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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Drug deals or mercy missions?
P Coleman PColeman@cngroup.co.uk News and Star, Carlisle
Saturday 16 Dec 2006 Exhausted, angry, and tearful, Lezley Gibson sat in the dock, shaking her head, silently mouthing the words: “It’s just not fair”. The 42-year-old former hairdresser, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 21 years ago, had just heard Judge John Phillips explain a court ruling that effectively scuppered her defence in this week’s gruelling cannabis trial. With her husband Mark, 42, and co-defendant Marcus Davies, 38, she had helped create an operation that supplied cannabis-laced chocolate to 1,600 people. Like herself, all had been diagnosed with the neurological condition multiple sclerosis (MS). From her own experience, and from months of research, Lezley knew there was compelling evidence suggesting cannabis can produce dramatic benefits in people with the condition. Twenty years ago her doctor’s prediction was that she would be in a wheelchair in five years. Mainstream medicine offered little help: anabolic steroids left her with horrendous side effects, her weight ballooning to 14 stones. Then Lezley discovered cannabis. She became – and remains convinced – that using it has kept her out of a wheelchair. In 2000 that contention was tested in a trial at Carlisle Crown Court and – despite clear evidence that she was using the drug – the jury accepted her medical justification for using cannabis and acquitted her. In the months that followed Mark and Lezley turned their home into a mini cannabis chocolate production line, determined to ensure that anybody with MS who needed the drug should get it. Marcus Davies, who used cannabis to ease symptoms associated with his epilepsy and diabetes, agreed to help, setting up a website, under the banner of their THC4MS campaign group. From the start, the couple tried to ensure that only genuine sufferers could get the chocolate, produced with what the couple said was only the best quality cannabis. Only those who could produce a doctor’s or MS nurse’s written confirmation of diagnosis could get it. But everything changed on May 27, 2005, when law lords at the Appeal Court gave a decisive ruling in the case of a man called Barry Quayle, a 38-year-old double amputee who had grown and used cannabis to ease his chronic pain. Along with four others, he had pleaded medical necessity, but the court ruled that this defence should not be available to defendants in cannabis trials. It meant the defence the Gibsons and Davies thought they had – they were accused of conspiring to supply cannabis between January 2004 and February of last year – was taken away. Yet throughout their trial this week, the Gibsons and Marcus Davies clung to that argument. Three MS sufferers – one of them a middle-aged solicitor – spoke of how the drug had benefited them. Quizzed about whether she made money from the operation, Lezley Gibson told police: “You’ve seen my house, my clothes. “You’ve seen my car. There’s no profit in this whatsoever. I could give you a few people who would do it to line their pockets, but not me.” She said their supply was an attempt to take “scumbag” drug dealers out of the equation. Her barrister Andrew Ford described Lezley Gibson’s motive in a single word: altruism. Marcus Davies also contested that there was nothing genuinely criminal about what he and the Gibsons did. “We lost loads of money doing it,” he said. “Crime is something where you have a victim, but there is no victim in this.” Lezley Gibson’s defence barrister urged the jury of six men and six women to defy the 2005 Appeal Court ruling on medical necessity defences. He spoke of the celebrated book A Time to Kill by US author John Grishman, which tells the story of a black man who kills the two white men who raped his daughter and walked free from court. When the case goes to court, the fictional US jury refuse to convict, recognising a moral justification for this most serious of crimes. “Ultimately,” Mr Ford told the jury, “this case is about the tension between the law and what is just.” For his part, Mark Gibson’s defence barrister Greg Hoare echoed the words of US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt following Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, almost 55 years ago to the day. Mr Hoare said: “It would be an infamous day in the English criminal calendar for people to be rendered liable to conviction for serious offences where they had no moral blame or criminal intent.” The facts of the trial were never in any doubt: this was a trial not only of the three defendants, but also of the current law on cannabis that had landed them in the dock. Lezley said yesterday that the effect of the trial on her health has been dramatic. “It’s crippled me,” she said. “At the start, my immune system crashed: I ended up on antibiotics, with boils and pins and needles across my face, nose and mouth. I haven’t slept for two weeks.” Mark Gibson too is adamant that the prosecution was fundamentally unjust. Speaking after the verdict, he said: “We’ve got 65 letters from doctors and nurses saying their patients could benefit from our cannabis chocolate. So you could say that they are all co-conspirators. That information was available to the prosecution so why were these doctors and nurses not put in the dock?” Marcus Davies said THC4MS would now revert to being a pressure group and would not supply cannabis-laced chocolate. Both Cumbria’s Crown Prosecution Service and Cumbria police defended the prosecution. A CPS spokesman said: “We prosecuted this case because it is an offence to possess or supply cannabis, or to conspire to supply it. We don’t make the law, we simply prosecute the laws made by Parliament. “The Gibsons sent out cannabis chocolate bars and had no control over who ultimately consumed it.” Superintendent Steve Johnson said: “The law has been upheld. Class C drugs are illegal and it’s an offence to supply them. It’s a political debate as to whether cannabis has medicinal benefits – a debate that is for agencies other than the police.” He said the police decision to initially not pursue the Gibsons in 2002 was based on the facts as known to senior officers at that time. By January of last year, the scale of their operation had grown to such an extent that officers had to take action. “We’ll take each case on its merits,” he said. “It’s an offence to possess and supply it and people who are in possession of or supplying illegal substances will be investigated.”
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