Reynolds claims credit for the work of others

Warrington Borough Council take down Facebook page

Author: James Collins

Anybody who follows the UK cannabis movement will be aware of the controversy surrounding claims by Warrington Borough Council that cannabis is stronger than heroin.

For those that don’t know, earlier in the week, a local authority in northern England launched a campaign called “it’s not just a joint”, which included the ludicrous claim that “cannabis can be stronger than heroin and cannabis related crime is the most common drug related crime in Warrington”.

The news quickly spread on social media, including the NORML UK and the London Cannabis Club Facebook pages, which are the two largest cannabis related Facebook pages in the UK by far. NORML UK also quickly posted this excellent response to Warrington Council’s loopy claim by Clark French and Deej Sullivan.

This lead to an army of cannabis activists who follow NORML and the UK Cannabis Social Clubs leaving comments on the Facebook page of Warrington Council. They were angry, they wanted answers from the Council about the exceedingly silly claim they had made.  It’s nice to see the public won’t stand by and let this kind of nonsense stand unchallenged.  Undoubtedly Peter Reynolds also wrote an angry letter, because that is his shtick.  Peter is the wacky old crank with dust in the creases of his eyelids that writes cantankerous letters to the editor, from the days when newspapers were significant.

The following day, the Council’s response was to shut down their Facebook page, issuing the following statement “Due to a high volume of inappropriate comments and posts on the council’s public Facebook page, we have temporarily taken the page down.”

Warrington Council also issued a statement saying that the campaign was meant to pull punches, however, they were withdrawing the campaign saying “Uncertainty has arisen regarding some of the statistical data supporting the campaign. In the interests of ensuring robustness, we have decided to review the campaign.”  Yes, uncertainty; because evidently nobody kept track of whose ass their latest public information campaign was extracted from.

It has long been said in politics that local politics is a dumping ground for people too crazy and stupid to make it in the major leagues.  If you ever needed proof of that I would have to say that this would suffice all by itself.

The climbdown by the Council was the lead article in the local newspaper the Warrington Guardian, who quoted NORML UK as saying the claims were ‘irresponsible and dangerous’. Take note that it was not CLEAR who were contacted and quoted on the incident, despite claims by Peter Reynolds that he runs “the largest membership based drugs reform organization in the UK.” He doesn’t really call it a political party anymore, likely preparing for the inevitable day when they delist themselves from the Electoral Commission and take the financial details of their operation into secret entirely.

So there we have it, using the power of social media the UKCSC movement and NORML UK by issuing a swift and intelligently thought out response to Warrington Council’s League of Extraordinary Jackasses, the UK cannabis community scored a victory, by getting this ill thought out campaign shut down.

In the meantime, over in Camp CLEAR, their illustrious leader and president, Peter Reynolds, announced he was responsible for the backing down by Warrington Council following a CLEAR complaint.  Are you falling out of your chair yet?  Not likely, because at this point Peter could claim credit for the liberation of Europe and it wouldn’t seem out-of-place with his history of congratulating himself for other people’s accomplishments.

The article posted by NORML UK has so far received over a thousand likes, by contrast an article written by Peter Reynolds yesterday, this morning had received Nil Points – nobody liked it, (perhaps he was too pissed).  Normally one wouldn’t pay a great deal of attention to the number of likes something got on Facebook, but we have previously established that “likes” are the metric by which CLEAR measures popular support.  By this measure CLEAR is about as popular as syphilis chancre and anal warts.

Though we can report by early evening the article had received two likes, so we’re guessing that Peter Reynolds and his sock Owen Richards finally got round to liking it; come on Dewek and Manrag, take one for the team and pretend you genuinely still give a damn.

We’ll leave it to our readers to decide whether a campaign group that regularly posts blogs that receive over one thousand likes played a part in getting Warrington Council to withdraw its crazy assertion that cannabis is stronger than heroin, or was it down to Peter Reynolds and his joke of a political party that struggle to gather a two digit figure in the number of people who read the article and hit the like button on Facebook?

Peter is more and more like Adolph Hitler in the waning days of the war.  Cowering in his bunker, listening to false assertions from his closest minions and sycophants about the inevitable victory they are just about to snatch from the gore-dripping jaws of total defeat.  Pounding his fist on maps of things that never were, yelling for people to be shot and strung up from lampposts; Peter is less the figure of the mighty dictator and more a shadow of living failure with every passing day.