I’m not going to make this a right/left rant. I am going to bring into the light, and focus on a detail about the Arizona shootings that is being ignored by both sides.

Jared Lee Loughner was, and is, a pot-head, a marijuana user--just like the columbine shooters (12 Dead)........just like Jeffrey Weise in Red Lake Minnesota (9 dead)...... Just like the Virginia Tech massacre (32 dead)........

Their are hundreds of other examples, but they all have a common thread:  Pot usage. Some, like the perps of the Columbine massacre also share a thread of prescribed psychotropic medications combined with marijuana. The professional psychiatric community seems to ignore the dangerous experimental pharmacology of mixing potent psychoactive drugs with potent street drugs.  This is a subject for another time.

I know, I know.  Everyone believes that Pot-heads aren’t violent and pot use doesn’t really hurt anybody.  Freedom should allow us to do to our bodies what we wish.  Pot usage is about being laid back, relaxed and eating Doritos.   The human toll is insidiously subtle until something like the Tuscon incident grabs national attention. Unfortunately no one is paying attention to this side of the story.......

Take a deep breath, listen carefully, here comes the truth...

I am a recovering 20 year plus daily pot user.  I thought, like all pot-heads, that it was the salvation of the world.  If everybody just smoked a little pot there would be no violence; if everybody just smoked a little pot we would all just get along, and everything would be beautiful.

I am here to tell you that that idea is one of the greatest delusions ever perpetrated upon society. While using, and since my recovery began, I have done considerable research on the insidious nature of of that false perception.  One of the major symptoms of marijuana usage is that the user becomes unable to see what the drug is doing to them aka, denial.  In the case of marijuana, this  denial  is also being perpetrated upon society as the great delusion that “it’s only pot......” as if there is nothing to worry about.

Yeah, when I was stoned, I didn’t usually feel like getting off the couch to go take out my frustrations on massive amounts of people, or even take out the garbage.   I simply wanted to be left alone.  I had smoked myself into a corner of self-righteous indignation; I knew only narcissism; I felt violently frustrated because the world, and the straight people around me  just “didn’t get it;”  I acted out, sometimes very violently against the ones I loved, and against people I didn’t even know; I was completely apathetic about the harms I caused others. and was completely unaware of my wrongs.  I was so indignant, I was sure that my violent means were justified toward Utopia.

I watched exactly the same behavior in the other addicts around me.  We had all dropped out of society and looked at it with deep confusion and contempt.  All of the drug induced delusional thinking had built up and fueled destructive behaviors both subtle and overt.  The prevalent thought patterns were completely skewed.  You can only imagine the level of frustration felt by the pot-head whose perception of everything is so different from reality.

I, and the pot-heads I knew could have easily lashed out violently at the world, or at any number of political figures.  I frequently lashed out at loved ones citing the “abhorrent injustice of their behaviors” as rationalization for wanting them dead.

Furthermore, I would have done it without any remorse.  I believed that I was so right and so good, and so smart that the rest of the world would just have to die to prove it.  I believed that my viewpoint was so divinely exclusive (and so frustratingly ignored) that my only solution was extreme, violent rage. I tried that solution in escalating incidents for years, to no good end.  I got lucky and got out of the life before I made the headlines.

Now, with a couple years sober, I still have trouble summoning remorse.  I see others feel it for behaviors far less destructive than my own.  I even try very hard to dig for it, but there is drug addled brain damage still prevalent in that part of my psyche. It is getting better; the brain has an amazing capacity for healing.  But it is is still there.  I shudder to think of the consequences for myself, let alone most of society living with this lack of or delusional conscience.

Daily, I talk to other former marijuana users.  Though we have vastly different backgrounds, we all had the same symptoms of rage, and share bewilderment at our own feeling of apathy.  We all still struggle with over-coming our violently delusional pot induced worldview.  We even have a term for it “PMS” Post Marijuana Syndrome. (I’m going to pause here and give credit for that term to my wife who was the unfortunate victim of my PMS for many years.)

I see the hidden rage-ful behaviors and thought patterns all the time in active marijuana users I know; I  feel the apathy; I hear the unbelievable narcissism, I hear the profound denial and destructive rationalization. The stoned mind can rationalize and justify anything from wretched demoralizing behavior to mass murder. After a while, once conscience disappears, the pot-head looses control of their actions.  At that point they lash out.  Sometimes it is in the form of a rage-athon that can go on for hours, days, or months.  Sometimes it is a violent episode that results in physical and emotional harms to the people close to the perpetrator.  Still other times, it makes national news.

The unrelenting delusions of grandeur and righteousness combined with a unexplainable detachment from reality become the pervasive caveat to marijuana use. Columbine, Virginia Tech, other nationally noteworthy incidents, thousands of smaller incidents, and now Tucson are the consequences.  Ask any cop what percentage of Domestic Violence incidents involve pot-heads.  It is easy to blame it on Alcohol which is almost universally pervasive in DV situations.  Unfortunately, it is much harder to identify marijuana use as a contributing factor. The delusional thought patterns inherent to marijuana use (and painfully obvious to any recovering pot-head)  fuel the escalation to violence.

Murder, and mass murder is not a political issue.  Hatred is not a political issue.  Lashing out to the extent seen in these publicly noteworthy episodes is endemic not to any political party or ideology.  But I am here to tell you  from my own experience, and the experience of hundreds of others that can now reflect with a clear mind.  It is endemic to pot usage.

***editors note. If anybody wishes to fund a book about this subject please contact me at 907-355-7881 or at akkurt@gmail.com. I have thousands of lines of material on this subject both empirical and anecdotal. It needs to be said especially as the nation contemplates legalization. ***