News / Drug made drunk student attack himself
A COLLEGE student from Shetland who took LSD at a party after a drinking binge and started to attack himself with a knife and a pencil told Lerwick Sheriff Court he had no recollection of the incident.
On Thursday 21 year old Alexander Wishart, of 121 St Olaf Street, Lerwick, admitted repeatedly cutting his neck with a knife, stabbing his neck with a pencil, attempting to assault a policeman with the pencil and kicking out at and struggling with ambulance staff.
The court heard that he had been drinking for two days when on 15 May he attended a house in Lerwick’s Grodians full of people, who procurator fiscal Duncan Mackenzie said were “well known to this court”.
The fiscal said Wishart then took “a controlled drug” and reacting badly to it, he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and started cutting himself in the neck.
Everyone else in the house fled in fear and when an ambulance crew turned up to reason with Wishart they had to call the police before they could approach him.
“When the police arrived they could see him behaving very erratically indeed and when they looked through the window he seemed to be stabbing himself in the neck with a pencil,” Mackenzie said.
The police went in and Wishart lunged for one officer with his pencil before he was brought under control.
However he was still lashing out when the ambulance staff tried to give him medical attention.
Defence agent Tommy Allan said this had been just as distressing for his client as it had been for everyone else involved.
“What he tells me is that he had had a lot of drink, not just that day but the day previously, and then taken what he had been told was a legal high,” Allan said.
“Thereafter he has no recollection of this at all until he woke up in hospital.
“Clearly it’s very disturbing to him to find out what he had done and he is still scarred by it, physically as well as mentally.”
However the procurator fiscal took exception to the suggestion Wishart did not know he was taking “acid”, the colloquial term for the hallucinogenic drug LSD.
Allan accepted that he had taken a drug “knowingly”, adding: “He bought the ticket so he has to go where the train is going.”
Sheriff Philip Mann adjourned the case for background reports until 17 October.
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