The ‘Arthur Scargill’ Approach To Cannabis Law Reform Doesn’t Work.
“Anything less than 100% capitulation on the part of the authorities is unacceptable!
Stand together in solidarity brothers. We’ll fight them in the parks, in the streets, we will never surrender!
We’ll smoke cannabis where we want, when we want and we don’t give a damn who it upsets – ‘cos it’s our rights brothers, it’s our rights!
We’ll show ’em, If we keep defying them, keep showing we don’t care what they think, keep on smoking – WE WILL PREVAIL!”
It’s the hopeless, hapless politics of the school playground. It doesn’t work. It’s about defiance, civil disobedience, selfishness and bull-headed obstinacy, always with a simmering undercurrent of aggression and violence. The ‘angry stoner’ is becoming a cliche that is causing immense damage to our campaign.
Progress will be made and is actually being made in small steps by patient negotiation, compromise and hard work. That’s real work that’s often boring, tedious and has none of the appeal of marching in the streets or sitting round in the park with your mates getting stoned. This is what has created reform, firstly for medical marijuana in California, now 19 other US states and most recently a genuine revolution in in Colorado, Washington and Uruguay. These developments have been achieved despite the demos, not because of them. Exactly the same is happening in Britain.
Legally prescribed, legally dispensed, legally imported medicinal cannabis is now in Britain. The greatest progress in the cannabis campaign since the Dangerous Drugs Act 1925 was enacted.
Cut Off His Head.
I am relieved that Britain pulled back from the brink yesterday and Cameron was curbed in his self-serving, warmongering ambition.
Assad is a monster but he’s also a puppet. He is simply a figurehead in a Saville Row suit. The Syrian regime is a paranoid, myopic, self-serving bunch of gangsters, nothing more. It doesn’t have anything to do with Islam, it’s about tribalism and grudges and greed.
Assad is not that different from Cameron. The oligarchy that runs Britain is also composed of gangsters. They oppress but in more subtle ways. They cause huge harm and exploit individuals for their own ends. They do it with the deception that we live in a fair and just democracy. There is death and deprivation and injustice in Britain as well. It is the scale that is different.
I can see no benefit to anyone in the sort of limited military intervention that is proposed. The Syrian army is hugely powerful and well equipped. Russia has a financial interest in continuing to supply it with weapons just as America has with Israel. The US momentum for action is insincere and driven by the arms industry and its massive financial and employment interests
There is a better argument for outright invasion and regime change but that is a huge step which I don’t believe we should take – yet.
A better solution would be special forces-led assassination squads targeting the ruling elite. It may be costly in casualties but better a few dozen volunteer soldiers should die doing their job than the collateral damage inevitable in air and missile strikes. I don’t want our soldiers to die for politicians’ weakness. Let them be given a clear objective for death or glory, not sent to the modern version of the trenches as in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The moral question is easy in my view. Any justification for launching a cruise missile is better justification for targeted assassination. Use drones, even use cruise missiles as assassination weapons but we have to be much, much smarter than the dumb George Bush ‘shock and awe’ tactic that is as much about grandstanding as doing anything effective.
Take out the leadership, one by one. Decapitate the beast.
Yet More Madness In UK Drugs Policy
The Right Dishonourable Theresa May MP
Theresa May really does take the biscuit for ignoring evidence and basing her policies on prejudice and vested interests. She defines its arrogance and exemplifies how out of touch our government is, particularly on drugs policy.
Khat, according to the experts, the ACMD, a pretty harmless, gentle stimulant, is to be banned. See the BBC report here.
The ACMD recommended exactly the opposite so it really should have expected Ms May to be contrary. That’s what home secretaries do when they receive expert advice – they don’t just ignore it, they head in exactly the opposite direction.
Presently, 90,000 people in the UK are said to use khat, so Ms May has decided to turn them all into criminals overnight. Does she expect they will all stop using it? Don’t be ridiculous. All she has done is created a new criminal market. Now we can expect violence, human trafficking and organised crime to get involved. As if our police and the Border Agency don’t have enough on their hands.
Her pretext is terrorism. That’s the same excuse she offers for wanting to snoop on all our emails and internet activity. It’s the same excuse this tawdry gang of thieves in Westminster offers us for anything they don’t want to explain.
Every day that passes our government proves itself to be more corrupt and more unfit for purpose. This stupid, stupid woman is a terrible liability to our country. Build more prisons, I say. Let’s install a special wing of padded cells and move the whole cabinet in.
I will not be ruled by these fools anymore.
I Gladly Accept The Title Of Cannabis Zealot
Last August, I complained about the conduct of Yvonne Davies, a Manchester magistrate. This week, remarkably, the regulatory process worked. She was reprimanded and, as a result, chose to resign. This was the correct decision. It is impossible for someone with such an extremist opinion to judge anyone else. She is an anti-cannabis crusader and no magistrate can properly take that position.
The Manchester Evening News led the reporting which was quickly picked up by the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. I telephoned the Manchester newspaper to protest that they had merely used the opportunity to re-publish all Ms Davies’ hysterical scaremongering. I’ll be honest. I was concerned the whole thing was starting to backfire, just giving more publicity to Ms Davies’ false and misleading claims.
Some cocky junior Mancunian journalist sneered so hard down the phone at me that I could feel it. When I explained about the endocannabinoid system and the neuroprotective qualities of cannabis he turned into a particularly ignorant and stroppy Gallagher brother and I realised there was no point. I wrote a letter to the editor for publication instead.
I also wrote a letter for publication to the Daily Telegraph.
Then, Tuesday afternoon, I was enjoying a brief glimpse of sunshine outside my friends pub, The Falcon, in Queen’s Park, west London. My phone rang. It was the Daily Mail and I chatted away with Nazia Parveen, the journalist, for a good fifteen minutes. The result you see below in print and the online version is here.
The Daily Mail 26th June 2013. CLICK TO ENLARGE.
Trust the Mail to try and twist the story into something it isn’t. I wish I had the power to force a few people to quit. I’d start with Theresa May, move on to Jeremy Browne and rattle through Cameron, Osborne, Paul Dacre, Kathy Gyngell, Melanie Philips and by the time I got to the judiciary there’d be plenty more senior than Ms Davies with much greater reason to go (see here for a few examples).
A ‘cannabis zealot’ I am. Just as the 1st century Jewish sect who fought against the Romans, I will stand every time, in the face of whatever odds, use whatever means, to tell the truth about cannabis. It is an immense gift on our planet in so very many ways – which is exactly why it is demonised, why it is only its harms that are discussed and never its benefits.
Yes. I gladly accept the title. A ‘Cannabis Zealot’ am I.
Next Time A Young Person Dies From Legal Highs, Blame David Cameron, Theresa May And Jeremy Browne.
See the excellent article in today’s Observer
Legal highs are the product of prohibition. If we made cannabis and MDMA legally available to adults under responsible regulation the market for these new, untested substances would virtually dry up.
We have at least 5,000 years experience with cannabis and for most adults, used in moderation, it is actually beneficial as a supplement to the endocannabinoid system and it helps protect against cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative and auto immune conditions. Each year in Britain we hospitalise three times as many people for peanuts as we do for cannabis and that puts the health risks into proper perspective.
Similarly, MDMA is far less dangerous than aspirin or alcohol and if, as in Holland, we tested and certified the contents of a tablet we would protect people far better than the present inane and self-defeating policy.
The people who are directly to blame for the fact that our children are taking these dangerous, untested new substances are the idiots who run our drugs policy: David Cameron, Theresa May and, shamefully, against his own party’s policy, Jeremy Browne.
These weak, hypocritical, self-serving and cowardly politicians have allowed themselves to be bullied by the alcohol industry and a malevolent, sensation-seeking tabloid press into maintaining a policy that is simply absurd.
BBC Staff Display Rudeness And Ignorance Towards HM The Queen
I have seen nothing so shameful, crass and ignorant as the behaviour of staff in the BBC newsroom during the Queen’s visit today.
I saw not one bow, curtsey, nor even a bow of the head as Her Majesty passed by. Instead, in vulgar and embarrassing fashion virtually everyone was pointing their mobile phone, gawping, intruding, forgetting themselves. ‘Chav’ seems the perfect moniker for such individuals.
If this is the behaviour of well educated people at the world’s leading news organisation at the pinnacle of British cultural life then we are sadly diminished.
Masterchef. It’s My Secret Pleasure.
I love Masterchef. Every year, in every version: the original, professional, junior, celebrity – I’m sure they’ll come up with another one soon.
This is finals week and I never knew you could get teared up about cooking!
My hot tip is Natalie, the ‘common as muck’ but charming ingenue. Personality plays a big part.
It’s worth watching. The music, which reveals the rhythm of cooking, is a vital ingredient.
I’m Not A Conspiracy Theorist But…
If I had just executed a dramatic terrorist attack for maximum media impact I would not go out holding up 7-11 stores.
If I was photographed exiting the boat I was hiding in, apparently unarmed, why am I now in critical condition in hospital.
Why has it taken an operation on such an outlandish scale to deal with two pretty dumb teenagers?
Something isn’t right.
Medicinal Cannabis Users – Parliamentary Delegation
CLEAR has arranged for a delegation of 12 medicinal cannabis users to visit parliament to meet with senior figures in the field of health and home affairs.
In order to protect patient confidentiality and against the sort of sabotage which is so often seen in the cannabis campaign, we are not releasing details of who we are meeting or when. Suffice to say that this breakthrough has been achieved by many months of behind the scenes work, meetings with MPs, doctors and the courageous efforts of several CLEAR members.
The focus is to permit medicinal users access to the products of Bedrocan, the Dutch government’s official producer of medicinal cannabis. We now have written confirmation from both the Department of Health and the Home Office that doctors are fully entitled to write prescriptions for Bedrocan products, just as they are for any other unlicensed medicine.
The next stage is to obtain an import licence from the Home Office, either a personal import licence for each individual or a licence for a pharmacist to import and dispense. The recent re-scheduling of Sativex makes our case for obtaining these licences much stronger.
We are not there yet but we are now closer than we have ever been to enabling legal access to medicinal cannabis. The delegation will be meeting face to face with people who can make this happen.
We also have a BBC documentary producer with whom we have been working for a few months concerning a programme to be broadcast in the autumn. This visit to parliament could form an important part of the programme.
If you are interested in being considered as a member of the delegation, please email me with a concise description of yourself, your condition and your history of medicinal cannabis use: peterreynolds@clear-uk.org
Peter Reynolds 