UK: Pot Chocolate
Source: Daily Telegraph, UK
Section: Magazine,
Pub Date: Saturday, February 22 2003
Subj: UK: Pot Chocolate
Author: David Rowan
Web: http://www.telegraph.co.uk
THC4MS http://www.thc4ms.org.uk
POT CHOCOLATE
Once a week, a village postman in
Pembrokeshire delivers a parcel of the "magical medicine" that has
transformed Elsie Jones's life. For 10 years, as multiple sclerosis (MS)
gradually conquered her nervous system, Mrs Jones felt increasingly despondent
about the loss of both body and dignity - the humiliating incontinence, the
uncontrolled muscle spasms, the searing pain that makes her husband Bill's
nights as fitful as her own. The doctors offered little hope to 55-year-old Mrs
Jones. Her illness was too advanced for her to try the drug beta-interferon,
and her pain could not wait for the cannabis-based medicines currently under
trial.
"She was just vegetating away, quite
motionless apart from her left hand, and I would have done anything to give her
a better quality of life," her 61-year-old husband explains in their
specially adapted Fifties terrace house near St David's. "And then, two
years ago, someone told me about those wonderful people making the medicinal
chocolate. That was when everything changed."
Since then, Mrs Jones has been receiving
free weekly gifts of the chocolate from a group of strangers who risk jail to
help her and hundreds like her. The ingredients list, set out below the
"Keep out of the reach of children" warning, explains why - besides
cocoa mass, raw cane sugar, cocoa butter, lecithin and vanilla, this confection
also contains a two per cent dose of raw cannabis, an active ingredient that,
according to Bill Jones, has dramatically eased his wife's symptoms without
getting her stoned.
"It didn't work immediately, but over a
month there was a vast change," he recalls. "She's more relaxed now,
can move her legs without much pain, and is even getting to sleep again."
Mrs Jones - who remains unable to talk -
still demands the constant attention that caused their family butcher's
business to collapse, but she hints at a smile when, twice a day, her husband
of 38 years asks her to open her mouth "for choccy time". "There
are a lot of good people out there," he sighs, pointing to a padded envelope
with a Cumbrian postmark. "People who'll take a risk to benefit others. I
don't know who they are, but I'd like to shake them by the hand - there are an
awful
lot of grateful people." The depth of
that gratitude is an extraordinary testimony to an underground mail-order network
that refuses to wait for cannabis-based medicines to be legalised. For two
years, as pharmaceutical companies have prepared to tap a market worth an
estimated £250 million, thousands of cannabis-laced chocolate bars have been
arriving free of charge in the homes of MS sufferers across Britain.
The 150g "cannachoc" bars, as they
are known, are made in volunteers' homes, with raw materials donated by
well-wishers, and supplied only to carefully vetted MS patients - 300 at the
last count - of whom most, like Elsie Jones, claim their lives have improved
immeasurably. Until now, the internet-based network has maintained a necessary
secrecy, aware that its members risk jail for growing, possessing and supplying
the drug. But faced with threats of exposure by online "vigilantes'
and aware that the political pendulum is
swinging fast towards therapeutic legalisation - it agreed to allow The
Telegraph Magazine to follow its work.
The group calls itself Therapeutic Help from
Cannabis for Multiple Sclerosis (Thc4MS), and is nothing if not
consumer-oriented. Inquirers, who must provide a doctor's note to confirm their
illness, may choose milk, dark, vegan or diabetic chocolate, and are
recommended to take one piece three times a day to alleviate symptoms without causing
a cannabis
"high". Potheads these people are
not.
Typically the "clients", as they
are known, are respectable professionals, mostly in their 50s and 60s, who
would have little
interest in cannabis had not they, or
someone close to them, begun a desperate search for help. No payment is
required, but stamps and minor donations are welcomed. And although the
chocolate does not work for every sufferer, when it does the effect is deeply
moving, as revealed in the letters received at the organisation's north
Pennines outpost.
"Dear whoever," writes an elderly
woman in Wokingham. "Thank you so much for my first supply of cannachoc.
It is wonderful. For the first time in many, many months I do not have
'jerking' legs in the evenings and can sit still and watch TV!" From
Essex, the scribble of a woman's unsteady hand testifies, "Since taking
cannachoc, I can honestly say that the aching subsides and I can usually get to
sleep. I don't feel any high-ness at all. Thank you so much." From Rhyl, "Without
it my life
would be one long pain, literally. Please
can I have another bar? I had six squares of the last one and then I managed to
tile the bathroom."
And from Gwent, "It has taken me
several years to take the plunge. I was reluctant to ask my husband to buy cannabis
in a pub or street corner and risk arrest."
None is under any illusion about the crimes
they and their unpaid suppliers are committing. But whatever their views about
the legality of recreational cannabis, cannachoc's users share a consensus that
the current law fails people with MS and other diseases who find it brings
significant medical benefits.
Few of those we contacted were surprised
that GW Pharmaceuticals, licensed by the Government to test cannabis-based
medicines, had recently reported a series of successful trials which the
company hopes will allow the NHS to offer its cannabis-based oral spray later
this year. "What took them so long?" asked a young mother in Argyll.
"It's not as if we haven't been telling the Government that it
works." The House of Lords accepted this four years ago, when its Science
and Technology Committee stressed "the need to legalise cannabis
preparations for therapeutic use", until which time it urged toleration of
"genuine" medicinal users. GPs, certainly, seem to share this view,
judging by the number privately referring patients to the Thc4MS.org website -
as are care home owners and, apparently, some police officers. As Bill Jones
says, "I really don't care that it's illegal. It works for Elsie, and I made
my mind up not to buy from a dealer, as you don't know what you're getting.
I've told the neighbours. They just say, 'Good for you'."
Those bearing the greatest risk are
volunteers like Mark and Lezley Gibson, a couple who have been making the
chocolate bars from their home in a small Cumbrian town. They ask that the
town's name is not specified, but that may be more to discourage desperate
wheelchair-bound MS sufferers from arriving at their doorstep, as had been
happening. It is not as if they are hard to find after two years making and
posting the weekly chocolate packages. Legalise Cannabis Alliance stickers
cover the car parked outside their terrace house and the local tourist
information office directs inquirers to their front door.
They wrote to the Queen last year to explain
what they do, and sought a Jubilee year amnesty for medicinal users.
Buckingham Palace replied that their letter
had been passed to the Home Office. "And David Blunkett's chosen not to
reply," Mark says in mock surprise. "Never mind."
"These people have been through every
quack cure," says Lezley as she opens the morning's dozen or so inquiry
letters in the Gibsons' kitchen.
"Eventually they've found the
chocolate. Sometimes it's heartbreaking. Letters saying, "I have been
leading a life of misery, I hope you'll be my light at the end of the
tunnel..." Look at this old guy," she says, struggling to read one
page of barely controlled scrawl. "He's been on beta-interferon but found
it gives him mood swings. Yup, it can really make you evil. Now he's going to
try herb as a last resort. They're so straight, some of these people, that you
can see how stressed they are
when it comes to asking for cannabis. It
must be awful - I know, I've been there."
Lezley, 38, had never tried cannabis until
Mark, whom she met at a nightclub, suggested it might relieve her symptoms. She
had become a hairdresser on leaving school in Carlisle, and was about to open
her own shop at 21, when, as she put it, "my body just stopped
working".
For eight months she had experienced pins
and needles down her right side. One morning, sitting at an interview for a
£1,000 new-business grant, she found that she could not stand up again. "I
was in hospital for eight weeks, during which time the steroids doubled my weight
till I resembled a small bungalow," she recalls, smiling at Mark as he
sits unpacking catering-size bars of plain Dutch chocolate. "What was
worse than being told I had MS was being a spakker - one minute this
fashion-obsessed hairdresser, just turned 21 and full of myself, the next being
prodded with needles and tickled with cotton wool. I'd never even heard of
MS."
Her hospital consultant explained that
within five years she would be incontinent and in a wheelchair. It is not an
easy image to reconcile with the giggly, chatty woman who, 17 years later,
saunters downstairs to post the latest bundle of parcels, her strawberry-pink
dyed hair, diamond nose stud and black fetish-club T-shirt a jarring statement
of individuality amid the prim order of this cobbled hill town. Approaching the
post office, where she is greeted warmly by neighbours and the postmaster
("How many will it be today, Lezley?"), she explains that when she
smoked one of Mark's joints she would notice her attacks
becoming weaker and less frequent. "I
read up on the medical research into cannabis, and thought, wow, that's what
I'm finding. I'd felt apprehensive about taking a drug, but apparently it was
doing me the world of good." She now smokes daily; on those days when she
does not, such as when she was arrested three years ago and charged with
possession - her symptoms invariably re-present themselves, from the shakiness
and fatigue to the twitching eyes and slurred speech.
When Lezley's case came to court, the jury
acquitted her, to the judge's evident disappointment. "I explained that I
wasn't doing anything wrong as it was a medicinal necessity," she says.
"When you're that ill, you'd take paintstripper if you thought it would
work." Mark, a 38-year-old cleaner and former food hygiene manager, is
also no stranger to the courts. In 1989 he spent a week on remand in Durham
prison after 1lb of cannabis was found in the boot of his car (he says it
belonged to
someone else). He has also been fined over
various minor charges of possession. In 2001 he stood for Parliament as the
local Legalise Cannabis candidate. Although Lezley and Mark are both clear
about the illegality of the cannachoc network, they argue that, since it is a
cashless, altruistic project that is harming nobody, they have a moral duty to
respond to pleas of desperation. "I can't look someone in the eye when
they're saying help me," Lezley says, back in the kitchen, its walls
plastered with "No victim - no crime" stickers and a poster of Howard
Marks. "It's not the right thing to do. I didn't even have a
detention at school, but because I use
cannabis I'm getting dragged into a world of crime. If someone is sick, you
don't put them in jail!" Mark adds, "I can't see how anybody could
have an objection to what we do. But if we were charged, we'd plead not guilty
on the grounds of necessity - if we don't help these people, their health will
degenerate."
He holds up 11 thick red files in which each
client's preferences are stored ("prefers dark";
"diabetic") alongside their doctor's notes.
"There are plenty of quack remedies out
there, with guys charging £59 an hour for something that doesn't work. Not
here," Mark says with some passion. "We get nothing out of this. If
the chocolate keeps one person off beta-interferon, we're saving the public
health £12,000 a year." Lezley appears to have a tear in her eye. "I
never wanted to be the Emily Pankhurst of the cannabis world," she says,
slowly shaking her head, as their 16-year-old daughter arrives home from
school. "What damage am I to anyone? I'm 5ft 1in, I can't run as this leg
doesn't work. I can't even spit. If they bust me and Mark, they'd put 200
people out on the streets looking for cannabis. What's worse?"
"All we're doing is removing the
monetary value of cannabis so that people who need it aren't ripped off,"
Mark says pensively, running his hand through his tightly cut hair to rest on
his trim beard. "We want to be accepted for what we do and do it from an
industrial location. I see this as a social experiment to see how people can reach
out to each other."
In a modern bungalow behind a field of
organic cabbages in rural Northamptonshire, Roger Newton is checking that his
highly prized crop is kept at a constant 26 degrees. Within two weeks, cuttings
from the five mature cannabis plants nestling in his loft will be driven off to
provide the active ingredients for another hundred or so bars of chocolate.
Newton does not know Mark and Lezley Gibson, nor does he ever use cannabis
himself. He just decided, when he learnt about the organisation, that he
"wanted to do something useful". In a sheltered corner of the loft,
behind his mother-in-law's fuchsia
cuttings, he opens a door into a sauna-like
pine cabin, releasing the rich, pungent aroma instantly familiar to anyone who
has lately walked down Brixton Road. The five-foot-tall grove of plants,
sheltering a smaller group of Newton's "babies", will provide around
400g of raw cannabis that he estimates would cost £1,500 on the streets.
"To be honest, I wouldn't really know," says Newton, a 51-year-old
retired former engineer and businessman. "I tried it as a youngster, but
it's not for me. Ask my kids how firmly anti-drugs I was in their formative
years, and they'll tell you - I told them if they ever came home with
drugs, I'd have to blow my head off."
A grandfather with two sons in their 20s and
a nine-year-old daughter, Newton is no radical activist. In a West Ham T-shirt
and jeans, his glasses resting on high, well-nourished jowls, he explains over
a pint in the pub how he refocused his priorities when diagnosed with
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma eight years ago. It was, fortunately, a treatable form
of cancer, and the removal of a tumour followed by radiotherapy seems to have
seen it off. But then illness hit other family members. His 34-year-old niece
developed breast cancer; his mother-in-law had a brain haemorrhage.
"You're here one day and gone the next," Newton reflects. "It
doesn't matter how much money you've got, it's about enjoying what time you
have with your family."
When the husband of an old friend with
advanced MS asked if he knew where to buy cannabis, he wanted to help.
"There was a shop up the road selling seeds, so I said I'd grow some in my
conservatory," he says. "As she couldn't smoke it, I looked on the
internet for some tips and came across Mark and Lezley's website. So now I
supply them, and some of my friends get to benefit. You could say we've got a
mutual arrangement."
Of the risks he admits, "You do get a
bit paranoid, but it's something I've got to do, my way of giving something
back. I wouldn't do it if I felt it was going to the wrong people, but I trust
them. I know some who are benefiting. My fear is not that anyone will be
arrested but that, until the Government takes this on board, the demand keeps
rising and too many sufferers will be disappointed."
The medical benefits of cannabis have been
chronicled for 2,000 years. But not until 1992, when Clare Hodges, an MS
patient, wrote in The Spectator about her "very alternative
medicine", did the current movement for therapeutic legalisation begin.
Her neurologist put her in contact with other users and the Alliance for
Cannabis Therapeutics was born. It recruited Geoffrey Guy, a retired
pharmaceutical executive, to join a delegation to the Department of Health in
1997 demanding a licence to research the drug's benefits. The following day,
Guy founded GW Pharmaceuticals, which now stands to make a fortune from a
medically approved form of the drug.
"Mark and Lezley are absolutely
remarkable and I refer people to them every day," Clare Hodges says.
"They're completely self-sacrificing and do an enormous amount of work for
no obvious reward. But now the drugs companies are running the show. Suddenly
everyone accepts that cannabis can help people with MS, but the way things work
is that the drugs companies have to make money out of it."
The MS Society, which claims to represent
Britain's 85,000 sufferers, argues that only completed clinical trials - such
as one backed by the Medical Research Council now starting in Plymouth - will
determine whether cannabis is a safe treatment. "We do not encourage
people to break the law," the society says, "though we have asked
that the prosecuting authorities should treat tolerantly people who are
self-medicating."
It is a position the Prime Minister appears
to share. Earlier this month, Biz Ivol, the MS sufferer who founded what has
become Thc4MS, was due in Kirkwall Sheriff Court, Orkney, on charges of
supplying, possessing and growing the drug. When, last July, her MP asked Tony
Blair if he believed the war on drugs would be won "by making a criminal
of a 54-year-old woman who has led an otherwise blameless life and who is now
confined to a wheelchair", he was assured that the law was being urgently
reviewed.
"We understand that there is
potentially a distinction between those who need cannabis for medicinal
purposes and those who do not," the Prime Minister said. "I am sure
that people will take a sympathetic view of the position of the honourable
gentleman's constituent, although that must remain a matter for the
authorities, not the Government."
Back in the "chocolate factory" -
borrowed premises near their home - I watch Mark Gibson clean the £400
Auto-Therm ElectroMaster chocolate melter as Lezley breaks up 40 medium-sized
bars of Dutch plain Rademaker chocolate by banging them on the table. Four
hours later, the melted chocolate flowing smoothly, Mark weighs 80g of
finely-ground female tops
of cannabis. "It's the finest you can
get, dearer than gold," he says, before slowly sieving it and stirring it
in. He lowers the temperature and leaves the mix to stand overnight before
giving it another stir and pouring it into confectioners' moulds. "Before
chilling it, we agitate it with our secret process," he says, his T-shirt
spattered with spills.
"That puts in the bubbles, which people
seem to like." As he and Lezley later foil-wrap the first of 60 bars, Mark
says, "Cumbrian Police told the local paper they're 'monitoring the
situation'. [The police confirm this, adding that they are fully aware of the
Gibsons' work.]
"It won't do the group any good if they
arrest Lezley and me, so we're about to shift production to new premises in the
east of England to ensure that the supply continues. But I'll still be involved
until there's a viable, legal alternative at the pharmacy, then get a bloody
rest. Come on GW Pharmaceuticals, get it right."
He pauses and looks at the pile of prepared
chocolate. "Actually, I hate the stuff. I've worked with chocolate for
such a long time that you see so much of it you're sickened. But Lezley, now
she likes chocolate." Lezley giggles. "Name me a woman who
doesn't."
- Some names have been changed.