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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Open for two years until cops swooped
Dianne Bourne Metro News, Manchester
Friday 08 Feb 2002 Patrick's experiences as a cannabis cafe pioneer to be made into a feature film Seven years ago, nobody had heard of Colin Davies, Stockport tourist office had never had an enquiry about Hooper Street and the Dutch Experience cafe wasn't even a pipe dream. But Patrick Hollis was busy putting pot in to the Potteries as part of the management team at Dreadheads cafe in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent. Patrick, who lives in Chorlton, is fed up with reports about Stockport's cannabis cafe beimg the first ever - because the cafe, set up by cannabis campaigner Colin Davies on Hooper Street in September, is doing nothing more than he and his university friends did in 1994. In fact, the Dreadheads cafe used to bill itself as "the first and original Amsterdam-style coffee shop in Britain". Patrick, aged 32, has ow written a film script about the years he spent at the cafe, which has been accepted by a London film company. He said that the time was so surreal - with not a single drugs bust until the shop was closed in 1996 - that it was easy to write a plot full of oddball characters and twisting plots. "The Dreadheads experience surprised everyone who was involved with it," said Patrick. "Every day we expected to get busted and every day were amazed we didn't. "We began to think maybe our cafe was an experiment, that the government wanted to see how it would work for us to run a cannabis cafe. "Policemen would call in and tell us we needed a better lock on the back door, or that someone needed to move their car from outside. "The cafe would be full of people smoking spliffs, but they just never said anything." The cafe's motto was "come in for a crafty", and within months of opening up to 100 smokers at a time were cramming into the shop and openly smoking cannabis. It even had its own "ganja garden". "In winter we would have the door open and it would look like a settee was on fire with all the smoke belching out of the shop," said Patrick. "But it was never seedy, we had a theatre group, poetry reading nights and regular DJs. It was justr a happy chilled-out place." The cafe was busted by police in July 1996, with quantities of cannabis siezed and owner, Gary "Ragga" Faulkner, charged with allowing premises to be used for the supply of drugs. The cafe never reopened, but Patrick believes the time is now right for more cafes to open, like the one in Stockport. "Its an easy market if it does take off," he said. "But it needs to be done with some style and inytelligence. We need to try and get away from the idea that smoking cannabis is something seedy." But he definitely won't be visiting the Dutch Experience. "My film script was a way of getting on with my life, and closing that particular chapter," he said.
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