of mountains of medical evidence showing it is a safe substance for most people that does not induce psychosis or increase aggression.

The Return of Reefer Madness

There has been an influx lately of negative cannabis articles, alarmist "studies," and other propaganda demonizing marijuana. Things that the government and anti-drug establishment have been pushing for over 50 years in some capacity, regurgitating the same old claims, but now trying to brand them as "new" problems with weed.

For those of us who have been writing and advocating in the cannabis space for over a decade, we can sense the steadily shifting tone and renewed pushback against legalization from the powerful entities that have existed to uphold prohibition - the UN, DEA, big pharma, law enforcement, and prison-industrial complex.

Dig into some of the foundational treaties that codified the global "War on Drugs," and you'll find suspicious linguistic choices like using the heading "Marijuana and Drugs" - subtly separating it from other substances as if it didn't even belong grouped with them initially.

I've read accounts from historians and researchers speculating that cannabis was almost an afterthought addition to the Controlled Substances Act and UN drug conventions - a last-minute play to criminalize the most ubiquitously consumed "illegal" substance on earth.

This questionable legal status was then perversely exploited by governments worldwide to wage a militarized war on their own people under the patently false pretext of protecting us. Using the drug war as a thin veil to deprive citizens of bodily autonomy, personal freedom, and human rights, while enriching those in power: "You're too idiotic to think for yourselves, you peasants!"

At least, that's how this state-sanctioned oppression and plundering of communities can feel when you're on the receiving end of a no-knock raid, watching families torn apart over a plant. We cannot allow this to go unchallenged yet again. We cannot afford to sit back complicit and silent like the generations before us who witnessed the most valuable crop on earth get insidiously stolen away.

Not this time. This latest resurrection of reefer madness propaganda and quietly escalating reversion to the failed policies of the past will be met with a fervent resistance. We will expose the motives and rigorously debunk the junk science being pushed by those threatened by the cannabis reformation.

What to do in the case of recriminalization?

It's our duty as citizens to defy unjust laws. When tyranny appears, it never does so overtly with absolute force at first. That would spark an immediate and overwhelming backlash. Instead, it insidiously codifies itself into the legal system first, giving its oppression a veneer of legitimacy and "justification" for using force.

Those who engage in these authoritarian power grabs understand this well. They exploit the legal process to slowly tighten the vice of control over the populace. They commandeer institutions like the media to proliferate their narratives and propaganda. And they hijack law enforcement to criminalize competitors and dissenting voices, jailing them under the flimsiest of pretenses.

If the forces working to re-criminalize cannabis are successful at rolling back hard-won reforms through deceptive means like these "cannabis insanity" defenses, it will be a legal form of tyranny. One that strips us of our fundamental rights over our own consciousness and bodies under the guise of sham concerns like public safety.

We must resist this at all costs through peaceful, civic, and legal avenues first and foremost. Flooding the comments on every negative cannabis article. Calling out the fallacies and ulterior motives. Protesting unjust policies and laws. Using our voices, our voices, our wallets, and our votes to fight the injustice and rewrite the unjust laws in a credible way.

But if all that fails, and the tyranny persists in totalitarian fashion? Well, we must be willing to move beyond civility. Throughout history, unjust laws have required a form of mass civil disobedience to rectify grave injustices when the system becomes too corrupted to fix itself through proper channels alone.

The Sticky Bottom Line

I warned that the "cannabis made me do it" murder defense was going to become a disturbing trend, and unfortunately, I don't think the Diego Costa Silva decapitation case will be the last grisly act pinned on the scapegoat of marijuana psychosis.

But now is the time for the cannabis community to get activated. To call out this bullshit for what it is - cynical manipulation of the legal system and public opinion. We cannot be passive spectators letting this theater of injustice play out unchallenged.

It's time to claim our power as conscious consumers and citizens. If corporations support oppressive policies or peddle prohibitionist propaganda, we starve them of our money and find ethical alternatives. If politicians vote against our interests and freedoms, we vote them out.

We must draw a hard line in the sand and declare "Enough is enough!" We cannot buy into the lies and anti-cannabis hysteria anymore. Not after everything we've been through as a community to reform draconian marijuana laws through facts and truth.

Become free thinkers who scrutinize every claim and accusation. Build an unshakable personal understanding of this plant and its impacts grounded in objective research, not garbage inst-reefer scare tactics.

The future of cannabis legalization is ours to uphold, but only if we remain united, vocal, and defiant against any forces attempting to gaslight us back into the nightmarish days of reefer madness. This latest insanity plea loophole cannot be the spark that lets that smoldering $64 billion industry up in smoke.