Loughner's descent into a world of fantasy

He played late-night marathon games of Monopoly with his buddies. He went with friends on family vacations. He would hang with pals at IHOP on Fridays. He had a girlfriend. He laughed and he loved and he knew things - about jazz, cars, fantasy games.

And then Jared Loughner slipped into a world of fantasy that was no online game. Slowly but steadily, his intelligence warped into a distorted, disconnected series of obsessions. He developed an illogical fascination with logic. Math, grammar, logic - the systems civilization has developed to make sense of the world became the means through which he expressed the confusion and pain in his increasingly lost mind.

The first sketches of suspects in horrific killings are usually scattered images of hate - an almost superhuman anger trained at others. But as the portraits gain detail, they generally reveal some toxic combination of frustration, abuse, illness and loss. Loughner, those around him say, had the whole package.

A picture of Loughner gleaned from interviews with more than two dozen friends, classmates, teachers and neighbors, as well as from his own writing in online forums, shows no evidence that politics or government were among his defining or enduring obsessions. Rather, his deepest, most disturbing questions were about the very nature of reality: He appeared to have lost any clear sense of the line between real life and dreams or fantasy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/12/AR2011011206637.html

I recall one of the early interviews with 'former friends' mentioned that at one point he stopped the ganja and said he was going to 'stop drinking and start eating right and taking care of himself' and that's about the time when he started to warp mentally.

I dated a guy not too long ago who has smoked almost daily for about 30 years and claims that the times he's tried to quit and detox, he can't stop the 'noise' in his head and he's always confused and almost in a panic. I figured that was just stoner talk so didn't give it any credence. Now, I wonder ...

Maybe another argument for legalization, in addition to revamping mental health care provisions available to the general public ...


:shrug:

But that's just me. I smoke it sometimes to relieve average stresses in life.

This is precisely why Cannabis needs to be removed from Schedule I immediately and seriously studied, it may be beneficial for people with serious mental illnesses. If it is, it's criminal that is remains illegal in most states.