THE TROUBLE WITH INTERESTING HEADLINES

Judge Blames Pot in Fatal Stabbing.

Whoa! That headline in the Globe and Mail certainly grabbed my attention.

Sometimes a headline will give me a nudge, piquing my interest, suggesting
that there's a story there worth reading.

I've always assumed that was the purpose of a headline.

But there are others, ones that seem to tell the whole story, suggesting I
should move on because what I see is all I'm going to get. They can be
dangerous. A lot of people, myself included, may spot that kind of
headline, assume that's the whole story and later opine over dinner, for
example, that at long last a supreme court judge has explained: What's
Wrong with the System of Sentencing Criminals in Canada, and What's Needed
to Fix It (the Vancouver Sun, Oct. 6), only to find out later that the
piece didn't come close to delivering on the promise.

So, even though I fully expected to read that a judge had gone over to the
far side - after all, there are thousands of cases, big and small, going on
across the country every day and it's not too hard to find someone being
goofy - I decided I should look at the story itself.

It turns out that Justice Gilles Hebert of the Quebec Superior Court
sentenced Martin Veilleux to eight years in prison for the fatal stabbing
of his roommate, Raymond Gallant, in what was described as "a paranoid rage."

The accused was charged with second-degree murder but agreed to plead
guilty to manslaughter in what the story describes as a plea bargain.

Of course, as the Crown prosecutor readily admitted, no real bargaining
went on because it was clear that it would have been impossible to convince
a jury that the accused intended to kill.

The foundation for the plea lay in what was said by two psychiatrists. In
their reports, they both described the offender's act as involuntary in the
legal sense, in that he was too out of touch with reality to form the
intention to commit murder.

How did he get that way?

Well, it's a long story, but essentially it amounts to a life history of
drug abuse - sniffing glue at nine, smoking cannabis, discovering cocaine,
chemicals and alcohol, and undergoing eight separate detox and treatment
programs since he was 18 (1992) while amassing a criminal record for
impaired driving, break and enter, arson, fraud, threatening, and assault
including assault (and obstruction) of a peace officer. Violence was always
in his picture.

In spite of that background the principal psychiatrist cited by the judge
accepted at face value the accused's insistence that he had consumed no
drugs between November of 2002 and the end of February, 2003. He then, he
told the psychiatrist, started using "pot" (the psychiatrist's quotes) and,
on March 5, the day of the stabbing, he was smoking it "with a pipe and
through the nose" at home and began to hallucinate.

He heard voices, thought the cat was the devil and eventually became
convinced that his roommate would kill him if he didn't act first.

He was later seen roaming around outside, naked and covered in blood.

The good doctor said in his report that paranoia, impulsivity, increased
aggressiveness and irritability "can be observed with the consumption of
'pot,' chemical drugs like LSD or PCP and also cocaine."

He then suggests that the "pot" the accused says he consumed on March 4 and
March 5 may have had an elevated concentration of THC (delta-9
tetrahyrdocannabinol), its active ingredient. He also observed that, "very
often, in the past few years, the 'pot' sold on the street contains traces
of PCP (to enhance the psychedelic effect)."

PCP is phenicyclidene, also known as angel dust, and recognized as one of
the most volatile of the several chemicals making the rounds.

Taking his cue from those observations, Justice Hebert decried the
"sometimes unforeseeable consequences of consuming marijuana or other
drugs, the contents of which, the composition, the amount of THC, are
completely unknown." He concluded that the marijuana was at least a
catalyst that led Veilleux to kill his friend.

That's how the headline came to be. My reaction to the story behind it is
mixed.

I have never, in 25 years of hearing cases where drugs were a factor, heard
marijuana referred to by any expert as a drug that can cause increased
impulsivity, irritability and aggressiveness, regardless of its THC
content. Nor have I ever heard of it being ingested through the nose.

And only very rarely have I found it credible, without corroboration, that
a lifetime user of multiple drugs has been clean for four months,
especially when it is to his advantage to say that he was clean and sober
until he was blindsided by a spiked substance. All in all, it was
inaccurate to say that the judge "blamed pot" in the tragic death of an
innocent man.

What he did was warn against what, based on dubious information but not on
the whole unreasonably, he concluded is the grave danger of consuming a
substance sold on a black market - a market created by prohibition - with
no clue as to its origin, composition or potency. The blame lies properly
on the prohibition, not on the drug, whatever it may have been.