On Shane Tamura, the NYC office shooter: yet again, cannabis psychosis and violence may be hiding in plain sight

The media wants to spread Tamura's delusion that high school football caused his mental illness. It's ignoring his cannabis use, a far likelier cause. As usual, ideology trumps (likely) reality.

The legacy media wants to blame football for Shane Devon Tamura’s descent into madness and mass murder in New York last week.

In doing so, it’s ignoring an explanation that’s far likelier, though less appealing to woke reporters.

Cannabis.

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(Taking on the media establishment. With the facts they’d rather ignore. And your help.)

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On July 28, 2025, Tamura drove from Las Vegas to New York City and killed four strangers in a Manhattan office tower before taking his own life. He was 27. Friends who had known Tamura in high school struggled to explain his turn to violence. In high school, Tamura was “a great guy in general,” as one friend said - a common opinion.

Tamura had his own theory: brain injuries from football had destroyed his mind.

Though he had quit playing after high school and had no known link to the National Football League, he seemed to blame the N.F.L. for his problems. The league is headquartered in the building Tamura attacked. He targeted it but accidentally entered the wrong elevator, investigators found.

In a suicide note, Tamura asked scientists to study his brain for CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive brain illness linked to blows to the skull.

The media — which for a decade has pressed to link football to CTE — eagerly reported the note. “In Violent Attack, Gunman Brings Issue of C.T.E. to N.F.L.’s Door,” the New York Times wrote.

There’s only one problem. Tamura’s explanation is essentially delusional, closer to conspiracy theory than serious medical diagnosis.

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CTE is real, though at present it can only be diagnosed after death, and its pathology and prevalence are murkier than football's critics claim. As one skeptical neuropsychologist explained in 2019:

The problem from a clinical perspective is that the neuropathology, even in small amounts, has been considered sufficient to diagnose the syndrome, even if there were few or no symptoms present… this is tantamount to concluding that people with a small amount of neuropathology associated with Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease have the disease, even if they appear clinically normal.

But even the researchers who draw the strongest links between CTE and football agree that people who have played only high school football, like Tamura, have much lower risk than those who played in college or professionally.

And severe CTE has essentially never been found in anyone Tamura’s age.

The primary exception proves the point. CTE is graded in four stages. After Aaron Hernandez, a former New England Patriots player, committed suicide at age 27 in prison in 2019, researchers reported Hernandez had what they called Stage 3 CTE.

The severity of Hernandez’s disease was by far the worst they had ever seen in anyone under 40, the researchers said at the time. “Individuals with similar gross findings…were at least 46 years old at the time of death.”

In other words, severe CTE normally takes decades to develop. Hernandez, the exception, had played football both in college and in the N.F.L., and he was known as violent and aggressive even by N.F.L. standards. He also had a long history of heavy drug use.

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So there’s essentially no evidence playing high school football could have caused severe brain injuries and made Tamura paranoid and violent a few years later.

What could, then?

Like millions of other Americans, Tamura may have suffered from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, serious mental illnesses that usually become first become apparent in people in their late teens or early twenties.

About 1 in 150 people worldwide develop schizophrenia, a severe and long-term psychotic disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disordered thinking, and paranoia. The combination is dangerous: people with schizophrenia are at a high risk both for committing and becoming victims of violence.

Researchers usually say that about half the risk of schizophrenia is genetically determined. Environmental and familial factors can also increase risk.

But the largest preventable risk for schizophrenia now appears to be cannabis use, particularly heavy use of the high-potency cannabis products that are now common. I documented this link in my book Tell Your Children in 2019, and the research has only piled up since.

A 2023 Danish study suggested as many as 30 percent of cases in young men — and about 10 percent of cases overall — might not have occurred if not for heavy use.

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(Tell Your Children. Seriously, just tell them.)

SOURCE

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So did Tamura use cannabis regularly?

Yes. CNN reported shortly after the shooting that New York City police had found cannabis in the BMW Tamura drove from Las Vegas — although, oddly, that report seems to have vanished.

This week, the Las Vegas police department released records and 911 calls of its repeated run-ins with Tamura in the last three years. In both 2022 and 2024, Tamura’s mother called police to tell them that he appeared suicidal.

Both times she mentioned his cannabis use and said he did not use any other drugs.

“He smokes marijuana, only marijuana,” she told police in 2022.

In 2024, a dispatcher asked her, “What about any drugs or alcohol for him?” and she answered, “No, just, uh, umm, cannabis.”

No. Just cannabis.

Because after 20 years of media and legalization propaganda, even well-meaning mothers barely think of cannabis as a drug.

Further, Tamura had many of the classic symptoms of drug-induced rather than organic schizophrenia. He could take care of himself and work, unlike many people who suffer schizophrenia. But his moods were volatile and his slow decline is visible in his increasing contacts with the police. At some point, he was prescribed anti-psychotic medication, which police found in his apartment after his death.

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(The truth you don’t get anywhere else.)

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None of this proves that cannabis caused Tamura’s worsening psychosis or paranoia about football.

But it does suggest that cannabis is a far likelier explanation for his problems and the violence that followed than his high school football career or the essentially non-existent chance he had severe football-related brain damage.

And Tamura’s suicide note should be viewed as meaningless as a clue. People with psychosis commonly try to find explanations for their disordered thoughts which they hope will sound reasonable to themselves and other people. I’m getting sicker and it’s because of football is a more comforting explanation than I’m getting sicker and I don’t know why. People with drug-induced psychosis may lean on alternate explanations particularly heavily, to avoid blaming their substance of choice.

So why won’t the legacy media take a hard look at Tamura’s cannabis use?

Maybe because the same outlets that have screamed about football and brain damage for a decade spent most of the same decade pretending cannabis is harmless.

Very recently, they’ve started to admit the truth.

They have a long, long way to go.