The northlondonhippy

Archive for January 30th, 2008

Richard Made­ley and Judy Finni­gan, or “Richard and Judy” as they are known to their legions of fans in the UK are very pop­u­lar and influ­en­tial celebri­ties in this coun­try. When they rec­om­mend a book or a wine, it becomes a big seller overnight. What they say to the nation, can change the course of the nation. They hold a lot of sway.

For those of you not resid­ing here in Blighty, I should explain a bit. The cou­ple I’m talk­ing about have been fix­tures on our day­time TV screens for many, many years. They are mar­ried and after start­ing out in regional telly, moved on to host­ing a national day­time chat show in the morn­ings on ITV. After many years on ITV and in a well pub­li­cised and expen­sive net­work coup, made a high pro­file jump to Chan­nel 4. That’s where theyre­main, host­ing a pro­gramme that goes out week­days 5pm-6pm.

Nor­mally, I find their views on the con­ser­v­a­tive­side and in some instances extremely so, which meant I was quite sur­prised when some­one I know drew my atten­tion to a recent Richard Madeley’s col­umn in the Daily Express newspaper.

Yes, the Daily Express of all places!

Rather than tease you with this, I’ll just cut to the chase with the salient quotes:

“RICHARD: How awk­ward it is to have to begin the new year defend­ing the appar­ently inde­fen­si­ble… in the form of eccen­tric police chief Richard Brunstrom’s lat­est headline-grabbing “gaffe”. I refer, of course, to his call this week on Radio 4’s Today pro­gramme for the legal­is­ing of drugs.



He may be a ridicu­lous hon­orary druid with an irri­tat­ing pen­chant for speed cam­eras and absurdly sen­si­tive to weak jokes about the Welsh, but he’s doing some­thing rarely seen in our chief constables.

He is think­ing out of the box. That is brave and bold and deserves thought­ful con­sid­er­a­tion, not calumny.”

Please do click this link to the orig­i­nal arti­cle, it starts about 1/2 way down the page.

I was stunned.

I was flabbergasted!

I’m never flabbergasted.

I’m not cer­tain what flab­ber­gasted even means!

Some­times, com­mon sense comes from very unlikely sources and I must say there was no more unlikely source of these sagely words than Richard Madeley.

I’d like to applaud Mr. Madeley’s brav­ery and gen­uine courage for com­ing out in sup­port of Richard Brun­stom and the Police Author­ity in the pur­suit of truth and hon­esty about drugs.

The next time you’re dis­cussing legal­is­ing drugs with some­one, quote Richard. Seri­ously, even to your par­ents. Peo­ple really dig Richard and Judy, if you quote him, they will think twice about their beliefs and per­haps even start to ques­tion them. Try it and you’ll see what I mean, attach­ing his name to the cause will give it a new level of respect.

If Richard Made­ley sup­ports a com­plete re-think on drug pol­icy, per­haps there IS some­thing to it!

If more peo­ple were will­ing to stand up and speak out, per­haps things would be bet­ter for respon­si­ble adults like myself and those of you out there who choose to indulge in the use of unsanc­tioned sub­stances. There are so so SO many of us out there, who lead pro­duc­tive, nor­mal lives, yet enjoy things other than alco­hol and tobacco.

We have too much to lose. That’s the prob­lem, our nor­malcy and respon­si­ble lives don’t meet society’s stereo­types of what a drug user is. If we did step out of the closet and pro­claim proudly that we smoke weed, or snort a bit of char­lie, or neck a few pills every week­end and it wasn’t destroy­ing our lives, peo­ple who dis­ap­proved would find a way of destroy­ing our lives for us.

Next week is the pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on reclas­si­fy­ing weed. I’m sure peo­ple braver than me will attend and speak out elo­quently on the sub­ject, before they’re ignored com­pletely and the gov­ern­ment just reclas­si­fies it any­way. But that’s not why I’m not going.

I’m not going, because I have too much to lose. As open as I am about my drug use to friends, fam­ily, work col­leagues, strangers I sit next to on the bus, I don’t know how I’d feel about my name and address being on record with this gov­ern­ment in rela­tion to the sta­tus of weed and specif­i­cally my con­stant intake of it.

And with this gov­ern­ment, how long would it take them before they lost the list and it ended up in the hands of, oh I don’t know, the police maybe! Mak­ing cannabis class B means the penal­ties are worse for the end user; what if they decide to ‘round us all up? They’re build­ing an awful lot of new prisons!

Oh and by the way, the penal­ties for pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of cannabis, ie grow­ing and deal­ing, are exactly the same under class B as class C, so it’s really only those of us who might get caught with a small amount who are see­ing the penal­ties change. Thanks, Gor­don. Thanks, Jacqui.

What’s worse is that it will only drive those of us who wish to speak out, fur­ther under­ground, while allow­ing the crim­i­nal ele­ment to con­tinue rul­ing the trade, with no addi­tional risks. Who really ben­e­fits from this change in status?

That’s an easy ques­tion to answer. Who ben­e­fits from the reclas­si­fi­ca­tion of cannabis?

No one at all.