Having been on the front line of a cancer battle for the past 2 and a half years, I have been on a constant quest to keep myself learning so that I can outsmart the disease that turned my life upside down at the end of 2015.

Outsmarting the disease has felt like being on the run from a psychopathic killer that will take a mile if you give it an inch. So far I have been very successful going into remission early and staying there for longer than my prognosis.

Unfortunately, luck played a big part too and I say unfortunately because as a humanist, it’s frustrating that I cannot replicate my luck in others in this regard. I was lucky in two major ways. The first was that my cancer happened to have the right mutations to over-express CB1 receptors making it highly responsive to the entourage effect of simply vaping “Cheese” in a herbal vaporizer every night, crucially while I was halfway through a course of brain radiotherapy.

The second was meeting a survivor who was further along than me who told me about the trial he was on to find how successful the ketogenic diet is against brain cancer. Not only did he give me some crucial lifesaving advice on starving cancer cells of the glucose it prefers to gain fuel on but he told me he started cannabis as soon as he was diagnosed. He happened to be a former police Sergeant so he stood as the first example to me of how indiscriminate serious chronic or “terminal” diseases can be.

Back then you could still buy CBD oil fairly cheaply on Amazon so I made sure that at the start of radiotherapy that I took some every time before I went for treatment until I could access the whole plant around week 3 which is generally the week hair falls out and to be forever thinned in that treatment area.

My new former police friend then bumped into me as I was on my way for another zapping after he had gone for an emergency MRI due to seizures that had been triggered by him enjoying alcohol a little too early after his treatment had finished. Of course, he was more nervous than ever about his results which came in my final week of treatment. I remember feeling sick on the treatment table that day because I was worried for him and when you are affected by this, everyone’s results become like your own, especially if they are a friend of yours.

His results were spotless which is exactly how my first results were after treatment ended. Not only were we benefitting from some lucky mutations that made our cancers respond to cannabinoids but we believe we also had the advantage of lower cortisol levels, purely from being more relaxed as our endo-cannabinoid systems were coming to life while others on the standard of care would have been likely dealing with the persistent anxiety cancer treatment can cause.

Now 7 scans in the clear 2 years later, I have made sure to stick to the diet and not miss a single night’s medicating with cannabis. I’m a totally different person than I was before my diagnosis. I was a misguided tory supporter who was brainwashed into believing all propaganda against cannabis. In fact, I’m sure when my Neurosurgeon’s clean up staff showed me the tumour in a pair of tongs it might as well have been wearing a blue rosette. I always wanted to be a good person but what I thought it meant to be so was misguided and I’m sure the worst of me was removed in that 80% tumour removal.

Today thanks to cannabis and of course to my survivor friends who have to lead the way ahead of me with clear scans, I feel lucky I did change and adopt a more progressive way of life, and I’m trying to help other people access the information that helped me to beat the prognosis.

However, neither mine nor my surviving friends’ lives will never be the same again, because once you have faced a brain cancer diagnosis once, it’s never “just a cold” anymore. In fact, any time where you feel less than 100%, you can’t help but fear the prospect of seizures at best and recurrences of cancer at worst.

Seeing how positive my former police friend is today makes me realise that not only are the serving police just as likely to have a diagnosis like his with brain cancer rates rising but the fact that they are considered “civil servants” is no longer realistic after all the pushback we have seen from the corrupt heart of prohibition in our politics all over the world.

Police and even soldiers are more like corporate servants now because through prohibition they are forced to enforce a law that is penned, paid and pushed for by corporations, to protect only corporate interests. As a community, many of us have seen recently from “The Kyle Files” a policewoman had to have her identity hidden because she is medicating her child with cannabis to help beat cancer that has afflicted her child.

It’s easy to shout hypocrisy but we should remember they are forced to protect corporations, even in cases like this where it’s against their own human interests to also put food on the table for their families. The police that still wilfully prioritise cannabis as a crime are misguided by their training and superiors, who are paid a lot more than them and I feel we could do more to reach out to contact such police to educate them because they can’t be on duty all the time. All it takes is reminding them that they are biological and they + their loved ones may need cannabis one day.

In the United States, we have seen nothing short of a showdown between what was known as the “Deep State” and is now known as the “Permanent state” which is inherently right wing, and a younger generation of progressives. One of the issues this battle has evolved around is in regards to the legalisation of cannabis. In States where the plant has been fully legalized through democratic votes by each States population, the pushback is not from local law enforcement, but purely the Federalists in their capital Washington D.C.

Retired LAPD Deputy Chief Stephen Downing is one of many voices from the police community who once asked former President Obama what he has to say to the population who are according to gallop polls overwhelmingly support legalisation of cannabis. His question was famously ignored by the former president. The subject of Cannabis was something the former president was consistently desperate to ignore which was an act of many broken promises from his presidential campaign, much like today’s president Trump’s broken promise to leave the States to make up their own minds on cannabis legalisation.

During Chief Downing’s time in the LAPD, he found that cannabis provided around 60% of criminal cartels funding which had been a large increase compared to when he started out on the beat. This is why Stephen Downing is now one of many of the long-serving and former law enforcement officers that all agree the “war on drugs” has been a huge failure that has simply exploded the prison population which has mostly benefited the private prisons that have a vested interest in having a large population of prisoners.

It’s also not lost on Michael A. Wood Jr who is a United States Marine Corp Vet and retired Baltimore police sergeant who is open about the racist agenda behind the prohibition of cannabis. He now plays an active role as a communicator of police culture and is consistently vocal about his critique of police officers in the United States who are operating with a racist agenda and killing young black American’s with unreasonable and unprovoked brutality.

He is a regular face on large progressive Indi news networks like The Young Turks and The Jimmy Dore Show which is reluctantly having to fill the void of honesty that corporate mainstream media has left given they are paid to support the permanent state’s failing prohibition policy and bang the drums for war to keep their private military contract sponsors happy.

There is now an organisation to provide a voice to these growing numbers of progressive ex-police officers who wish to help end prohibition known as LEAP (Law Enforcement Action Partnership).

One of its co-founders is retired police Captain Peter Christ who has been demolishing the false logic behind prohibition on news programs going back to 2012. One such appearance he was faced with the usual prohibition talking points but simply owned the debate when he explained that prohibition has forced law enforcement to divert their attention away from their original role which is to “protect people from other people” and instead forcing them to “protect people from themselves”.

He explains that if the war on drugs was being won, it would mean drugs would no longer be common in society much like how the SS are hard to find since the allies won World War II. He elaborates that the police do not have the training to protect people from themselves, which is a matter for family, the medical profession and education.

When faced with the theory that the police simply are not being tough enough, he rebutted it with “We have the largest prison population in the world and the most efficient prison system in the world, yet even these prisons cannot keep drugs out of them, if we can’t keep drugs out of such a system, we cannot keep drugs out of any system especially free society”.

Like our progressive equivalents in the UK, LEAP supports a regulated cannabis industry that also brings back the Hemp industry to help fight climate change. In the most experienced State to benefit from the full legalisation of cannabis Colorado, crime rates have done nothing but fall because the original Mexican cartels just cannot compete with the highly regulated and popular dispensaries which have introduced cannabis cultivation as an art form due to the competition between each vendor.

Of course, we have LEAP UK and LEAP Europe so this movement is not confined to a hand full of progressive States that have the freedom to disregard laws from a federalist hub that gave birth to the prohibition in every sense. We should celebrate LEAP UK and encourage its activists to be more vocal and join us at our events at any opportunity.

From my experience of facing a death sentence and trying my best to make sure no one else has to walk in my shoes there I personally beg these corporate servants to organise a coup against their corporate overlords and join us in our community because I’ve found we are not just about cannabis, we are also on team human and so are the people who are unwitting servants to corporations when all is said and done.

None of us is immune to serious diseases but those that are not awake like us and are living their lives with endo-cannabinoid deficiencies are much more vulnerable to the many diseases of inflammation.

No matter what Warren Buffet, Wall Street or Randian Hero bankers say, corporations are not people with human rights. People are people and we have to reach and engage with them to save them from the lies and corruption that are the life support of prohibition.

Call me an optimist but I have a good feeling about our future because the cat is out of the bag and they can’t put it back in the bag because that cat is long gone. Full legalisation of cannabis is inevitable worldwide because prohibition is losing credibility.

Simpa Carter from Durham CC recently posted about how cultural norms are killing his family and friends in the form of tobacco, alcoholism and poor diet. These are all by-products of the corporatist system which cannabis and other healthier choices are excluded from.

The Parliamentary Labour party may still be dragging their heals on cannabis but as a fully paid-up member of Momentum where I have yet to meet a single prohibitionist, we have the representation now and as Jeremy Corbyn is the only Labour leader to ever stand in a leadership contest and say “we should be grown up and legalise cannabis”.

On the day I wrote this Labour gained enough seats in the 2018 local elections that if it had been a general election, Jeremy Corbyn would already be our Prime Minister now.

So I say let’s go forward from here, let’s do our best to get the police aware and on side with LEAP, lets educate them and the rest of the public who are all running a risky game of follow the leader in the hope that those Tories are going to trickle something down from their Panama pockets. We are human, they are corporations, and without humans, there would be no corporations.

In the future the police will have to go back to doing what their inventor Robert Peel intended them to do, which is to protect good people from bad people because the corporations they are serving today are run by bad people that are not giving back to them. Under corporatism they have faced pay cut after pay cut, destroyed their connection and respect amongst local communities and encouraged their gradual replacement with private sector police and their associated private prisons which act more like a return to racial slavery than places of correction.

This philosophy of us human’s rooting for team human is only going to become more important as technology speeds up exponentially, beyond the national borders which can’t even be seen in space.

My survivor friends and I are glad to still be here to do what we can to help you all on this journey.

Phil James