You are in Activism / Coffeeshops / Dutch Experience

Open Letter to the Manchester Evening News
February 2002

Colin Davies, HMP Manchester.

The keys made their now familiar sound as they were put into the oversized lock that adorned my cell door as was the creak of the hinge as the warder pushed it open. I was awake but did not want to open my eyes, I had been dreaming about a patient & now friend that I always to looked forward to visiting when time and health allowed, his name is Lawrence Briely who suffers from severe MS which has cost him both his legs, and left him requiring 24 hour attention from the carers at his nursing home in Stockport. I miss the visits to his care home and his tales of better times when he was a long distance HGV driver which managed to take him all over Europe, with him all the while inhaling deeply on the Marijuana joint I would always roll for him on my visit.

Lawrence’s room isn’t much bigger than my cell here at Strangeways which I share with a fellow inmate Bob, he’s the fourth cell mate who’s taken up residence with me on the Notorious K wing, Strangeways, Manchester. I feel this is a strange way to treat a person who’s only aim was to help sick and dying people from all walks of life, people like Lawrence trapped in a care home unable to obtain quality cannabis. From a Baroness in London, to a Reverend in Durham and as far away as lady in Orkney, I supply small quantities of cannabis to people who require symptom relief from debilitating illnesses. No longer can I help these people, of whom the majority will now be suffering due to lack their of medicine. People know and accept that taking cannabis will not cure them, but it can and does vastly improve peoples quality of life by removing some or all of their symptoms, in cake, butter, chocolate & smoked medical users take cannabis not to get high, they take it because it’s the only substance that helps them deal with their symptoms. It is truly immoral to withhold this ancient herb from being used in its many forms.

I must thank many of my fellow inmates for the helping me through my incarceration, prison is a different world to the outside until you learn the rules you are totally lost! I would also like to thank the warders & medical staff here who have had the patience to allow for my own illness the best that they can do under these circumstances. You hear in the news about the bad state of the railways, roads, education, hospitals, well the prison service is the Cinderella of the public services with spending way down on the Chancellors list of priorities. This could be the reason that the prison population is already 6,000 inmates over capacity with figure expected to rise to 13,000 by summer of this year. The lack of resources available to the prison puts pressure on both prison officers & prisoners alike, as the government attempts to pile more and more prisoners into an already bursting at the seams prison system. The recent announcement by David Blunkett on the weekend & evening prisons will take years to implement, the problems are here and now yet there seems to be no plan to deal with this ever increasing problem.

The current living situation for me is a 7ft X 14ft cell shared with my cellmate, the cell is our dining room for all meals, it also our bathroom and bedroom, eating a meal 3ft away from a toilet cannot be hygienic, in here it is just part of daily life.

So many prisoners in here are in for drug related offences and their number just keeps growing as the government continues to lock away drug users at an unprecedented rate. The issue of hard drug abuse is a medical problem and not a criminal one, users who are addicted should be offered the appropriate treatment to stabilse their addiction and also regain their life’s back and also the possibility of some kind of future. The present system of criminalizing drug users is the root cause of our current drugs problem, as long as the illegal market controls drugs supply then the ‘War on Drugs’ was lost even before it began. The way forward can only be through health and education, not criminality and court rooms.

This is where the Coffee Shop system comes in by having somewhere to buy cannabis from legally you are able to not only separate cannabis from hard drugs straight away thus breaking the so called ‘Gateway Theory’, you are also able to educate people to issues of hard drugs and why they should be avoided. Ask anybody in the Dutch Experience they will confirm hard drugs and cannabis are not connected other than by their position of being criminalized , meaning that your hash supplier could quite likely be a smack or crack dealer and the potential from that is what needs to be removed. We sell lighters in the coffee shop on which is written “Just Say No To Hard Drugs”, people buy these lighters and are proud to pass on the message. Everybody now knows that the main problem is with hard drugs being the killers, which again is mainly due to the fact of being illegal and contaminated with all kinds of toxic substances by unscrupulous dealers, but cannabis has killed no one and yet I sit in jail.

The Dutch Experience has now been open five months and there has been no violence to report of, if this were a Public House in the centre of Stockport to go five months without a pub fight would just not happen. If cannabis were available as an alternative to alcohol it would I feel lead to a major reduction in alcohol related offences. Over the past few years I have met numerous alcoholics who have successfully managed to give up their addiction to alcohol by using cannabis. 5000 people die each year from alcohol, a further 12,000 people die from mis-prescribed or incorrectly taken medications. How can cannabis considered a dangerous drug? When tobacco sold in every corner shop kills 120,000 people each year in the UK, and countless millions world wide, these present policies of hypocrisy must be changed and those who defend them shown for the hypocrites they are.

We are seeing now that the movement towards a change is inevitable, the actions witnessed on the 29th January, C-day show that the people want a change in the law on cannabis. MEP’s and people from all over the UK and the world came to support the Dutch Experience Coffee Shop and the world’s media looked on while Stockport Police made up their own interpretation of the cannabis law as they went along.

We have been asking successive governments over many years to reclassify cannabis but for years these calls have fallen on deaf ears, the voices of medicinal & social users alike have been ignored out of hand. The current groundswell of the cannabis campaign is the result of the failure of past & present governments to treat cannabis users not as criminals for most of them aren’t, but as taxpaying and voting citizens of the UK.

My next court appearance is set for Feb15th at Manchester Crown Court, I invite anybody who cares about their rights and cannabis to join the already growing campaign to put an end to the madness of cannabis prohibition. By the time my case comes to full trial in June / July there will be few people in the UK who do not know about the current situation, the pressure must be maintained so those in power cannot continue to shirk their responsibilities to us the cannabis smoking population.

Many Thanks

Colin Davies