On cannabis and (political) violence

Wednesday’s "ANTI-ICE" sniper was a pothead, no other way to say it. Sometime around the start of Covid his life just... stopped. Five years later he was on a rooftop, shooting at federal agents.

Leftist ideology appears to have motivated Joshua Jahn, the 29-year-old Texas man who attacked a federal immigration center Wednesday in Dallas, killing one person before fatally shooting himself.

But did years of heavy cannabis use, starting in his teens, contribute to Jahn’s violence?

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Jahn, 29, killed one immigration detainee and wounded two others before fatally shooting himself. But he was targeting agents, not detainees. Investigators Thursday said he had left a note explaining he hoped the attack would cause “terror” in agents.

The attack makes Jahn the second leftist twenty-something mass shooter in less than a month to have cannabis use as a central feature of his life.

Robert “Robin” Westman, the 23-year-old transgender Minnesota man who killed two children in a shooting at a Catholic church in late August, actually blamed cannabis, as well as his gender transition, for his mental illness.

“Gender and weed fucked up my head,” Westman wrote in a note found by investigators. “I wish I could stop vaping but I can’t! If I could stop vaping, I could stop myself from doing this attack, but I just don’t want to.”

So far, investigators have not reported that Jahn made such an explicit reference to cannabis in any notes or other materials.

But Jahn was clearly an extremely heavy user.

In April 2016, he pled guilty in court in Collin County, north of Dallas, to delivery of under five pounds of marijuana - a felony charge. Even in hard-red Texas, Jahn faced only a slap on the wrist, a $500 fine and five years of probation, which a judge voided a year later on the recommendation of probation officials.

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(He looks nice… Joshua Jahn’s 2016 mugshot.)

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Jahn’s misadventure did not discourage him from his favored drug.

In 2017, he moved to Washington state for seasonal cannabis work at the “Golden Leaf” farm. Access to the product was his main motivation, Ryan Sanderson, the farm’s manager, told the New York Post:

He was all about the weed. He wanted to be part of the scene. He lived in his car while he helped… There are people who work, and there are people who go through the motions. He was one of those guys. He didn’t work that hard, probably because he was too high... What I believe happened is he was selling weed and then he came up here to work in the weed industry because he was all about it and that fizzled out.

Yes, in 2018, Jahn was “too high” to work on a cannabis farm.

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But that fact wouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who knew him on Reddit, where from 2012 to 2019 he frequently posted under the username “hankiebob,” often to the “subreddit” known as R/Trees, the Internet’s largest message board for cannabis users.¹

In R/Trees and a related subreddit called R/Treecomics, “hankiebob” describes heavy cannabis use, at one point saying he would masturbate (fap) several times daily while smoking:

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Jahn was 15 when he wrote this.

Nearly every study of drug use suggests that heavy use before 16 is far more likely to lead to addiction and other problems than use delayed until adulthood. For cannabis in particular, early and heavy use is strongly linked to a sharply increased risk of schizophrenia, a severe mental illness characterized by hallucinations, delusions, and a highly increased risk of severe violence.

So what happened to Jahn over the next several years? We don’t really know. His LinkedIn work history reveals one more job after that stint at the Golden Leaf, as a solar panel installer. That work ended in 2019, leaving no evidence of how he has supported himself for the last five-plus years.

Jahn’s friends told Ken Klippenstein, a left-wing journalist, that he became increasingly isolated and focused on video games — a common pattern among heavy cannabis users, who often withdraw from life into their own private worlds:

He preferred edgy humor, video games and the message board 4chan, all of which he became increasingly steeped in as he withdrew from social life as well as their own friendships several years ago, they said…

“If you’re having trouble finding people besides immediate family who knew him, that’s part of the story,” one friend said.

Because cannabis, even in states like Texas, is easy to find and inexpensive, heavy users do not face the same financial pressures as opioid or stimulant addicts. They can quietly use THC until their minds crack — and then take out their delusions and anger on the rest of us.

In the case of people with severe schizophrenia, that violence is usually either random or directed at a nearby family member, frequently with knives or other edged weapons.

People who are not quite as ill, especially those whose psychosis is drug-induced rather than organic, often plan their attacks more carefully. Sometimes they even have insight into what’s happening to them, as Westman apparently did:

“I wish I could stop vaping but I can’t! If I could stop vaping, I could stop myself from doing this attack, but I just don’t want to.”

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(He said it, not me)

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I don’t mean to discount the political and cultural motivations that apparently drove Westman and Jahn. They chose their targets carefully and intentionally. Jahn allegedly left handwritten notes behind that read in part, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘Is there a sniper with AP rounds on that roof?’”

But the step from political anger to political murder is a big one. At least it should be, especially for people with no history of violence and comfortable middle-class backgrounds.

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These days, though, the rising, long-term availability and use of high-potency cannabis and THC products appears to be making that step easier and easier for troubled young men to take.

1. Reddit contains hundreds of thousands of message boards, called subreddits. The subreddits are created and overseen by volunteer moderators but owned and controlled by the company, which is for-profit and under Section 230 can force moderators out at its discretion. I know, nice gig.