Friday, August 5, 2016

Are Drugs Behind "the Summer of Terror"?

The more I look at the terrorism problem, the more convinced I am that we are misdefining the problem.   We are focused on Islamic terrorism, but other examples of mass killing are just as bad. Look at this case in Japanese nursing home recently. Is there a common link?

Peter Hitchens believes a consistent thread in many of the recent cases has been drug use by the perpetrators.  He puts together an impressive list of the types of the drugs, legal and illegal, that many of the attackers have had a history of taking.  The Orlando killer was a steroid user.  The San Bernardino killers were on Xanax and Adderral.  Mental illness medication has been tied to the murderers of the priest in Normandy and to the mall shooter in Munich.  See one-common-link-DRUGS

He asks:  shouldn't we be looking at this issue of drug abuse more closely?  Yes we should.  That doesn't mean that militant Islam isn't a motivation for many, but its significance in this global phenomenon might be overstated.