So where are all the heinous murders committed by psychotic cannabis users?
Turns out they are all over, hiding in plain sight.
Scientists like to say that the plural of anecdote is not data. In other words, don’t draw conclusions based on stories, no matter how convincing they sound. Just because you know someone whose toddler was diagnosed with autism a week after a vaccination doesn’t mean vaccines cause autism. (They don’t.)
But no one ever points out the statement is true in reverse. If the scientific evidence suggests that a phenomenon is common, then that phenomenon should be easy to spot in the real world. The issue of marijuana and violence proved the point. Once I started looking, I found a long parade of cases, each more terrible than the rest.
Are all those murders and assaults making a notable difference to crime rates? Very possibly. The first four states that legalized marijuana for recreational use—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington—have seen their rates of murder and aggravated assault increase much faster than the United States’ rates as a whole since legalization. The gap has increased every year.
Canada, which also has high and rising rates of cannabis use and in 2018 became the first major Western nation to legalize use, has seen a similar trend. Homicides in Canada rose almost 30 percent between 2014 and 2017.
The violence comes in three baskets.
The first is the most obvious and hardest to dispute: murders and assaults by mentally ill people who were also heavy cannabis users.
A second group of crimes is committed by people who became violent from temporary cannabis psychosis.
The third comes from people who weren’t obviously psychotic, but whose crimes occurred alongside marijuana use. In those cases, marijuana may function more like alcohol, as an intoxicant that reduces inhibition. Often, those crimes took place in the context of small-time drug dealing. They also included a disturbing number of crimes against children.
Unfortunately, I had no foolproof way to tease out hard numbers for any of the three categories. Like being drunk, cannabis psychosis is a form of voluntary intoxication, which is not a defense to criminal behavior. Defense attorneys raise the issue infrequently.
Nor do police departments or prosecutors particularly care about marijuana use, especially in cases where a defendant’s guilt seems beyond dispute. Police officers, detectives, and prosecutors have crimes to solve and cases to prepare. Unless cannabis or cannabis intoxication is relevant to winning conviction, they may not investigate it.
More broadly, the criminal equivalent of the HCUP database—a national dataset showing drug use or abuse by defendants—doesn’t exist. Even in murder cases, police sometimes don’t run a toxicology screen on a defendant if they arrest him more than a day after the crime. The screens are expensive and won’t prove the perpetrator was using drugs at the time of the offense anyway.
The only way to have a complete count of all the serious violence associated with marijuana would be to look at each individual case, a project far beyond my resources. Only a large team of researchers could examine all the 17,000 homicides committed in the United States last year. For serious but nonlethal violent crimes, the task would be even harder. In 2017, the United States recorded 810,000 aggravated assaults.
So, the cases that follow are just a tiny and nonrandom sample of the marijuana-linked violence that occurs every day. Be warned, though: they make for horrifying reading.
Advocates for the mentally ill often say the media stigmatizes people with schizophrenia by highlighting crimes they’ve committed. The truth is the opposite. Reporters and news outlets dislike covering these cases, especially when the victims are family members. The crimes are brutal and ugly but without much mystery. People with severe psychosis rarely make much effort to hide what they’ve done. Even when they do, they are obvious suspects, and police often arrest them quickly. These are the murders the New York Post writes about for a day or two and the elite media ignores as tabloid fodder.
Still, the cases popped up frequently. After a while, I grew to recognize murders that involved psychosis even when it wasn’t explicitly mentioned. They were chilling both in their lack of obvious motive and in the degree of violence. Often, they involved bats or knives rather than firearms. They were the cases where parents suffocated infant children, or children clubbed their adult parents, or men stabbed to death women they’d never met before in libraries.
Of course, I couldn’t always be sure cannabis played a role. Prosecutors don’t usually bother with a marijuana charge when they indict someone for beheading his best friend. But mental illness is no barrier to having a Twitter account or a Facebook page.
Over and over, I found that defendants themselves revealed either their love of marijuana or their psychosis or both.
• • •
Take Domenic Micheli. His case briefly received national attention because it was so brutal and unusual. Micheli, a personal trainer in Tennessee, allegedly murdered Joel Paavola, his former boss, with a hatchet in June 2018—in the gym where they had both worked. Micheli was arrested a few days later in Kentucky. He had filled his Facebook page with long, incoherent posts. A few days before the attack, he called himself “The Sun of God.” Three months earlier, he’d posted a photo of cannabis buds and a rambling discussion of his cannabis use:
the other thing is that, marijuana is something that is fun because it gives you truths
if we adjust things so people didn’t feel like escaping it will definitely lose a certain aspect of its appeal even from a mathematical standpoint . . .
ill tell you this though, its not all fun and games. i have a weed called mystery kush from mendocino county
this is not my idea of a good time. it feels like the hard part of a painful relationship in some ways. and you can tell its going to be that type of trouble just from the smell . . .
Less than a week after Micheli was arrested, police in Hamden, Connecticut, arrested Kyle Tucker for allegedly beating his mother Donna to death and burning her body in a backyard fire pit. Tucker—a 34-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School—told police that he had killed his mother because she had tried to poison him repeatedly. God “got into my body and walked me downstairs with my baseball bat and it was very quick and almost even hard to remember,” he told detectives, according to news articles about his arraignment.
In the months leading up to the murder, Tucker’s tweets were increasingly bizarre and had a strong cannabis tint. He asked the president to appoint him ambassador to Jamaica, so he could help local marijuana farmers. “Jamaica has a climate very well suited for the cost-effective production of high-q weed outdoors,” he wrote, in one tweet that could have come out of a cannabis industry conference.
Tucker was also obsessed with Bob Marley and the singer Lana Del Rey. Three months before allegedly killing his mother, he made the eerie threat that “if Lana keeps disrespecting me, i’m gonna burn that bitch with a slow bonfire on live television as I smoke weed and laugh in her inferior face.”
(Indeed, corpse mutilation happens weirdly frequently in these cases. Dean Lowe, a British man who called himself “the biggest stoner in the world” on his Facebook page, dismembered his girlfriend Kirby Noden after murdering her in January 2017. He then flushed part of Noden’s body down the toilet of their apartment in Cornwall, England, left the rest for trash collectors, and made a necklace from her teeth.
• • •
Blake Leibel, a would-be movie producer whose Ukrainian girlfriend Iana Kasian complained to her mother that he smoked “huge amounts” of marijuana, scalped Kasian in their West Hollywood apartment in May 2016. When she was autopsied, Kasian had only a teaspoon of blood in her body, according to the Hollywood Reporter, which ran a long article about the case. Kasian and Leibel had a 3-week-old baby at the time of the murder.
• • •
Camille Balla, a Florida woman with a history of mental illness, gouged out her mother’s eyes with broken glass after killing her in March 2018, according to prosecutors. Balla told an ambulance crew that she had just smoked marijuana; investigators found notes that included “religious-themed written messages” about cleansing the soul.)
• • •
Sometimes the marijuana connection came not out of social media but from the comments of prosecutors. In May 2018, weeks before Micheli was arrested, a Cleveland judge sentenced William T. Jones Jr. to sixty-three years in prison for the murder of a uniformed Salvation Army volunteer in December 2017. Video shows that Jones walked to up to the man, 21-year-old Jared Plesec, and shot him in the head without warning.
After shooting Plesec, Jones did not immediately try to escape. Instead he went on an incoherent four-minute rant that a passerby captured on video. “Fuck Trump,” he yelled. “They’re going to kill us all.” Then he ran off, tried to carjack two vehicles, and wounded several other people before being arrested. At his sentencing hearing, a prosecutor said that blood samples taken from Jones after his arrest tested positive only for marijuana and no other drugs.
Yet—like most other cases I examined—the Jones verdict ended in a guilty plea and prison. Judicial records would not connect it to either marijuana or mental illness. Toxicology reports are part of police investigative files, and in many states, those effectively remain sealed even after a case is closed. The prisoner and arrestee surveys on drug use are years out of date and don’t directly examine the connection between marijuana and violence anyway. The lack of readily available information is the reason that counting marijuana-linked cases is so difficult, and probably why the trend has not yet become obvious on a national level.
Proof of the link was easier to come by in cases where the killers also died—either by suicide or by being shot by police officers. Autopsies that include toxicology reports are standard in those cases. And in many states, including cannabis-rich ones like California and Colorado, autopsy reports are public records.
• • •
In November 2017, a month before Jones shot Plesec, a man named Kevin Neal went on a rampage in Tehama County, a rural California community 200 miles north of San Francisco. Neal killed five people and wounded nine others before killing himself.
The crime could have been even more devastating. After killing his wife and three neighbors, Neal drove to a local elementary school just as kids were arriving for the day. But a quick-thinking secretary heard shooting as Neal approached. She ordered a lockdown, and the school’s front gate was pulled shut before Neal could drive inside. He fired from outside for several minutes before fleeing. Two students inside were shot and wounded, but none was killed. Neal killed one more person before sheriff’s deputies pinned him down ten minutes later. After a final exchange of gunfire Neal shot himself. He died at 8:23 a.m., November 14, 2017.
Neal’s rampage attracted little attention. In the United States, the murder of five people barely rates as national news. But after seeing that the Tehama County Sheriff had called Neal “deranged [and] paranoid,” I asked the sheriff’s office for his autopsy report.
I also called his sister, Sheridan Orr. Family members of perpetrators often won’t talk, but Orr was a welcome exception. She spent more than an hour walking me through her brother’s history of mental illness and violence, which were intimately connected to marijuana.
Neal, Orr, and their sister grew up in an affluent family in North Carolina. Even as a child, Neal had trouble following rules, but he was smart and funny and “got away with it.”
In about 1987, when Neal was 14, he and a group of friends began smoking marijuana. The effect was immediate. “He started to get into more and more trouble,” Orr said. Within two years, he’d been arrested for the first time. He went to a rehab clinic but continued to smoke. In 1992, he was arrested again, for possession of marijuana with intent to sell.
By then, Neal had become difficult, Orr said. He lived in the basement of their house, but when people walked above him, he became enraged and shot a BB gun at the floorboards. Their parents fought over his behavior. “Honestly, Kevin was the reason they got divorced,” Orr said. (Neal’s mother, Anne, declined to comment on the record.)
Neal was never properly diagnosed as either having a psychotic, mood, or personality disorder, Orr said. But he was clearly mentally ill. For the next fifteen years he continued to act out—and to smoke marijuana. In 2006, he was arrested again, this time for assault with a deadly weapon. Again, though, his mother hired a lawyer for him. He was not convicted.
By then Neal showed clear paranoia and psychosis. He claimed his neighbors were sneaking into a house his mother had bought him and defecating inside it. He built a large fence around the house—“the crazy fence era,” Orr said.
By 2007, he and his girlfriend, Barbara Glisan, had decided to move to California so Neal could become a marijuana farmer. Tehama County is just east of the famous Emerald Triangle, three northern California counties that are famous for high-potency cannabis cultivation.
Orr had little contact with Neal by this point. Both she and her sister were frightened of him. But Neal remained close to their mother, so Orr knew what was happening in his life. In California, Neal began to grow marijuana in bulk. At one point, Orr’s mother told Orr she had paid a $20,000 electric bill for him. (Growing cannabis indoors requires huge amounts of electricity.) Orr said that her mother had told her, “You wouldn’t believe how good Kevin is at growing marijuana.”
Becoming a marijuana farmer did not solve Neal’s problems. He was arrested again in 2013, for a hit-and-run. By 2016, he had moved to a decrepit house in the unincorporated community of Rancho Tehama Reserve. Sheriff’s department records show he and his neighbors feuded constantly. Neal became convinced, without evidence, that the neighbors were cooking methamphetamine. To retaliate, he would shoot at random, according to calls neighbors made to the sheriff’s department.
In January 2017, Neal was arrested again, this time for stabbing a neighbor. He faced felony charges, including assault with a deadly weapon. Neal’s mother pledged her house to bail him out, but he faced the serious risk of jail. As the case moved forward, Neal’s paranoia worsened. He fired Leo Barone, the lawyer representing him. “He was making bizarre statements,” Barone told the Los Angeles Times after the shooting. “I confronted him.”
Orr said Neal had told Barbara Glisan—by then his wife—to leave him before the shooting, probably because he knew he was on the verge of snapping. Glisan refused. The couple had nine dogs, and she didn’t want to leave them. Ultimately, Neal killed Glisan and the dogs the day before he attacked the school.
Given the path Neal’s life took, “this is the logical conclusion,” Orr said. She blamed both methamphetamine and cannabis for her brother’s decline. But Neal’s autopsy report showed only THC and no other drugs or alcohol in his blood.
• • •
While Neal was troubled his entire adult life, Matthew Riehl’s decline was sharper and shorter. Riehl grew up in Colorado, served in the National Guard in the Iraq War, and in 2010 graduated law school from the University of Wyoming. But in the spring of 2014, while practicing law in rural Wyoming, he began sending bizarre texts to his mother, Susan. When she couldn’t reach him, she decided to see firsthand if he was all right.
“He was barricaded in his house,” she said. “He had aluminum foil all over the windows. He had tubs of water all over the place. And in the spare bedroom, he had a bunch of baby chicks hatching. It was pretty crazy, but he was happy to see me. I talked him into going to the hospital.”
Veterans Administration records show Riehl was held in the psychiatric ward of a VA hospital in Wyoming in April 2014. The episode marked the beginning of his unraveling. He fought with family members, made bizarre posts about his former law school, and claimed police officers were harassing him. His brother told University of Wyoming police officers that Riehl had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
In 2016, Riehl gave up his Wyoming law license and moved to Douglas County, Colorado, where he shared an apartment with a roommate and posted odd videos on YouTube. He worked at a Walmart for a while, then quit.
Susan told me that Riehl smoked marijuana frequently in Wyoming. “When we would visit with him, sometimes he would smoke in front of us,” she said. (Susan later emailed me that she did not believe marijuana played a role in the case.) Riehl may also have been using methamphetamine. In a YouTube video he posted on December 19, 2017, he mentions a burn on his lip, then giggles and adds the burn did not result from cooking meth.
But in the early morning of December 31, 2017, Riehl had no methamphetamine in his system, only caffeine, small amounts of alcohol, and THC—including one form of the drug that is a product of eating rather than smoking cannabis and is particularly psychoactive. (The amount of alcohol in his blood was about the amount from one drink.) Around 3:00 a.m., Riehl called 911 to complain he’d been the victim of domestic violence. When Douglas County sheriff’s deputies arrived at his apartment, they found him agitated. But they concluded no crime had occurred and left.
Two hours later, another 911 call brought them back. Riehl was waiting for them. He barricaded himself in his apartment and screamed, “Go away! Go away!” and “Identify! What’s your name!”
Then he started shooting. By the time he had finished, Deputy Zackari Parrish was dead, and six other people, including four law-enforcement officers, were wounded. Deputies fired back, killing Riehl.
Because a law-enforcement officer was killed, the Riehl case attracted attention in Colorado. It was the start of a troubling trend. In the next five weeks, two more Colorado law-enforcement officers were killed in separate incidents and six others wounded. The state had not seen so much violence against police officers in such a short period in at least thirty years.
In each case, marijuana appeared to play a role.
• • •
Of course, in most encounters in which police and civilians clash with lethal consequences, it’s the civilians who wind up dead. Those killings provide another window into the link between THC and violence.
In 2017, police in Colorado killed 35 civilians, accounting for 3.5 percent of all the police-involved killings in the United States that year—though Colorado has only 1.7 percent of the US population. Colorado has a strong open-records law, so I requested autopsy reports on the people who had been killed from several large counties. I received 18 reports back.
Few documents in the world are starker than autopsy findings. They can’t be spun or argued away. They hold the brutal truth of a human being’s body at the moment of his death—his diseases, his hidden vices, the way he perished.
The Colorado reports revealed that in every one of the eighteen deaths, the person who was killed had drugs in his system. In three of the eighteen, THC was the only drug. (THC is fat-soluble, and the body can store it in a form that is not psychoactive. But toxicology screens distinguish between psychoactive and nonactive forms of the drug. I counted only screens that show the active forms of THC as being positive.) In eight more cases, THC was found alongside other drugs or alcohol.
Alcohol and methamphetamine both trailed cannabis. They were each found alone in two cases and in combination in six more. Opiates, cocaine, and benzodiazepines were found in only a handful of reports combined.
Hungry, happy, sleepy—and primed for lethal conflict with the police.