More Misleading Headlines from The Daily Mail

Here we go again:

Teenager high on cannabis stabs girlfriend 32 times during bondage game after being wrongly told she had Aids

This is the British 'Daily Mail' latest scaremongering headline.

I'm not making light of the crime. It's a horrendous thing that this girl went through. In late 1996, she was taken to a quiet area and convinced to be blindfolded and whipped with a stick as a mobile phone prank. Bondage or somesuch. Then, while his friend held a mobile phone up to provide some light, Edward Bell, then 17, proceeded to stab her. He had been told by friends that she had HIV, a lie.

What irks me is that The Daily Mail had to use cannabis as a scapegoat. Further reading of the article shows that yes, Bell had smoked pot on the night of the stabbing. However, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with a long history of 'substance' abuse. What the substances were weren't mentioned by the Mail. Further, in a Police interview, Bell claimed that voices told him to stab her.

The BBC reported on the case and didn't see the need to mention the cannabis use, but did note that he was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic.

Herts 24 carried the story and didn't mention anything about cannabis, drug abuse or schizophrenia.

It was Bell himself who presented to Police on the night of the attack, confessing to the attempted murder. He has been locked away indefinitely in a psychiatric hospital.