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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Rebel granny adds one for the pot
Olgar Craig The Age, Australia
Monday 31 Jan 2005 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. Ref: Pat Tabram http://www.ccguide.org.uk/pattabram.php
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