Photo: One of 3,600 marijuana stores in Canada
Saturday night, weekend past, a sports utility vehicle accelerated into a crowd of happy people in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The people, celebrating the culture of the Philippines, became an instant target, eleven of them killed, scores injured, and Canada in mourning - again.
Kai-Ji Adam Lo, the 30-year-old alleged Vancouver killer’s motives are not yet clear, but the police have ruled out terrorism. They have indicated that the lone killer’s mental health is problematic, and he has had many interactions with police in the past. Whatever his motives, we can rightly say that we live in a very sick world.
Some journalists have erroneously claimed that such mass killings are rare in Canada. They are not. The earliest recorded mass massacre in Canada occurred in 1689 AD. All eleven recorded massacres up to the end of the nineteenth century were not acts of lone operators. They involved multiple attackers as part of wars, rebellions or another inter-group dispute.
However, of the twenty recorded mass massacres since the beginning of the twentieth century, only three have been perpetrated by a group of killers. In the last forty years alone, there have been sixteen separate episodes of mass murder in Canada, five of them in Ontario, four in Quebec, two each in British Columbia and Alberta, and one each in Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and Northwest Territories. We had a similar car attack on people in Toronto in 2018, in which, coincidentally, eleven people died. All but two were committed by a lone killer.
Scientific progress has enabled a single mentally sick or hateful person to kill multiple people at once. A press on a pedal, a pull on a trigger, a push on a switch or a click on a mouse, an individual can achieve what used to take armies of hundreds, even thousands, to accomplish in the preindustrial period. Bullets and bombs, gas and grenades, automobiles and armaments, drones and drinks, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, human progress boasts of them and uses them as a measure of success and superiority.
Today’s victims need not be combatants. They need not be enemies. They need only be living humans in the wrong place at the wrong time. That wrong place is nearly every place that humanity inhabits. The wrong time is normal time for normal activities. The mentally ill and the hateful folks can strike any time. Normal life is transformed into hell.
Access to these destructive weapons is not as difficult as it once was. Uganda of my childhood did not know how to destroy the innocent. It had a very limited supply of weapons, in the hands of the national army and police, jailers and professional robbers, and a tiny number of licensed animal hunters. Uganda was largely free from addictive substances except alcohol and tobacco.
Uganda, the land of my dreams, where I hope to end my days, is now armed to the teeth, with every Tondo, Dibya, and Haabukiriro owning guns, the plural intended. Uganda has become a land with more guns than grain harvesters, more bullets than Bibles. It is a land where death by the gun hardly shocks citizens anymore, except when the victim is of a high profile. The guns are celebrated, even worshipped, by people to whom killing others for power or trinkets is easier than catching November grasshoppers.
The killer in Vancouver may well have amplified his mental illness with enjaga- cannabis, marijuana- or some other mind-altering substance. What they call recreational drugs are often destructive poisons. Growing up in Uganda, such substances were strictly academic curiosities that we read about to broaden our knowledge, certain that we would not encounter their consequences in our professional and personal lives.
Yes, I heard rumours of indulgence by some of my Makerere University contemporaries. However, I neither saw a user nor cared to read much about addictive substances besides alcohol and tobacco. It was when I came to Canada that I was confronted with young people in the throes of addiction to “recreational” substances. I foolishly reported to my Canadian colleagues that drug use was a foreign phenomenon that was taboo in my homeland. I was very critical of the madness that led Canada’s parliament to legalise the sale of cannabis (marijuana) in retail stores. As of January 2025, there were 3,600 marijuana stores in this beautiful country. Truth be told, I said my piece with a “we-are-better-than-thou” moral pridefulness at which I now cringe with shame.
Imagine my scandalous reaction to the discovery that marijuana, khat, cocaine, heroin and other poisons were now part of many Ugandans’ daily diet. The illegal legalization of marijuana growth and “use for medicinal purposes” in 2015 disabused me of my innocence. It was illegal because the Act was passed without quorum in Parliament. Nevertheless, it confirmed how far Uganda had gone on the dark path already travelled by countries like Canada and the United States. The 2019 report that 2.6 million Ugandans were marijuana users was probably an underestimate. Whatever the current figure is, Uganda has formally embraced the marijuana culture for economic exploitation. But is the country ready to deal with the mental, social, physical, and security consequences of substance use disorders?
The good news is that it is not too late to reverse the mess of guns and drugs. Concerted efforts to remove guns from private hands, along with genuinely professionalizing the security organizations would be a good start. Mass education about drugs and other harmful substances, along with investment in treatment and rehabilitation programs, would yield good dividends. Young people need to be educated about the potential disruptive effects of drugs on brain function in areas that regulate behaviour, judgement, learning, memory and motivation.
Recognition of comprehensive nationwide mental health care as an urgent priority for Uganda is one of the most important measures that may save our country from the ticking bomb of the rapidly growing population and increasing addictive substance use.
Hatred and violence towards others seem to be part of humanity’s collective DNA. Canada and Uganda, my two most favourite countries, are now places where one’s life can be snuffed out on the streets by complete strangers. Guns and drug use in the two countries are nothing compared to the problem in the United States. But our moral high is long gone.
As we await the secular rulers to do the needful, we should remember that He whose death and resurrection we celebrated a few days ago, is able to change our individual lives. The power of hate or addiction is neutralized by the Lord’s grace and mercy for those who seek Jesus Christ and surrender their lives to Him.
© Muniini K. Mulera