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....Years of cannabis smoking 'may have caused killer's schizophrenia' |
If you are looking to escape a lengthy jail sentence and for whatever crime you decide to commit, the government are making it all to easy as they stoop lower in their quest to demonise cannabis, its use, and its users. Simply put all it takes is for the astute criminal to talk of "voices in the head", pay reference to lengthy cannabis use, and the Great British judicial system, allied to the anti-cannabis brigade, will do the rest...its as easy as that.
| A MAN could have developed the schizophrenia that drove him to kill his partner due to years of heavy cannabis smoking, a court heard yesterday.
| James Bryceland, 43, had abused drugs since his teenage years and become a paranoid schizophrenic who heard voices in his head. They told him his partner, Jacqueline Hughes, 35, was having an affair and he bludgeoned and stabbed her to death as she lay in bed beside a toddler and a six-year-old boy. At the High Court in Glasgow, Bryceland denied murdering Ms Hughes on 19 August last year in their Glasgow home. |  |
The jury was then read a joint minute in which the Crown and the defence agreed he had killed
her.
Dr Douglas Gray, a consultant forensic psychiatrist from Carstairs State Hospital, told the court Bryceland had been insane at the time because of a psychotic condition.
He said the killer had smoked five cannabis joints a day from the age of about 18 and used speed and LSD.
Another psychiatrist, Dr Natasha Billcliff, said: "Cannabis may have caused (his illness], but it's impossible to say that he would not have developed schizophrenia if he had not been taking (it]."
The jury was told to find Bryceland not guilty of murder by reason of insanity and he was ordered to be detained in Carstairs without limit of time.
Professor Neil McKeganey, head of the Scottish Drug Misuse Centre, said there was "clear evidence" cannabis could "increase the severity of psychiatric illness", while drugs campaigner Janice Jess warned it was a "gateway drug" to harder substances.
| | http://news.scotsman.com | |
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