| You
are in Library / What you did Smokey
Bears picnic - Hyde Park London September 1998
This
turned out to be a very significant day for UKCIA, and, for totally unrelated
reasons, for me personally. We'd
heard about the plans for a "Turn yourself in" day organised by Mr Free
Rob Cannabis from Glastonbury. The idea was to openly use cannabis and then go
along to the local police station and, well, turn yourself in - "Please arrest
me, I'm a cannabis user". Well, there seemed no better place to do this than
in central London, speakers corner in Hyde Park. Rob
had actually done this the year before with a spectacular lack of response from
the police, so he decided to organise another one. As a gesture of support, the
Smokey Bears decided to have another picnic in the same place at the same time. UKCIA,
of course, put the word around and the event turned out to be the first ever meet
up for a lot of people who had only known each other on e-mail up to that point. The
CLCIA, also of course based in Norwich, organised a coach to take us all down
to London and we piled on in a rather damp Norfolk morning outside the Theatre
Royal, getting to London just in time for the advertised start. The
picnic started with speeches at Speakers Corner where a small crowd had gathered.
A few uninterested police looked on as people started rolling suspicious looking
cigarettes, but after a while the hard tarmac got too much, so we sauntered onto
the grass of Hyde Park and began the picnic. It
must have been pretty obvious what was going on, we had Legalise cannabis flags,
people toked on huge bongs and the police did nothing, somehow not noticing anything
out of the ordinary. We
left around 5.00pm for the coach ride back to Norwich. It was on this journey
home that the idea of ukcia.org was born, up to that time the site had existed
as just a "user" site on the Foobar server with the sort of URL you'd
instantly forget. Derek
UKCIA  | Free
Rob Cannabis
(His real name) at Speakers Corner |  | |
 | It
was a real picnic! |  | TV
news took an interest |  | |
 | |
| 
