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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Second cafe set to open for smokers of cannabis
The Daily Post (Liverpool)
Saturday 20 Apr 2002 A SECOND Dutch-style coffee shop is to compete for Liverpool's cannabis-smoking clientele. The cafe will rival the city's first proposed coffee shop which is set to open in May. The new plans are the brainchild of Liverpudlian Jimmy Ward, the man behind a Bournemouth coffee shop opened in a blaze of publicity at Easter. Like Dutch Experience 2 on the south coast, the Liverpool coffee shop will not sell the Class B drug. Instead, it will act as a venue for cannabis smokers to meet and smoke in a communal atmosphere. Premises have already been found by Mr Ward's business partner in Liverpool and work is due to start on the coffee shop within weeks. Asked if he anticipated any action from police, Mr Ward, 30, who used to run a transport company, said: "I don't think Merseyside Police will bother, they have enough trouble with Class A drugs. "The idea of setting up in the open is to challenge the law. We want a licence to sell marijuana because then we can break the link between it and hard drugs. "There are two Dutch Experience coffee shops that everyone talks about, but there are hundreds of them hidden away." However, the father-of-six refused to reveal the name of his business partner until the shop was opened, to prevent it being discovered and raided by police. Such problems beset the preparation of Bournemouth's Dutch Experience 2, which will be chronicled on BBC2's Money Programme next Wednesday. Mr Ward added: "They came and raided us before we opened and arrested me for conspiracy to to incite people to smoke marijuana, but we haven't been raided once since we opened. "The premises for the Liverpool coffee shop are like this one, a converted old warehouse. And this place is earning money already." Both the Bournemouth cafe and a shop in Stockport are co-owned by Nol van Schaik, the Dutch multimillionaire entrepreneur and former international bodybuilder. Largely credited with starting Britain's booming coffee shop craze, he spent four years in jail for bank robbery and is still wanted by French police for drug smuggling. His Stockport business partner Colin Davies, a disabled man who uses cannabis for medicinal reasons, has been on remand in Strangeways Prison for several months. Meanwhile, as exclusively revealed in the Daily Post in February, Liverpool's first coffee shop is set to open next month. The bar owner behind it, who already owns three venues in the city, recently attended van Schaik's Canabuziness course in Holland. "The Liverpool bar owner came on the course," said Mr van Schaik. "He has his financing pretty much finished and he is ready for talks with the police." A Merseyside Police spokesman said: "We cannot comment on speculation that a cannabis cafe is to be opened in Liverpool. However, we can confirm possession of cannabis is an arrestable offence."
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