REBEL GRANNY ADDS
ONE FOR THE POT
Source: The Age,
Australia
Date: January 31,
2005
Subj: Rebel granny adds one for the pot
Author: Olgar Craig
Ref: Pat Tabram http://www.ccguide.org.uk/pattabram.php
Grandma Pat, 65, faces a prison sentence for supplying dope to her
old age pensioner club.
Patricia Tabram is known as Grandma Pat to the children of her home
village of Hums-haugh in Northumberland. For the ailing pensioner, who always
has time for a kind word or a friendly hug, it was a rather surreal moment.
"There I was, dear, grey as a badger . . . with my hearing aid
turned up and my walking stick in my hand, sitting in the police station
listening to the nice policeman telling me that I was being charged with
possession of cannabis with the intent to supply. Well, it was rather an
experience, I can tell you," she said.
Mrs Tabram, a 65-year-old widow and grandmother, has the dubious honour
of being the first British pensioner to admit possessing the drug and intending
to distribute it among her pensioners' group. She has taught its members how to
cook it in cakes and add it to meals for, she said, medicinal reasons.
Cannabis, taken for pain, she said, works best in milk, oil, chocolate
and butter. But she is not saying whether she has included the ingredient in
her latest batch of baking.
What she does believe is that its pain-relieving properties have freed
her from agonising incapacity. "None of us takes it for any other reason.
I no longer wear my surgical collar, my back and legs no longer ache from
arthritis. Cannabis in our food, properly administered, has given us freedom
from pain."
Mrs Tabram was formally cautioned in May last year for possession and
cultivation of cannabis. A month later, she was caught with 242 grams of the
drug. Now she awaits sentencing following Newcastle Crown Court's decision to
seek reports from a probation officer and a psychologist.
But none of this bothers her. She is quite prepared to go to jail. Too
many medicines, she said, contain harmful ingredients. Cannabis, in moderation,
is a valid pain-relieving drug.
Mrs Tabram bakes it in her leek-and-chicken pie, stirs it into her
evening hot chocolate and adds it as an extra ingredient to the recipes she
favours. "I have done all the scientific research," she said.
"By trial and error, I know exactly what the dosage should be." She
is writing a book, Grandma Eats Cannabis.
About 18 months ago, she suffered a bout of depression brought on by
local tearaways attacking her property. She took to staying up all night to
watch for attacks from her window.
A friend realised that Mrs Tabram had not been seen for weeks, called
around and discovered that she had become depressed - to the point of
considering suicide.
"When she saw the state I was in, she offered me a hand-rolled
cigarette," said Mrs Tabram. "Not only did it calm me, more
importantly, the next morning the agonising pain I have suffered for years from
arthritis and whiplash injuries in a car crash had gone."
When asked what was in the cigarette, her friend said it was cannabis.