Memorandum: 24th September 2001
by Caroline Coon

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2. The biggest problem for us cannabis users is how we buy our drugs and who we buy our drugs from, our DRUG DEALERS.

3. Home Secretary David Blunkett, in line with the incoherent Police Foundation's Report Drugs and the Law, is proposing even longer prison sentences for drug dealers. Blunkett is proposing that drug dealers should be sent to prison for longer even than murderers, or people in possession of guns or people who sexually abuse children. This is an expensive mistake. Prison doesn't work for drug dealers.

4. We should care what the law does to drug dealers not only in an abstract way for the sake of ethics or morality, but PRACTICALLY for our own safety's sakes. Demonizing drug dealers puts us all in danger. Putting drug dealers outside the law means that every time we buy our drugs we risk getting poisoned, ripped off, mugged or worse.

5. I trust my own dealer. She tries to supply organic weed, and she gives me a fair deal. But 1 am always concerned at the risk she has to take - in effect for my sake. If she gets busted she will be sent to prison for years. If I get busted... well, not much will happen.

6. Should I be busted, like many of us here to-day, I will ensure it costs Government a great deal of time and money. I will refuse to be cautioned, I will plead not guilty, and cite the Human Rights Act.

7. Since it is not against the law for us to kill ourselves, since we are free legally to commit suicide, then Tony Blair and George W Bush have no right to tell us what recreational drugs we take however bad they think they are for our health - because, as we all know, with educated care, all drugs can be taken safely.

8. What we must do from now on. is insist that the way we buy are drugs is safe. This means that we must, stop demonizing growers and dealers. We must licence growers and dealers to supply us with drugs of our choice.

9. Licensing the cannabis trade, from prime producers to user, is not a complicated matter. We do not need to re-invent the wheel in the matter of manufacturing, licensing and controlling the sale of drugs whether cannabis or anything else. We already have well tested laws for manufacturing and selling drugs like alcohol, tobacco, aspirin and Viagra.

10. For example, for our own use we are free to brew alcohol. For our own use we must be free to grow cannabis.

11. For example, we can buy alcohol on licensed and off licensed primacies. Likewise we must be free to buy cannabis from off licences or supermarkets, or from our local grocery store or our local cannabis cafe. We must be free to buy our cannabis from specialist shops like Tony's Hemp Corner, and Lees Alchemy, from Colin's Dutch Experience in Stockport or Cafe Cairo in Clapham, or from Tesco's or Harrods.

12. Like we have a variety of ways of buying tobacco from cigarettes to cigars and alcohol from beer, wine, spirits or champagne there be will be that many varieties and ways of packaging cannabis, from cheap everyday pot-ordinary to expensive special-occasion pot-vintage. We must be free to smoke cannabis not only in private, but in public, in cafes and pubs or where ever it is possible to smoke tobacco.

14. OTHER DRUGS? Yes, the same applies for all other recreation drugs from Ecstasy, speed and LSD.

15. Because HEROIN can be an unpleasant, highly addictive drug sometimes involving blood and needles, heroin must be available on prescription from a G.P.

16. COCAINE can be just as dangerous as whisky or vodka. Cocaine could be available in the same way and in the same places as whisky and vodka

17. Legal manufactures of cannabis and other drugs, will be subject to health and safety regulations.

18. If we are producing and buying drugs and not producing and making our own, we will be have to pay tax. Instead of threatening to confiscate the assets of drug dealers, David Blunkett should instruct his civil servants in the Home Office to tax the earnings of the cannabis trade. And yes, as with alcohol and tobacco, when Gordon Brown excessively taxes cannabis, the police will have their time cut out trying to catch tax-avoiding smugglers.

19. This is the shape of the drug scene to come:
Prohibition will end bringing drugs, drug takers, drug producers, manufactures and sellers, dealers and traders with in the law. This will make society safer whether you take drugs or not.

20. Ending the futile demonization of drug growers, manufacturers, suppliers, traders and dealers will end a massive amount of violent crime. To legalise the growing and supplying of cannabis will take this popular drug out of the hands of the Mafia and terrorists like the IRA and Osama Bin Laden.

21. Legalising the growing and marketing of cannabis whether in cooperatives, fair trader associations or in big business will give a decent living to cannabis growers, especially farmers in countries where cannabis is a traditional crop e.g. Afghanistan, Morocco, Egypt, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Jamaica...

22. The money saved in ending this war on the prime producers of cannabis - our drug dealers - will be especially useful in this respect: we w i 11 be able to spend money on educating people about the dangers of drug use. We will have enough money to spend on the care and treatment of those who become dependent on drugs.
We must remember that at least 5% of any population is vulnerable to drug dependency. And you never know who that vulnerable person is. It could be me, it could be you. All of us must be careful.
The scandal is that apparently politicians don't care.

The effect of decriminalisation would
a) not lead to any significant increase the availability and demand for drugs
b) increase the money spent on education so that, as with alcohol and tobacco, there could be a reduction in drug-related deaths and an increase in social control to encourage responsible use of recreational drugs e.g. campaigns against drink/drug taking and driving.
c) not effect the aeneral level of crime. Although violent crime will be reduced in the drug trade, the legal drug trade and legal drug use will still have to be policed.

Decriminalisation is desirable because

23. thousands of drug users will be taken out of the criminal system with commensurate saving in police and court costs and time.

24. The War on Drugs brings politics and democracy into disrepute. The phoney War on,.,Prugs is a prime reason why there is an increasing detrimental gulf between Government and the street. To many people it appears that George Bush 2 and Tony Blair's War on Drugs has nothing to do with taking care of sick and vulnerable people in society. Bush and Blair have taken recreation drugs themselves. And survived. Why should people vote for such palpable hypocrites?

George Bush 2 and Tony Blair's rich and famous financial supporters, advisers and friends have taken recreation drugs. Do they think we don't know? jbgy don't go to prison, and neither do their drug dealers.

The truth is that it is obvious to many people that the rich and privileged don't care about the rest of us. All these "great and good" "respectable" people, including Sun newspaper editors and BBC TV executives, they shut up in public about the need to end the phoney War on Drugs for the sake of huge salaries, quango jobs and promotion to the House of Lords.

While many people, especially the poor and the young, die for want of education and care in this phoney War on Drugs, in private the cowardly "great and good" nod and wink. Behind closed doors the great and the good express anxious doubts about prohibition.

While we cannot heap enough praise on brave backbenchers like Paul Flynn, Jon Owen Jones and Anne Cryer, there is nothing cuddly or cute about duplicitous politicians like Mo Molem. She enjoyed the odd puff of cannabis. Yet, until she was about to retire she preached Government's unjust War On Drugs. Her kind of political hypocrisy has nothing to do with principal or fact or a safer society and everything to do with cowardly selfinterest and venal ambition.

24. Can we do more about all this than we are already?

Yes, we can keep up the pressure.. Until politicians and "the great and the good" come out and demand that the rest of us, like them, should be free to buy our druas from safe licensed growers and safe licensed dealers then WE WILL JUST HAVE TO CALL THEM HYPOCRITES, RIDICULE THEM AND DEMONSTRATE. TAKE TO THE STREETS. KEEP UP THE PRESSURE. Demand International Justice. Demand the total end to prohibition!

To: The Second Clerk of the Committee at the House of Commons, 7 Millbank, London, SW1 P 3JA
From: Caroline Coon, artist, co-founder of Release and an activist for the end of Prohibition.

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