CLEAR, Cocaine and Bitcoins.

Author: Kevin John Braid

Always looking for new ways to scam money from the unsuspecting public, CLEAR recently announced they had started to solicit donations using Bitcoins.

For those not familiar with Bitcoin, it is a complex and anonymous type of electronic currency that can be swapped for local currencies like pounds, dollars and euros.

This would appear to be the brainchild of CLEAR Membership Secretary, Joel Dalais, who has been espousing the merits of Bitcoin on Facebook. They will even offer you a 10% discount on any payments made with Bitcoin, though why anyone in their right mind would want to hand over their hard earned money to that bunch of scamsters is beyond me.

Perhaps this new and novel way of financing a political party would catch on? Have CLEAR revolutionised the way British political parties fundraise? We suspect not, CLEAR have already removed the page soliciting cash via the faceless and highly encrypted decentralised Bitcoin currency. 

I phoned up the Electoral Commission to ask if it were legal for a political party collect donations via Bitcoin. The very honest answer I received from the very helpful chap I spoke with was “I haven’t a clue, let me ask someone else”. A lady later got back to me to confirm any donations over £500 have to be declared, and can only be accepted if they are from someone who is on the UK electoral register; any donation over £500 which you cannot prove came from a UK registered voter would have to be forfeited by law. I explained the nature of Bitcoin and she said any donation under £500 would not have to be declared, however, if a political party had several small donations of say £50 via Bitcoin and over the year it tallied to over £500 then the onus would be on the political party to prove they had not come from the same person. It’s a grey area, but the general gist of it is if you are a registered political party in the UK, probably not a good idea to accept donations via Bitcoin, however, in the case of CLEAR they are probably ok, since I doubt they could muster up enough people dumb enough to donate over £500. I can’t see any serious political party starting to accept donations via Bitcoin.

Perhaps CLEAR removed the page and decided to err on the side of caution, just in case they felt collecting money anonymously for a registered UK political party using Bitcoin is not legal, or rather could it be because their Membership Secretary, Joel Dalias, got caught soliciting cocaine using the CLEAR email while in correspondence with someone about collecting a donation using Bitcoin.

During the weekend I received an anonymous email from someone claiming to be ‘Internet Against Racism”, together with an email exchange between a fictitious simplysarah@tormail.org and Joel Dalais (membership director of CLEAR – Cannabis Law Reform) where Joel admits that he and two other executive members are cocaine users, and attempted to solicit cocaine for the three of them. He confirms the other two other Exec members are PR (Peter Reynolds: Leader of CLEAR) and DW (Derek Williams: Webmaster of CLEAR).

Here see it for yourself:

The full text of the Joel Dalais cocaine scandal can be read here.

So there you have it, Joel Dalais offering his address to get sent a few free grams of “Bolivian Marching Powder”, which he says he will share with the rest of the team, who he confirms are PR (Peter Reynolds) and DW (Derek Williams).

How will CLEAR respond? Perhaps Peter Reynolds will claim they are forgeries, as he has in the past when embarrassing screenshots of his blogs or Facebook comments find their way onto the World Wide Web. As it happens, they admitted the email exchange was genuine on their twitter feed, demoting Joel Dalais to a junior CLEAR member and stated PR and DW neither offered nor accepted anything and neither use cocaine.

So there you have it, Peter Reynolds doesn’t use cocaine, which is just as well, since he is suing activist Alun Buffry for sharing a photo of Peter Reynolds in front of a table with some white lines on the table.

Except, in 2011 on his Facebook, Peter Reynolds admits to using cocaine. I’m guessing Alun will not have a hard job defending his case and and if you’re reading this Reynolds, we’ve Evernoted it, just in case you try to claim it is a forgery.

Peter Reynolds Watch also received this message from Joel Dalais’ nephew during the Corby by-election alleging Peter Reynolds and the rest of the CLEAR team snorted copious amounts of cocaine during the Corby by-election. Joel Dalais has admitted this email is genuine, we have blotted out the details of his nephew’s name and email.

I can’t say it surprises me that a drug whose unique selling point is it makes you an arrogant dickhead would be popular with the CLEAR Executive.

Furthermore, in 2011 Peter Reynolds told Greg de Hoedt and Clark French at a Students for Sensible Drugs Policy (SSDP) conference they didn’t know what getting high was until they’d hit up a crack pipe and he also drank half a bottle of whisky. A fine example for a man in his 50s to set for two young men; I think not!

Peter’s views on cocaine are somewhat more puritanical when it comes to Chancellor George Osborne’s alleged cocaine usage.

The rumour George Osborne took cocaine was fueled when a photograph of a young Osborne emerged with high society hooker, Mistress Pain, and what appeared to be white lines of powder on the table. Now of course, George Osborne denied it was cocaine and claimed it was salt, but that didn’t stop Peter Reynolds from calling him a “seedy cocaine user.”

Since inconsistency is the only consistent thing about Peter Reynolds, we assume if anybody contacted him to ask what the white lines of powder are on the table in this photograph, he would claim they are lines of salt too.

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Kevin John Braid is an artist, writer and activist who was born in Scotland, grew up in the U.S.A. (California and Arizona), lived in England for a few years, and now lives in Poland. He has spent many years fighting against marijuana prohibition, and is a lover of books, cooking and Nietzsche.

He is a well known antifas and key writer for Peter Reynolds Watch.