Different people react differently to drugs. Weed edibles are fine for most people but sometimes if they’re extra strong, or contain something else in them, or the person taking it already has a mental illness — it’s like psychedelics.

I’m actually inclined to believe this man’s explanation. Not that it excuses the act. My own fiance had a similar psychotic break while on magic mushrooms and killed a very dear friend. I was a witness and so I saw what his mental state was like. It’s terribly sad. The innocent victim, but also the perpetrator who has to live with the guilt forever. Because in my fiance’s case, he didn’t see the victim as who she really was — he saw her as a “murderer, a terrorist, a monster” — essentially someone else. And yeah, he had a history of mental illness, so almost certainly should never have taken psychedelics at all.

When these kind of drugs are decriminalised, we need to be aware of the potential dangers they have for a minority of the population. And no one should consume either weed edibles, or psychedelics (two types of drug I’ve taken in the past with no ill effects) where there are weapons, or for that matter, around children.

Decriminalisation may help though because one reason we didn’t call an ambulance for my fiance when he started hallucinating was that we were worried that he would be arrested and lose his job for drug use. But we really should have, and it probably would have prevented the awful tragedy.