In a year that has seen the first major national legalisation of cannabis in Canada, strongholds of legalisation in the States raise billions in tax via dispensaries, the ailing minority Tory government in the UK clings onto whatever it can of the dying model of prohibition. In many ways, the UK government has adopted a worse structure of prohibition by using it to create their own monopoly thanks to their corrupt and hypercritical licensing to their own corporate base via GW pharmaceutical’s 45 acre Skunk farm.

As the Tories own policy board chairmen recently cried in horror “You want to legalize Skunk!” to the UKCSC’s Greg de Hoedt on the Victoria Derbyshire program during weeks of the government playing chicken by denying prescribed cannabis medicine to the parents of children with pharma drug-resistant epilepsy, George Freeman exposed his lack of knowledge on cannabis when Greg was able to truth bomb on TV that his own government is benefitting from Skunk with their monopoly via GW Pharmaceuticals.

One of the key points Greg was able to get across is that all cannabis is medicine, no matter what scary name strains of it are given. Whether May’s ailing government noticed it or not, they had scored a salvo of own goals against the cannabis community during the whole Spring and Summer. This is why it was inevitable that they would be forced to announce that the laws around cannabis, especially the untenable scheduling, would need revision.

So recently Home Secretary “Randian Hero” Sajid Javid has announced that specialist doctors in the UK will be able to legally prescribe cannabis-derived medicinal products. However, it further exposed how this government is trying to govern on a matter to which it has little genuine understanding of.

Just because a doctor can prescribe, doesn’t mean that the pharmacy will have a cannabis-based product for the patient. This means all the government has done is admitted that cannabis has medicinal value but kept the means of safe access illegal and left to the UKCSC and its allies to go on regulating cannabis for patients to keep them safe from the black market which the government has created.

This is a result of their own greed in regards to protecting their monopoly via GW pharmaceuticals who have made the UK the world’s biggest exporter of medical cannabis with the over-priced Sativex drug which NICE has deemed too expensive for the NHS and as I have seen with many other patients on private insurance, denied access for similar reasons.

The facts are, The UK government has allowed 1 private company to grow cannabis (Skunk No.1 is the strain used for Sativex), while their own drug’s ministers have lied to the public that cannabis in its raw form has no medicinal value. This 1 company has been granted a license to grow it via the husband of the drugs minister Victoria Atkins. At the same time, our own prime minister’s husband’s investment firm Capital Group has been found to own around 19% of that stock. Underneath it all, patients up and down the country with inflammatory diseases are being denied safe access to quality cannabis which is their only effective treatment.

Until grow your own is allowed and dispensaries are able to sell highly regulated cannabis, nothing is going to change at the point of use for more of the patients in the UK’s NHS.

Whether the patients are elderly people suffering from plaque induced dementia (Alzheimer’s), arthritis or even children dying from cancer, this government put their monopoly and financial conflicts of interest ahead of them. This should not be a surprise given the near-genocidal death toll from their 8-year program of failed austerity.

They should not be rewarded at the ballot box any longer for these continues crimes and inability to govern in the national interest of those outside of the 1% and ironically as those in the 1% red scare about socialism, they happen to be the only section of society that have benefitted from the largest social program in a generation known as the Bankers Bail-out.

As we in Wrexham Cannabis Club went to attend Green pride this year, we checked in with Greg at the UKCSC tent to thank him for his actions and guidance with setting up our own club in what has been a far too quiet general North Wales movement up until now.

We were able to chat to some of the communities most active online media personalities from Simpa Carter of Durham CCC and Tyler Green of ISMOKE, both of whom I had not seen since February attending patients at parliament. What was brilliant about being in an open venue full of stores and surrounded by the cannabis community is we were able to network with other clubs that were just getting started like us.

For me, it was very reassuring to find that all these other clubs were supporting the same model being encouraged by the UKCSC or regulation and patient safety/education. As I have said in many vlogs/blogs in the past, it’s a community I have love for because I’ve never found such a large community of people that are simply on team humanity rather than the runaway right-wing nationalism and crony capitalism that has been unravelling around the world ever since the 2007 financial crash.

As frustrating it has been for me to get people to become politically active when the current system is working against them, I have found optimism working with Wrexham cannabis social clubs and North Wales East Momentum who have shown support for me organising a campaign to make regulated cannabis availability a policy that all progressive parties need to push for.

Many people complain that the British population has never been more divided, I just look to which side has humanities best interests at heart which is why I believe progressives connecting together to bring about policies that benefit the many, not the few is whats going to save us all. Nationalism, jingoism or snobbery bring nothing to the fight against prohibition, the cannabis community as I saw it in Brighton is the most humanistic movement I have ever known and the reason why we are going to win against prohibition is that science is now firmly on our side.

The people that fear monger about cannabis have run out of credibility, leaving their talking points about cannabis being a danger to society to be baseless and exposed for what they are, lies at the behest of their donors to save their profits or clear examples of tabloid “education”.

I now feel very optimistic about the future and I believe now that it’s inevitable that this government has kicked off its own demise. Even the police at Green pride were agreeing with me that it’s going to be legal soon anyway. For me It was easy to approach them and gauge how low their interests were in busting people for anything cannabis related, especially as I was able to open their minds by telling them it was one of their own that saved my life when he had to leave the force, use cannabis and metabolic therapy to beat brain cancer.

The more I learn about the human brain which I have been obsessed with ever since my diagnosis, the more I can see a future where the source of consciousness in ourselves is treated universally with the value that really has. I could feel it at the Vatican in June standing by the monuments to the pineal gland, I can see it in the faces of the masses of people who are choosing hope over fear with their democracy, and I can hear it in the winds of change as chaotic as they are. Cannabis is coming to all of humanity and it will be here to stay.

Peace and Love to you all,

Phil James
Wrexham Cannabis Club