Should we be surprised? A recent study out of Denmark, published in JAMA Psychiatry, links ‘problematic’ use of marijuana with the development of schizophrenia. This link has been found before, and, with the legalization of ‘weed’ across many states, and all of Canada, we can only expect the incidence of mental disorders to rise.

But beyond, or perhaps underlying, the clinical, is the spiritual – Recreational drug use is sinful, and can be gravely so, putting one’s moral life, vocation, and eternal salvation at risk. As one aphorism had it a few decades ago, just say no.

And while on insanity, the House of Lords in Britain is debating a law that ‘prevent animal cruelty’, given them rights similar to humans, including the right to pain relief and anesthesia. More and more, animals are being considered ‘sentient’, a fraught term, which would link such rights to some sort of self-awareness and capacity to ‘feel’. One may have some sympathy for such, at least for the higher animals, but the evil lurks in what is not being debated, namely, any such rights for the unborn. As Lord David Alton, the author of the piece, and who will eventually have to vote on this piece of legislation, sadly declares: If only all humans enjoyed similar defenses in English law. Alas, unborn children in the U.K. are left without such protections. When I inquired whether some of the bill’s safeguards might be extended to unborn homo sapiens, I was told that the bill had been cast in such a way as to prevent this. 

This does not imply insanity, but rather deep moral evil, whatever their level of guilt. To realize that giving ‘humanitarian’ rights to animals, but specifically denying them to pre-born humans, implies of awareness in the legislators’ minds of what they are doing. They must be aware, at some level, of the following:

However, in the U.K., babies undergoing abortion at 20 weeks’ gestation “via surgical dilatation and evacuation”—described by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists as “where the foetus is removed in fragments”—are not provided with pain relief. Neither are babies aborted after 22 weeks through “foeticide, where potassium chloride is injected into the heart to cause immediate cardiac arrest.” Human Rights Watch has highlighted that potassium chloride is “excruciatingly painful if administered […] without proper anaesthesia.”

As bad as things are in our society, I’m surprised they’re not worse, given the ‘insanity’ what we’re doing to God’s littlest ones, and what the rest of us are not doing to protect them, standing up to such murderers, and calling them, and abortion itself, what it really is. And they’re all worked up about sheep and goats. Hmm.

Deus, Salvator noster, miserere nobis!

But on a note of hope, the wheels are turning in America, at least, to overturn the infamous 1973 decision Roe vs. Wade. The moral mettle, such as it is, of the the justices on the Supreme Court will soon be tested.

The post Pot, Schizophrenia and Debating Animal and Human Rights appeared first on Catholic Insight.