Peter Reynolds in the Sunday Times

By James Collins

Peter Reynolds was in the Sunday Times.  The text of the article is below.  Did you read that?  Good.   Now we’re on the same page.

Spliffs And Tiffs As The Cannabis Lobby Tears Itself Apart. By Oliver Thring. The Sunday Times, 12th May 2013

The winds of change are blowing, perfumed with notes of Moroccan black, Bubblicious and Super Silver Haze. Last week the Senate executive committee in Illinois voted to legalise marijuana for medicinal purposes, and the state’s full Senate will soon make a final decision. Two American states, Colorado and Washington, have legalised marijuana for recreational use, and 52% of Americans now favour that policy — the figure was 45% just two years ago. In all, 25 countries have softened their laws on cannabis.

Things are changing in Britain as well. A few weekends ago about 2,000 people sat down in Hyde Park, central London, to smoke joints under the convivial auspices of the London Cannabis Club. Police made two arrests and issued a handful of “cannabis warnings” but on the whole left the group alone.
Such an event passing largely unmolested might have seemed impossible a few years ago, but the British public is far less concerned about soft drug use than it used to be. A poll in February found that 53% of people in the UK favoured legalising or decriminalising cannabis.

Most cannabis users suffer no lasting ill effects. However, a small but significant correlation seems to exist between young people using cannabis and later developing psychotic symptoms. Marjorie Wallace of Sane, a mental health charity, says that skunk — a particularly strong and popular form of cannabis — “can trigger frightening psychotic episodes . . . and bring about mental conditions such as schizophrenia”.

She argues that “diluting these dangers . . . could cause widespread suffering”. Rethink, the largest schizophrenia charity in the UK, says that “jailing people for cannabis will not solve the problem. Money spent on policing cannabis should be spent on health education, services and research.”

The argument, therefore, is between those who believe that prohibition is more effective at steering vulnerable people from the drug, and those who believe that regulation will better protect them.

An extraordinary mix of people now argue for cannabis law reform, including MPs, medicinal users and clear-headed, evidence-based pressure groups such as Release and Transform. The most prominent campaigners, however, are disunited — and some simply hate one another.

Perhaps the most visible individual arguing for a change in the laws on cannabis is Peter Reynolds, the leader of Clear, a single-issue political party. He has often debated against Peter Hitchens — perhaps the sternest of the anti-drug moralisers — and appears frequently in newspapers and on television. We meet in a cafe — he had suggested a pub — and he orders a triple espresso while boasting to me about the number of complaints he has made to the Press Complaints Commission. I make a mental note of the implications.

You might have thought the “free the weed” crowd would be a relaxed bunch, but Reynolds paints a picture of a cannabis lobby riven by nasty internal politics and mutual loathing. “The movement has a history of divisive infighting and argument,” he says. The London Cannabis Club “have a beef against me”. Several leading members of Clear have left in the past few years to set up a rival organisation, Norml. Reynolds is suing at least one fellow campaigner for defamation.

A number of blogs about Reynolds wrongly allege that he is homophobic and a paedophile. (He admits to having called a woman who maintains one of the blogs a “genetically confused half-werewolf half-woman”.) I ask him if he referred to “evil Jews” in a blog post. “I might have used the phrase,” he says. He also makes impressive claims about his group’s popularity, for example: “We had several 50,000-plus marches last year in London which received no media coverage at all.”

One leading cannabis reformer says, “Clear are a pretty shady bunch and personally I wouldn’t trust Peter Reynolds as far as I can throw him. He’s not helpful to the far more serious organisations that are pushing for reform. He has become the figurehead of this movement, and that could potentially set the cause back no end.” Reynolds tells me he has tried “most drugs” but “the only time I injected heroin was with a doctor”. He uses cannabis “almost every day”.

One wants to avoid clichés about cannabis users, but Reynolds does sound rather paranoid when he says, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist”, before claiming that “agitators” and “subversive elements” are “within the campaign, seeking to disrupt us”.
I doubt he means Stuart Wyatt, a softly spoken activist who suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome and who says the drug has “made my life worth living again”. (He calls Reynolds a “dictator”.) Or Ewan Hoyle, a Scottish Liberal Democrat activist with a master’s degree in neuroscience and a brother with psychosis. He has never touched cannabis but believes “strict control and regulation” protect young people better than “failed prohibition”. Or the long-haired stoners of Hyde Park and popular imagination, none of whom was very good at replying to my messages.

Julian Huppert, a Lib Dem MP, favours drug laws that “help addicts to break their addiction rather than punishing people. Poll after poll shows the public doesn’t think politicians are doing the right thing on drug laws,” he says. The mild-mannered Baroness Meacher sits on the all-party parliamentary group for drug policy reform, which advocates the decriminalisation of all drugs.

“I began looking at the evidence four years ago,” she says, “especially Portugal [which decriminalised personal use of all drugs in 2001] and the Czech Republic [which decriminalised drugs after strict laws were shown by a study to have failed]. That is how I reached my conclusions. I’m not an ideologue.”

These campaigners may believe they are “winning the argument”, as Huppert puts it. Most polls suggest that they are. But the argument within the cannabis lobby is just as visceral. The pressure may well intensify as changes to the law start to bud and shoot.

By Oliver Thring

Peter is pretty proud of this article.  That is because he lacks objectivity, any time his name appears in print he assumes it is a good thing.  This kind of egotism is what makes him such an easy target for criticism.

The Times has painted him out to be boastful, paranoid and also implies he might have an attachment to the bottle.  They also claim he has been falsely accused of homophobia and pedophilia.  I’m not sure who directly accused him of pedophilia.  While his defense of certain high-profile sexual predators raises questions about his own inclinations, nobody actually said as much that I have seen.

I guess the press is adhering to the new low standard accepted for the establishment of facts.  Nuance and detail are lost.

He most certainly did say that homosexuality was “a perversion from the norm”, which falls under most peoples’ definition of homophobic.  If a rather right-wing press organization wants to parse semantics on that front, I suppose there isn’t much you can do.  It’s the same mentality that lets the UKIP both believe that all foreigners are a detrimental influence on the UK, but that this does not qualify them as racist or bigoted.

Peter claims in this article he “might have” used the phrase “evil Jews”.  There is no maybe about it, he quite simply said that.  The Jewish Chronicle was happy to make note of it when they took a sniff of Peter Reynolds epic manure pile, and we’ve documented it here repeatedly.  A decent journalist would have called bullshit on that one, but this one didn’t.  I guess he wanted to seem objective.

He also appears to claim in this article that “we” (whomever he includes in the plural) had marches with fifty thousand people that the press entirely ignored!  Nobody even heard of it!  Have you heard of a protest with so many people?  No, because it is a big secret apparently, and nobody noticed in the place where it happened.

I don’t know how paranoid and psychotic you have to be to believe that a public action with enough people to clog the motorways of a major urban center was erased from history, but I suspect it is bordering on the accepted threshold of clinical psychosis.  I don’t use that word pedantically; I mean it in the medical sense.  Peter Reynolds simply has no attachment to reality at all.

To put it in a little perspective, fifty thousand people are enough to fill a major American football stadium.  That is the turnout for a Rolling Stones concert in a large city.  That many people marching about and waving signs would have stopped traffic for blocks and required half the city’s police resources to manage and contain.  It’s starting to edge towards the turnout at events like the World Trade Organization riot in Seattle.  Peter claims an event of this magnitude occurred, but nobody heard of it, because the press kept it “secret”.

He later goes on about how “he isn’t a conspiracy theorist but..” – the old fallback.  When Peter says something crazy or hateful he hangs a lantern on it.  If you were writing a television script it would be like a close call happens and then one of the characters verbally making note of it, to help the viewer sidestep their own sense of disbelief.  Peter often qualifies himself this way.  He is trying to hand-hold you around the obvious conclusion that he is a bigoted wingnut.  He starts by saying he is not identified with some group of crazy or bigoted people, and then he says crazy and bigoted things, as though somehow the qualifier justifies the abject foolishness of his words.

On the whole the article paints a pretty pathetic picture of Peter.  He comes off as egotistical, paranoid, self-righteous and somewhat delusional.  They even spoke to other activists and painted them in a better light, right after Peter is given his little tirade about subversive elements working to destroy him.  There is nothing subversive about it, I’m right out in the open here, and my name is on the byline.  It’s not really an attempt at “destruction” either as one of “exposure”; if Peter is ruined by the truth he only has himself to blame.  The only thing Peter seems to have taken away from this is that they misapply the term “leader” to Peter himself.

Peter talks about how the campaign needs leaders; he even makes a point of quoting that in this comment below.

Can you name the “leader” of the pro-cannabis movement in Colorado that successfully campaigned for recreational cannabis?  How about in Washington State?  No, can’t think of it?  That’s because there wasn’t one person inflating their own ego on the back of an anti-prohibition campaign.  The UK has Peter Reynolds and Colorado and Washington have legal, recreational cannabis.  Who wins?

In the United States a group called National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws or NORML has played a key role in the change that is happening.  They have done it without engaging the circus of the electoral process with pointless candidates who can’t get votes, or with egotistical personality cults.  They have done it through a movement of consensus, many people working equally towards a common goal.

This model is effective because it prevents the sort of thing that is currently going on in the UK.  If the entire movement is about one man, that man’s personal flaws and shortcomings become the issue.  In the UK Peter Reynolds has spent all of his time for years making sure every conversation about cannabis is really about Peter Reynolds.  It is an endless campaign of self-promotion weakly veiled in a flimsy pro-cannabis campaign.

To Peter it has to be about personalities, specifically his own.  He’s not really that dialed into the issues, he spends more time talking about his own importance when he engages people on the topic.  He has been given a certain amount of attention from the media and Peter Hitchens in particular.  What does Hitchens think about this relationship?  Have a look…

Peter Reynolds imagines a friendship of equals, where Hitchens clearly thinks that Peter is a wry amusement, a momentary distraction from his real work.  He points out that he beat Peter in debates, and he is correct, met by Reynolds’ deflection of the facts and a ham-handed attempt to butter Hitchens’ bread.  That effort is notably met by silence.

Peter Hitchens debates Peter Reynolds for one simple reason: Peter Reynolds is to debating what a punching bag is to boxing.  It’s an easy win.  It’s a practice session for Hitchens.  It makes him look good, gives him a guaranteed win on his own record, and Reynolds is too egotistical and foolish to see he is playing the jester.  This is the same reason he appears in the press.

They don’t want a good example of cannabis users, because then it makes people like Hitchens, who are actually paid for this sort of work, look even better.  It’s like Fox News having one token “liberal” on a discussion panel that is too soft-spoken and mousy to get a word in edgewise.  Peter Reynolds is the prohibitionists’ straw man, all the better that he moves around and appears to speak of his own accord.  He’s all too happy to don the rainbow wig and squeaky clown nose, because any kind of attention is positive to him.

One wishes that his mother hugged him more, or less, or whatever influence made him so desperate to engage in this psychotic self-aggrandizement simply wasn’t there.  It’s a sad display that prohibitionists play on, and it CLEARly isn’t the answer.