Peter Timms, governor of Maidstone Prison from 1975 to 1981, remembers the change. 'I suspect that if you looked at disciplinary reports in the late seventies and early eighties you'd start to find less reports about alcohol and more about cannabis than five or ten years earlier. It's a bit of an institutional game to beat the authorities making hooch, and the game changed in a way.' Making illegal alcohol involved bulky equipment, and the stuff smelt. So of course do burning joints, but the smell could be camouflaged behind the pungency of prison tobacco. Cannabis was routinely smuggled in - 'On open visits it was relatively easy for men to secrete in a variety of orifices.' Timms denies turning a blind eye to cannabis, but says that it was something dealt with as and when it arose rather than actively sought out. 'If you started going on purges on anything that was the road to disaster. You give it an attraction it doesn't deserve whatever it happens to be.'

In those other closed communities, fee-paying schools, cannabis stayed popular - not just among the pupils but sometimes among their parents as well. In 1998 Caroline Noortman, a former BBC radio journalist who is the mother of two public school boys, set up an organization called the London Lecture Group to lay on conferences on the issue of drugs in school. She says that there are pot smokers among the parents concerned enough to book places: 'You can get even quite nerdy-looking, quite anoraky parents who see giving a joint to their kid as a sort of rite-of-passage thing.'

It's the well-off who are the biggest drug users. The Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence10 pulled together statistics on drugs in Britain for Social Trends, the Government's annual guide to the way the country is changing. It found that the richest group in society, who in today'sjargon are called the 'thriving', are the second most likely group to use drugs between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine, though their level of use falls to the

lowest in the thirty to fifty-nine age group. The poorest class, the 'striving', show a less marked decline as they get older, from 24 per cent having used drugs in the last year, falling to 7 per cent in the group aged thirty and over. But the astonishing figure is the one related to the 'rising' class, defined as 'prosperous professionals in inner-city areas and better-off executives in metropolitan areas'. This class is most likely to use drugs when young meaning predominantly cannabis - and more than six times as likely as the seriously rich to continue using when over thirty.

It's not often that you get all the different cannabis tribes under a single roof But that was achieved by Britain's biggest retail cannabis operation of recent times. Most people only heard of the Back Beat Club on 2 December 1998, the day after 500 police armed with stun grenades and sub-machine-guns stormed the three-storey building in Denmark Place, a cul-de-sac leading off the Charing Cross Road in London's West End. But during the course of the year its reputation had grown steadily. For Zelda and Daniel, who were colleagues in a local office, it was like going to the pub after work on Friday, except that both liked to stay till 6 a.m.

Daniel: 'I think for me it was the convenience. After a hard day's work you could leave Tottenham Court Road, the traffic, and go somewhere and totally forget about it all. Basically we'd go to a wine bar, get totally hammered on alcohol, and then sit and buy a draw. You could get all the supplies you need: buy your weed, buy your Rizla behind the bar, sit down at a table and roll your spliff'

Zelda: 'You had this room where you could chill out and play your own music and just sit there for hours stoned off your trolley. On the dance floor there was a lot of really young people off their faces on Ecstasy and cocaine. One of the guys did sell Ecstasy but the main thing was weed.' more foreigners there sometimes than English people.'

Zelda: 'It was just like a local shebeen, but you don't see white people in those apart from white prostitutes with Yardie pimps ... This was men, women, black, white, Indian, Chinese. It was totally multicultural. You can't believe that a place like that would be in the West End.'

Daniel: 'It's a high-profile place for tourists, but you've got this operation which is 100 per cent illegal. But they got away with it and more and more people actually get away with it.'

In fact the Back Beat mixed not only races and nationalities but classes and age groups. There were City workers in suits, middle-aged train-spotter types, with anoraks and unfashionable glasses. In the late autumn, when it was obvious that a raid must be imminent, the regulars eyed each other nervously wondering if the respectable-looking ones were Drug Squad officers playing a game of double bluff. The operation was protected with CCTV cameras with a view not just outside the door but up the Charing Cross Road.

But the club itself was being watched. For six months, according to the Evening Standard, there had been surveillance teams in the EMI publishing offices opposite. For the final assault, timing was crucial to catch the dealers with the drugs. One team threw stun grenades after abseiling from the roof; another burst from an apparently broken-down lorry and swept in from the street, armed with sub-machine-guns and wearing flak jackets. Scotland Yard's press briefings led journalists to believe they'd find guns and hard drugs. But later in the week the story had scaled down; they'd only found cannabis. An Evening Standard team described how this was dealed out through a hatch, in £10 deals at a time of 'black' or weed: none of the punters were allowed inside to see the scale of the operation.

Except for my interviewee Zelda. She's a small, mischievous, mixed-race woman of thirty, who moved to an outer suburb to bring up her two children away from guns, Yardies and drugs. 'Their father moved too - to prison.' Her passions are weed and excitement, which she sometimes finds in spur-of-the-moment sex with acquaintances of either gender. She rapidly bonded with the doormen at the Back Beat, first by discovering that they'd been at school together, and a little later with successive encounters in the locked stock-room at the top of the stairs. 'I didn't want to take them home: I just wanted to have sex with them.' She doesn't accept my description of her as 'queen of the Back Beat', but she did enjoy certain prerogatives, like walking to the front of queues, knowing from experience that the doormen would throw out anyone who objected.

But Zelda's writ only ran on the bottom floors of the club, with the doormen and the barmen, who were black English. Outside the drugs room was a man who wore a glove even during the hottest weather to protect himself from 'residue' - powder traces from firing a hand-gun. Inside the room, as she found out, the drugs were guarded by recently arrived Jamaican gangsters. She didn't enjoy her experience there.

'Jesus, that was just mad. I'd been downstairs with my friends and we were completely pissed. We'd taken a bottle of Jack Daniels in with us and we were drinking Jack Daniels all night. I said, ''I'm going upstairs and buy a draw." I went upstairs and knocked. There was this guy sitting outside the hatch, and I put my money through, and all of a sudden the door swung open. There was three Yardies in there. The guy just sitting in front of the hatch helped me into this room. There was mountains, piles of weed like I'd never seen before, coke like I'd never seen before, and security TV screens.

'This guy said, "What do you want?" I said, "I just want to buy a draw." He said, "Have it." I said, "I'll pay for what I

want." You don't get nothing for nothing. I knew thev were Yardies because of the way they spoke: they were definitely just off the boat. I know what Yardies are like and I know what they're like with English women, whether they're black or white. They expect a certain thing from you. I want to fuck someone because I want pleasure, but the Yardies are into their little gang-bangs and shoving fucking bottles up women. They like to see violence and all sorts of shit.

'He said, "What do you suggest we all do?" They kept talking in that fucking Yardie slang they thought I couldn't understand. I thought I'd play stupid. They said, "Do you want a drink? A double whisky?" I was going: "Fuck this shit. I don't need this. I'm the nearest to the door. Is the door open or locked?" I walked out of the room when the guy came in to give me the whisky. He stopped me going down the stairs and sat me down on the stairs and was kissing my neck - he was so ugly as well. He's like saying, "I want to fuck you. I know you want to fuck me. You can have as much weed as you like." He's got his image of this stupid little girl that I'd made myself out to be. He had me in this grip, but I just managed to break out of it and I just ran downstairs and came back to my friend Daniel.'

This story would have been a gift to the scriptwriters on Reefer Madness, but it's more about prohibition and its consequences than cannabis itself: I can't imagine Al Capone's men being any more chivalrous in the same situation. The Yardies were among the people arrested on 1 December, but were given bail - inexplicably - and are unlikely to be seen again. The black English doormen mingled with the crowd during the raid and escaped. The very day after the raid, Zelda claims, they were offered their old jobs back on double pay. For a while they held out, then capitulated. She has heard that at the time of writing - seven weeks after the raid - the Back Beat is back in business, though in new premises and only as a cash-and-carry operation.

A cry that's often heard is 'Take it out of the hands of the gangsters'. At a conference I heard someone call for licensed shops where pot would be sold together with non-alcoholic refreshments (and, if the speaker had his way, organic wholefoods and Third World handicrafts). But Zelda doesn't want to stop buying from her dealer. Apart from anything else, she's a bad girl and wants to stay that way.

I know it's wrong, but I do find criminals glamorous - from a comfortable distance. It's an attitude that pisses off people campaigning for a change in the law, like the Exodus Collective. Zelda used to go to this group's free raves when she lived in Bedford in the early 1990s. Like the police who briefly closed down the Back Beat, Exodus specialized in timing: at breaking into a warehouse and rigging it for power, lights and sound in under an hour. She remembers good DJs and a tactical sense that left the police outnumbered and powerless and made Exodus a local legend in the 'new townships' described by George Orwell, cut off from London by the Green Belt but linked by the M25. 'They're not just ravers,' said Zelda. 'They're like a little community by themselves. They weren't just total wasters and off their faces all the time - they wanted to do something.'

Exodus came out of the council estates of South Luton - the least glamorous end of a prosperous but charmless light industrial town, and the part where the West Indian community was concentrated. There was a local dub sound system called Gemini, with two celebrated MCs: Federal Billy (now Prince Malachi) and General DC. Among 200 black reggae fans would be a handful of white guys, including Glenn Jenkins, now the best-known member of Exodus, getting off on the ganja, the late hour and the music. Prince Malachi told a Radio 1 documentary in 1998: 11 'He is white and I am black and we are from different cultures. and he is cominz into mv culture to seekr and respect to him for it.'

There were eight people behind the first party put on in June 1992 by the group which soon after would call itself Exodus. Some of them had been drug dealers, but soon moved from selling drugs to a form of drugs activism. Specifically, they became militantly hostile to hard drugs and evangelistic about cannabis. 'Our whole culture is spliff,' one of them told me. This doesn't isolate them from the wider drugs culture; they say a shared interest in spliff makes it easy for them to convey their message when they meet hard drug dealers. (They're relaxed about a middle category, including Es and speed, whose negative effects, if any, affect the individuals who take them rather than by whole communities.)

When I went to visit Exodus it was because they were planning to turn their particular skills to the cause of cannabis legalization. Michael Anthony was one of those working on a plan to squat a large number of empty shops simultaneously in order to sell cost-price weed openly. 'We had this idea of twenty different coffee shops all opening at ten o'clock. We'd all be masked up, wearing Clinton and Jack Straw masks. It would be £6 an eighth, totally non-profit-making. When the police tum up, whoever's serving up would jump over and everyone would make their stand. That's how it happened in Holland: there was 149 coffee shops. That's how they legalized it, or decriminalized it. So the police tum up - twenty different Drug Squads - and you say that next week there's another twenty opening up. We ran it by Release's solicitors. They say the maximum would be eighteen months for intention to supply. That sounds to me like a holiday. I'd get myself a little garden job, and there are some really good books I'd like to read.'

A non-profit operation and the risk of jail sounds pretty far removed from a weekly turnover of £300,000 defended by armed gangsters. As a former weed dealer, Glenn Jenkins has had to work hard to shake off the hostile perception that Exodus had been funded by dealing. 'Fuck the dealers,' he told me. 'We're not doing it for the dealers. We're doing it for the smokers.' But though against 'gangsterism and corporatism', Glenn instinctively lined up with the Back Beat against the armed crackdown. 'I say respect to them, even if they were taking a profit. They showed up the police with that hysterical response of theirs.'

Not taking a profit is a central principle. Exodus have the expertise to grow and sell large amounts of highly potent weed (the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in California in the 1960s offer a precedent for idealistically motivated drug dealing). Instead they offer seeds to encourage people outside Exodus to grow their own. The principle of selling at cost means that as a visitor you feel that you've defrauded them when you pay ridiculously little for a huge fried breakfast or a goat curry (made with the meat on the bone and marinated for several hours). This is served in the canteen of a former old people's home to the north of Luton which the Exodus members first squatted, then bought with a bank loan. The sprawling single-storey complex of buildings is now called Haz Manor (HAZ = Housing Action Zone) and houses fifty families. The whole collective helped convert the individual homes, which their owners have decorated and personalized. At first glance it looks familiar - chickens, kids, long hair - but suburban Luton isn't the deep rural version of hippiedom that my middle-class university contemporaries went in for. As Glenn says, 'We're not tuning in, turning on and dropping out. We're the bods. We're from right bang smack in the centre of the community.'

Many Exodus people live off Haz Manor in estates defended by the council's security cameras. They speak like Londoners - although Luton is an old town,12 most of the population are fairly recent emigrants from the capital - and dress in trainers, ombat trousers and hooded sports tops. Their vocation is 'to link the culture to the mainstream - not to stay out on the fringe'. Steve Jacobs: 'Most middle-aged men between forty and fifty, working-class people, have accepted it.' Glenn Jenkins: 'I know people are up for this message on cannabis. I like it when it's Mr and Mrs might have some of that - not an Eco warrior.'

Glenn Jenkins worked for ten years as a train driver. He was an ASLEF shop steward, and his heroes include Tony Benn as well as Bob Marley, though he doesn't suppose Berm would give Exodus a whole-hearted endorsement. 'He was anti-cannabissmoking because he thinks it makes you drop out of work activity - which is generally true - and therefore you're dropping out of the struggle, because the struggle for rights is in the workplace.'

Exodus is dedicated to a different sort of struggle outside the workplace, but Glenn keeps an interest in the low-wage, electronically monitored work on offer to school-leavers through New Labour's 'New Deal'. One of his favourite books is Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the classic text of pre-World War I socialism. The book is set in 'Mugsborough', a thinly disguised version of Hastings, where its author worked for a firm of slapdash and money-grabbing builders, looking with longing desperation towards a socialist dawn while excoriating the corrupt local establishment. Glenn feels similarly about Luton, a town dominated by Vauxhall Motors and by Whitbread, the brewers. He once worked at the former Bedford Commercial Vehicles, rechristened IBC, which has operated Japanese work disciplines since Isusu 'bought' it in 1983 from General Motors - although, it transpires, Isusu was at the time 40 per cent and is now 90 per cent owned by General Motors. 'Our local MP assisted General Motors in creating a climate of fear that Bedford Commercial Vehicles was about to close. That's a cost to Luton of 6,000 jobs and this massive fear went through the town. Then this Japanese company Isusu say, 'We can save this place' and everyone says, 'Thank fuck for that.'

The local bourgeoisie are the enemy, whether imposing 'Roman working conditions', through blackmail and coercion, or in the form of 'Sam Whitbread, knocking out drugs': more precisely ethanol in the form of beers, wines and spirits, as sold in Luton's pubs. Back in 1992 Glenn claimed there had been a 40 per cent drop in pub takings when Exodus were playing, not to mention a 6 per cent drop in crime. 'The pub landlords were going to Sam Whitbread and Sam Whitbread went to the police. We were forced to look at the background.'

Exodus have made enemies, but also allies. The police have been round Haz Manor, seen the outdoor cannabis plants and been told about the ten-per-person rule. They have clearly decided not to descend in force to uphold the law. And for what it's worth, the Church of England diocese of St Albans thinks they're a good thing. It's difficult not to like them. When I was with them I found myself almost as a reflex taking up their funny handshake, which then ends up as a hand-clasp with the fingers threaded together. I also felt I should manage at least a token puff when a spliff was going round - and as a spliff always was going round, and I hadn't built up much tolerance, conversations seemed to happen in a dream. (Mick Anthony claims I hit a particularly taxing day, as a new crop was being assessed, and the conversation about cannabis put them in the mood.) I have notes, but I can't put faces to them, or I can remember faces but couldn't tell you what they said.

Perhaps because I kept doggedly writing, Steve, Mick and Glenn's conversation mostly took the form of a tour of Exodus's philosophy. All three, and others who joined in, agreed on every point, so I won't worry too much about my uncertainty about exactly who said what. There's a precise question I'd like to have asked, but didn't. This was whether they thought their anti- capitalist, 'spiritual' outlook came from 'chuffing' ganja 13 reflecting the state of mind you get into when you're stoned - or whether it was the other way round. Equally it could be that the collective's socialist principles had steered them towards a drug that lends itself to being produced on a non-profit basis and doesn't cause addiction or crime. They themselves are very willing to give credit to ganja, seen as expressing the will of a quasi-conscious planet. 'Weed-smoking is a natural response to the dangers posed by the attitude of humanity. We're saying it's a drug that makes you think naturally, slows you down from Babylon speed. If the earth's got a self-defence policy, it's the weed. The way it's so easy to grow - it's a God-given plant for sure.' They talk about how weed is helpful in giving up addictive drugs, something that has been asserted in the medical literature. But I suspect they're underplaying the importance of their ideology. Cannabis isn't enough in itself to guarantee social harmony; after all, the 1960s' psychedelic revolution went in exactly the opposite direction to Exodus, starting with weed and then being engulfed in a blizzard of chemicals.

With all the ganja in the air, everyday chores become pregnant with significance. One strand of the conversation comes from Glenn's absence for a few hours to get a dog to scare away burglars; he's chosen a sweet-natured but fierce looking English bull terrier from a local dog's home: 'While it's violent out there we're going to need our dogs.' It's the art of non-violent defence against burglars, gangsters and the police. 'I'd rather accept their violence than give it back to them any time the police come and weigh in, with sirens, uniforms, all these things that are military images designed to make it look as though there's more troops than there really are. Uniforms do that. When they bang their sticks on the floor ... You can go up to a line with them nose to nose with you. If you're not prepared to fight violently there's a warrior sense that that's cowardly. That's a Roman attitude that they've bred into you. To take but not to give it back, that's a lot harder. If you're a Roman you just go with the flow.'

They sum up Exodus as: ganja + rave + Bob Marley, now a kind of Christ figure in much of the Third World.14 'Reggae music is spiritually aware because of black slavery. Because black slavery was the worst atrocity. So for someone to come out amongst the murder and the blood and not be hateful and vengeful but saying One Love and Stand Up For Your Rights, that's the sign of a spiritual movement ... 'Rasta is the only spiritual warrior. Every one else is a spiritual but not a warrior. A Buddhist will take himself into the quiet of a contemplation. What about the screaming? What about the warring?' Exodus is multi-racial, but its white members don't try to talk like Jamaicans. 'We aren't sitting with dreadlocks saying Rastafari. What's happened is that the religion is alive and well in Jamaica, but I see us as a mutation of that; we're a spiritual movement but we are not Rastafarians. Spirituality is about, to do good for others. It's that moral life -like you're part of a whole rather than an individual, whereas Babylon is about doing well against each other.'

All the talk of Rome and Babylon sounds Rastafarian, but Exodus also gave me a sense of English traditions. Sometimes I was reminded of Robert Tressell's socialists, but at other times there were much more distant echoes - almost of the soldiers of Cromwell's New Model Army who sang as they marched:

For God begins to honour us The saints are marching on

The sword is sharp, the arrows swift To destroy Babylorr.t "

The Enzlish Civil War snawned scores of zrouns of workin

men who like Rastas derived their world view from the Bible: the Quakers, Shakers, Fifth Monarchists, Levellers and Diggers. The Behmenists, followers of Jakob Boehme (1576-1624), popularized the idea of the coming of the New Age, of spiritual liberty for the children of God. The Quakers are still around; the Muggletonians survived until the 1970s and the death of the last follower of a seventeenth-century tailor named Ludowick Muggleton. In Witness against the Beast, the historian E. P. Thompson describes how this last member of the sect allowed him to examine the Muggletonians' archive, and how this enabled him to understand the ideas underlying William Blake's prophetic writings.

Though Exodus live on the edge of the law, they appear more respectable these days than the precursors of the Muggletonians, the Ranters, who flourished briefly in the 1650s, and were noted for blasphemy, free love and smoking tobacco, then still novel and controversial.16 Or after a long enough ganja session could we even see Exodus as reincarnated monks (communitarianism and voluntary poverty)? Not that there's any claim to hair shirts. Glenn admits that they are 'British; English; comfortabilist. In the world that we live in poverty is relative. If you lived in Somalia and had to adapt in solidarity with the poorest people you wouldn't be able to struggle.'

Exodus's current campaign is to create what they call their 'Ark': in planning application terms, a community centre in a disused warehouse in the middle of a housing estate, creating workshops and entertainment areas. Their members, many of whom originally used drug-dealing as a way out of alienated employment, have developed a multi-racial cannabis culture that feels home-grown and here to stay, with the same powerful, imprecise appeal of Blake's 'Jerusalem'. Glenn says: 'I think now is the time for the victory of hearts and minds over misery - and

England is the prime place. It's class-ridden, but in England we don't hurt each other that much.'

This discourse, high-minded in every sense, isn't the way Exodus people talk all the time. They're also as addicted as Egyptians round a water-pipe to what they call 'ramping', or piss-taking. I find them convincing and impressive; not so Zelda, who preferred their earlier guise. In fact, the more I tell the little cynic about their idealistic views, the more irritated she becomes, finally snarling, 'That's all bollocks, that is. You'd better not get me in a room with them guys.' But plenty of other people, including their local police commander, are ready to applaud Exodus for going from small-time hustling to alternative politics and for their campaign against Class A drugs. Their achievement is to create a fully fleshed-out, home-grown version of ganja culture, which now co-exists with that other new phenomenon: the movement for medical cannabis.

In an Amsterdam hotel it isn't odd to overhear someone asking where to find a coffee shop. When you check in at the Hotel Ostade you in any case get given a map and advice on where to find the drugs area and the red light district. The young woman who'd made the request had a sensible English voice and smart clothes, but then pot-smoking couples often consist of a dishevelled male and a well-turned-out girlfriend. It just seemed rather early to want to get stoned - 9.30 in the morning, when she'd just arrived on an all-night coach trip from London.

This was the last day of the Cannabis Cup and hundreds of Americans were in town. A Frenchwoman who'd spent all week on the French stand at the Cannabis Cup's Hemp Expo helped out with a couple of names but warned 'neither of them are open till eleven'. The Englishwoman and her boyfriend found another one in their guidebook - the Green House, in Tolstraat, not too distant and opening at 10 a.m. Off the couple went; the girl, I noticed, was on crutches. Cicely turned out to have MS and to be a medical cannabis user - the first I'd met.

Next day at breakfast I sat at her table. We were both drinking too much tea and coffee to pretend that either of us felt quite OK. She was no longer on crutches and we took turns in making fresh cups on a scarily hissing piece of equipment. She said, 'I feel as bad as I did yesterday. My head feels this big' (indicating an imaginary goldfish bowl). But she was up for a conversation.

What intrigued me was that such a straight-looking girl should be smoking weed, even for medical reasons.

'When I was at university I was a real "drugs are for mugs" nerd - in fact I moved three times because my housemates smoked dope. It's really sad, isn't it? I look back and think - what a precious little girl. It was the way I was brought up, I suppose: drugs of any kind were no good. Plus I was asthmatic and I didn't like people smoking in the house - and I don't like people behaving like morons. I thought it was the effect; I'd rather missed the point that they were morons before they smoked.'

It was her family doctor who'd suggested she try cannabis, and other doctors had since agreed that it was a good idea. 'The one who suggested it was female; she'd just had a baby. Of course she said, if you get caught don't mention my name. Then there's the one I've got at the moment - he's a Pakistani male - and an orthopaedic surgeon who's English through and through, and they're all up for it. It was quite convenient as my fiance Liam had smoked for three years. I now roll four joints a day.' Cicely demonstrated how she makes them; very long, it seemed to me. 'Well, they're very thin and elegant. We buy a couple of ounces every two months, which should come to £30 a week, but we pay less because we buy in bulk. But in England you get really ripped off and the hash at the moment is so bad that it makes me retch. "Soap bar" - yerchh.' The words 'soap bar' still sound strange coming from Cicely (who asked me not to use her real name so as not to upset her mother).

'With dope I get my medication down to about a tenth of my usual levels. I'm prescribed around twenty drugs. One of the main ones is dihydrocodeine, which is an opiate one step below morphine. I've found that having dihydrocodeine and dope isn't a good thing - that it has negative effects.

'Dope is an anti-spasmodic: the effect is to make everything work correctly. It's also excellent for when you're bored: there was a period of time when I couldn't get out of bed or function in any way. I'd actually prefer to have the pain-killing without the mental effect, though it's still nice sometimes to have the freedom to just go with it. What it does do to people is to make them slightly more remote, and I don't think that's a bad thing. If I moaned to Liam as much as I feel I want to I'd drive him round the bend. And I can actually work on it. I'm doing a degree in biochemical sciences - laboratory medicine - and this last year I actually allowed myself to smoke while writing my assessment exams and report, and my marks have gone rocketing through the roof'.

Cicely turns out to be quite representative of many cannabis users who, in Europe at least, only began smoking after the onset of an illness. In Holland, where it could hardly be easier to buy cannabis in one of the specially licensed coffee shops, there is a large operation supplying marijuana through pharmacists; 400 of the country's 1,500 chemists' shops sell 25-gram tubs of highTHC weed for the equivalent of £100, restricted to patients with a doctor's prescription. Marcel de Wit, the chairman of Maripharm, which grows and packages cannabis, told me he started the company in 1994 in response to a demand from patients who wouldn't go near a coffee shop.

'Most of the time the patients are very old people and people who have money. It's like the time that alcohol was forbidden but only the rich got it on doctor's prescription. So our group of patients don't want to have anything to do with coffee shops and recreational use and they're very angry if they see a young kid smoking a joint and laughing. So they're very serious; they want to cure their symptoms and they don't want to get high.'

Marcel de Wit runs a curious business; two of his colleagues outlined their work in a presentation to the International Cannabinoid Research Society in July 1998. They described how they'd succeeded in growing plants with high levels of the psychoactive THC (delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol), and with less than 0.1 per cent variation between batches, and how after harvesting the female flowering heads they sealed them in plastic tubs and gamma-irradiated them to kill any fungal spores. Such spores can be a danger for patients with weakened immune systems, but Maripharm's product beats coffee-shop weed in that it can be guaranteed free of contamination. They grow a strain of cannabis called 'Plant 1001' under grow-lights and use no chemical sprays. For quality control the company sends regular samples to a Dutch Government lab which carries out tests and analyses which guarantee that the weed is free of pesticide residues. Medical cannabis is available under the Dutch equivalent of the National Health Service, in which insurance companies refund the cost of patients' supplies. And the whole operation is in breach of Dutch law and operates without any official Government tolerance.

At the time I spoke to Marcel de Wit early in 1999 there were rumours that even the tolerant Dutch might be on the point of ending these legal anomalies and closing down the Maripharm operation until it has created the licensing framework required by international treaties. The Dutch Government has only issued one such licence, to an Amsterdam company called HortaPharm for its own project to develop a medical marijuana strain, which has now come to the end of its term. A toughening line on medical cannabis has aborted the clinical trials on cannabis for MS patients that Maripharm were running with a leading Dutch teaching hospital.

Now it's in the United Kingdom rather than in liberal Holland that medical researchers are soon going to evaluate cannabis. There is a long list of conditions in which it is thought to help, including migraine, glaucoma, nausea induced by chemotherapy, depression, anorexia, AIDS wasting syndrome. However, the first clinical trials will concentrate on two of the best-attested applications, in relieving chronic pain and the symptoms of MS.

Until I met Cicely, cannabis as a treatment for MS had been an abstraction; part of a bundle of scientific and political arguments I could find my way around while staying neutral on the central proposition. Few anti-cannabis campaigners are even troubled by doubt: medical use is, in the words of Professor Gabriel Nahas, 'a fraud', a 'scandal' and a 'hoax'. Peter Stoker of the National Drugs Prevention Alliance talks about a 'Medi-Pot scam' perpetrated in order to give credibility to the legalization lobby.

Seen in this light, the pot-using patients must either be committed members of the lobby or have been duped by it. A parallel conspiracy has to be assumed among doctors, since respectable people would hardly start taking an illegal drug simply on the say-so of some hippie. The reputation of cannabis partly rests on word-of-mouth among patients, backed up by self-help groups like the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics and, as in Cicely's case, supported by a developing consensus among doctors. One reason for their interest is the discovery of how cannabis works (described in the next chapter); among other things, this discovery has helped to explain the drug's extremely low toxicity. It's virtually impossible to die of an overdose, and unwanted effects such as possible anxiety and short-term memory loss go away when the dose wears off 1 Cannabis doesn't kill off brain cells, as some people think, though you may give that impression if you're stoned all the time.

Fear, which invariably gets called 'paranoia', is the most common bad consequence of smoking cannabis, normally stopping some way short of the fully dramatized hallucinations of a bad LSD trip. It's the downside of the unpredictability that makes Freek Polak classify pot as 'psychodysleptic', and which means that despite his plainly addictive personality, Karl McCullogh doesn't feel at risk from dope. 'It isn't like any other drug. The reason cannabis isn't addictive is that it doesn't necessarily improve things. It enhances perception - but that can be a bad perception. So if you're feeling low it's really pointless taking Cannabis. I do think it increased the paranoia after my heart attack.' (On the other hand many MS patients, who have plenty to worry about, find that cannabis gives them more equanimity.)

Pro-cannabis experts claim that inexperienced smokers are more at risk. Dr Freek Polak says that unfamiliarity in itself is unsettling: 'When you become aware that the way you think or the way you see the world is changing or has changed - that can be a frightening experience in itself' In Hashish! Robert e. Clarke says that feelings of anxiety or even panic are 'rarely a strong effect' for experienced users. But even if you've been smoking on and off you can get into trouble if you break too many of Professor Tart's suggestions for ensuring a good experience.

I remember being petrified with fear during my first visit to the Rif in the mid-1970s. A young guy had met me and my then girlfriend in Chef chao en and invited us out to his farm, where we'd stayed one or maybe two nights. The views over the hills were exhilarating, and it was fascinating to see how hashish was made, with an oldish colleague permanently stoned from beating powder from dried plants over a sieve. But it was a claustrophobic social situation: we were imprisoned in our role as guests; our host didn't want to talk or go for a walk or do anything except smoke relentlessly. So I sat mutely beside my girlfriend accepting joints which soon tipped us from being ill at ease to feeling grossly anxious.

The set-up wasn't ideal, but the main thing that made us miserable was simply excess. There is such a thing as too much cannabis, even for enthusiasts. Two of the peoples of the Congo, the Kassai and Balaba, this century formed a cannabis cult called the Beni Riamba, using the herb as a medicine and a symbol of peace, but also as a means of punishing criminals by forcing them to smoke to the point of unconsciousness. On the face of it you'd expect long-term cannabis smokers like Karl McCulloch to be immune from this problem and be Paranoia-free. Yet in the world of what might be called 'cannabis professionals' - people who sell pot, or raise seeds, or write on the subject - it's surprisingly common to hear that so-and-so is chronically 'paranoid'. An acquaintance lived for several months in Amsterdam with friends who, unlike her, all smoked a lot of pot. 'There was always this paranoia under the surface,' she told me. In Amsterdam I also heard a lot about the paranoia of various cannabis celebrities: how one wouldn't venture from home for fear of DE A agents, another was so given to feelings of persecution that he felt he was insane to risk further anxiety in search of journalistic exclusives, and so on ... In fairness, though, people who make their living from selling or writing about an illegal substance have good reason to feel threatened. Although Howard Marks tells me that he is not troubled by paranoia, I would not like to have been in his shoes during the months in which the Drug Enforcement Administration was closing the net around his smuggling operation.

Of course, 'paranoia' is a word which in psychiatry means something more precise than a well-founded fear of prison. The Royal College of Psychiatrists reported to the House of Lords committee that the phrase 'cannabis psychosis' should be avoided, because of its lack of precision. Instead they describe a 'toxic confusional state', with confusion and memory impairment and an 'acute functional psychosis', resembling the symptoms of acute schizophrenia. Both of these were to be distinguished from true psychosis in that they cleared up within a week of abstaining from cannabis.

As well as being a pro-legalization activist, Dr Polak has spent many years treating emergency psychiatric admissions to Dutch hospitals. 'There used to be a large general hospital near the Vondelpark - it's now been removed to the south-east part of town. But the Emergency Room got very experienced with these cases: many tourists, but also Dutch people who first tried it. If you have people who are very frightened that they're going mad combined with the specific experiences of cannabis you can have something that looks like an acute psychosis. The classic medical approach was to give them heavy sedation and even anti-psychotic drugs, or to hospitalize them. But all over the world this approach has been replaced by simply reassuring them. You hope they have a friend or a confidant with them and say that if they remain quiet for half an hour it will get better, or if it's bad you offer a little tranquillizer.

'A very small percentage of these cases are really psychotic, and it may even prove to be the beginning of schizophrenia. Probably no one gets schizophrenic because of this, and they would have become schizophrenic anyway. We have no way of knowing that. What is reassuring is that the incidence of schizophrenia - that is, the number of new cases each year - has been getting somewhat lower for the past few years in Holland. It certainly isn't increasing, and given the large number of young people trying marijuana I think that is significant.'

I've been advised to smoke pot by a doctor. It was in my personal crisis of the summer of 1997 when my wife had left to move in with her boyfriend. An ex-girlfriend of mine, now a professor of Community Medicine, suggested I smoke a joint or two, but avoid prescription tranquillizers or anti-depressants. In the event, I thought that any drugs, or too much drink, would stop me holding things together. Now we've reversed roles; I've just visited her two days after she underwent surgery to remove a small breast cancer, and seen her battling to get enough pain relief, after only a single day on morphine. The doctors in the specialist pain team are held back by the toxicity of most pharmaceutical anaelgesics. Although I'm completely unqualified, I find myself burning to tell the staff everything I now know about the effectiveness of cannabis, its low toxicity and its apparent synergy with opiates given in tiny quantities.t

This is a message that doctors were increasingly prepared to listen to during the 1990s. In 1997 there were separate reports published by the British Medical Association and the US National Institutes of Health. In 1998 a committee of the House of Lords made up of distinguished retired scientists took written and spoken evidence over a period of months and in November produced a report. Professor Leslie Iverson, the scientific advisor to the committee and Visiting Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford University, told me that the biggest impression had been made by the personal testimony of MS patients. This of course was anecdotal evidence rather than hard science; however, it was given weight by a scientific paper documenting the claims made by 112 cannabis-smoking MS patients, which concluded in favour of taking these claims seriously and investigating them further.

Several of the stories forwarded to the Lords' committee carried an extra emotional charge because they took the form of handwritten letters. One described growing three cannabis plants in the greenhouse among the tomatoes and making the dried leaves into shortbread. Eaten before bedtime, this greencoloured biscuit guaranteed a peaceful night for both the writer and her husband. Otherwise, she wrote, 'Violent muscle spasms in my left leg would make me cry out in pain, and mv leg would jerk and bounce in the bed.' Another was from a seventy-five year-old patient who had had MS since the age of thirty; she wrote: 'I am in a wheelchair, which means it has to be brought to me, which means my supplier is running a risk. I have dreadful spasms in my legs and can take pills like diazepam without any effect. Half a cigarette a day doctored with cannabis stops the spasms within ten minutes. I have to pay £30 for a piece as long (mainly) as my little finger and half the thickness. I find it very difficult because I only have my pension and mobility allowance.' The conclusion: 'When, oh when, is it going to be legalized and put on prescription?'

The committee recommended that until more conventional cannabis-based medicines could be developed, patients should be allowed to possess herbal cannabis, provided they had a doctor's prescription. The Blair Government immediately ruled this out, but the very fact of the recommendation will have had an impact. My solicitor told me that his parents-in-law are constantly at odds over the issue. His mother-in-law would like to smoke pot to relieve the symptoms of her MS, but her conservatively-minded husband objects. 'Now at least she can quote the House of Lords as being on her side,' said my solicitor, who is professionally inclined to be impressed by House of Lords rulings. Similarly, Cicely now has a defence if her mother discovers her puffing on a joint.

In Britain, however, the medical cannabis issue dovetails with people's disinclination to get very worked up about this particular drug of abuse. Among the two-fifths of people under thirty who have smoked a joint at some time.' are a large number of future doctors: a study at Newcastle University Medical School published in 1998 found that more than 25 per cent of medical students were pot smokers. Although I believe that the medical and recreational arguments about pot are different, there is an overlap. Six of the nine medical marijuana witnesses to the House of Lords had not smoked before they became ill, but three had (which looks like a fair reflection of the national statistical picture). For a novel treatment, cannabis has a flying start; people are receptive in a way that they surely wouldn't be if, say, crack cocaine started being touted as a cure-all.

There is a lobbying group on each side of the Atlantic; both organizations are called the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics (ACT). The British version was founded by an MS patient living in Leeds, who took the pseudonym Clare Hodges to protect her two young children. She describes the ACT as 'a loose affiliation of patients, doctors and politicians', inspired and helped by the longer-established organization based in Washington, DC. Clare Hodges told the House of Lords that when she first discussed cannabis with her doctors they had been sympathetic but not well informed: 'They all said it couldn't do me much harm in moderate doses and was probably safer than many of the medicines they could prescribe.' The House of Lords backed the ACT's objective of making cannabis available immediately on a doctor's prescription. It probably helped that Clare Hodges spelt out that she was not campaigning for general legalization: 'Even if cannabis were legalized we would still be campaigning, as we think seriously ill people should get their medicine from their doctor and not have to provide it for themselves.'

As well as a British ACT there's a struggling and persecuted counterpart of the buyers' clubs that supply around 100,000 patients in the United States. The man behind it is Colin Davies, a young-looking forty-year-old joiner from Stockport, Manchester. Before the bizarre events of the night of 26 December 1995 he was a successful contracts manager for a firm of shopfitters which worked, among other clients, for British Home Stores and MotherCare. On that Boxing Night he had gone out for a drink with his parents at a scenicallv situated ub, whose garden looked out over a steep valley.

I'd gone outside with my father to get a bit of fresh air, because everybody was packed inside, and to get a cigarette. We was both talking - there was a mill opposite that we were reminiscing about - then my father said, "I'll go and get the drinks." It's very dark, this place, and I was just stood there. I could hear footsteps on the gravel. I didn't turn round because I was deep in thought, and the next thing somebody grasped the back of my waistband and said, "See how you like this, you fucking bastard." ,

That was the last thing Colin remembers before coming round in hospital. He had been rushed there after being found unconscious in the valley below the pub the following morning by someone out walking his dog. (His parents had left assuming he had gone on somewhere else on the spur of the moment.) He was paralysed, his spine was fractured in three places and his shoulder was shattered. Since then he hasn't worked, though he can walk again. There is more he could say about the assailants who left him for dead, but legal proceedings are under way. He has been left in constant pain. 'I've had bolts put in and taken out. My shoulder's in bits; I've got pieces of bone fragments around my spinal cord and now and then they interfere with my spinal cord and then I'm in extreme pain. If you can imagine having a huge splinter between the bones of your spine ... even breathing you feel a pain and movement is even worse.'

Although his appearance doesn't suggest any stereotyped idea of a pot smoker, Colin had before his injuries smoked a modest eighth of an ounce or less a week. While still in hospital he met people in wheelchairs as the result of road injuries who told him that cannabis relieved chronic pain. He found that it worked. Without cannabis he takes the maximum recommended dose of eight tablets of Tylex, a codeine and paracetemol mixture which leaves him nauseous. But he can halve his intake of pills if he smokes four joints a day, and he says they make him relaxed rather than outright stoned. But getting hold of those joints hasn't been easy. Perhaps he attracted attention by going to wellknown dealers: one morning at 10 a.m. the Stockport police broke down his door and searched the flat hoping, he thinks, to find cannabis by the kilo. Instead they uncovered just one plant, for which Colin was arrested and cautioned. This haul was modest enough; a second police raid caught up in its nets Colin's unassuming companion, his grey African parrot Mary.

'When I came out of hospital I was on Disability Living Allowance but that was stopped two years ago, and I couldn't afford to buy any because I was on £64 a week, so I decided to grow my own, and this was where the second bust came. I had eighteen plants and when I was taken to the Magistrates Court I was pleading Not Guilty. I'd got the seed from the parrot food and I didn't know ifit was actually cannabis.' No one ever found out; the police had allowed the seized material to decompose, and the magistrates threw the case out.

Then there was a third prosecution, which took place in June 1998 and involved another batch of eighteen plants. Now the saga moved to a higher plane. The facts weren't in dispute, and the prosecution told the Manchester Crown Court jury that having taken an oath to give a true verdict according to the law, they had a duty to return a Guilty verdict. But they didn't. After the judge had explained that a defendant might be justified in breaking a law to avoid death or some other extreme threat, the jury deliberated for forty minutes and then declared Colin Not Guilty. Afterwards an expert witness at the trial, Matthew Atha of the Independent Drugs Monitoring Unit, declared that the verdict would bring closer the day when cannabis for medical purposes would be legalized.

After the resulting publicity, Colin was contacted by two activists with MS from Edinburgh and Huddersfield, West Yorkshire respectively. Soon afterwards the three of them publicly launched the Medical Marijuana Co-operative, run from Colin's flat. The inspiration was the American buyers' clubs that have flourished, especially in California, since state voters passed Proposition 2154 on 5 November 1996 declaring medical marijuana lawful. The system in California works rather like the Dutch pharmacies supplied by MariPharm (who offered Colin moral support, though not supplies). Patients bring personal identification and a doctor's letter to the club. This is then verified and a check is made that the doctor is a bona fide practitioner before issuing the marijuana. As the three got the co-operative under way, planting a crop of plants and designing ID cards for members, Colin phoned for advice from Scott Imler of Los Angeles' Cannabis Research Center. 'I think what I told him was not to do it until there's some type of law there,' is Scott's memory of their three conversations.

The LA buyers' club, which serves 580 patients, has stuck meticulously to rules designed to restrict supplies to genuine medical cases and has prospered - unlike six clubs in Northern California which were raided by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The state referendums have created an interesting conflict between state and national law, which continues to ban all use of marijuana (except for a federal programme supplying a handful of experimental patients, which dates from the 1970s and has been deliberately run down). Washington counterattacked on two fronts: by threatening to withdraw the right to prescribe from doctors who recommended marijuana to their patients, and by sending (DEA) agents as agents provocateurs to try to buy marijuana with insufficient or bogus documentation.

Perhaps the Northern Californian clubs had become complacent. Terence Hallinan, the San Francisco District Attorney in the years before Proposition 215 was passed, was an ally, a believer in decriminalization on the Dutch coffee-shop model and a friend of Dennis Peron, the gay activist who wrote the text of215. (Hallinan had been famous for his policy that if Assistant DAs wanted to prosecute for marijuana, 'The cases had better be big and the defendants had better be bad.') After the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Co-operative was raided, the city authorities attempted to keep it going by giving its staff the same status as city police, who are legally protected from prosecution under a statute intended to give immunity to undercover officers.

In Los Angeles, where they lacked the support of the local administration, Scott Imler and his colleagues were alert enough to spot the fake papers carried by the DEA investigators and refuse to serve them. Scott, a former special needs teacher who uses marijuana to relieve his epilepsy, is troubled by Dennis Peron's much-reported claim that 'All marijuana use is medical.' 'That's not what the voters voted for. I understand that marijuana legalization is his agenda, and I think it's incredibly disingenuous. There are many people from the drug legalization movement who got on the medical issue bandwagon and supported it; they don't have the right to change the meaning of the law after it's passed.'

The LA Cannabis Research Center grows 146 pounds in weight of marijuana a year, which accounts for 60 per cent of its turnover. The pot is grown under lights and Scott says it's so fresh that the problem of fungal contamination does not arise: 'Fungus is a product of the black market.' Three-quarters of the members are AIDS patients and virtually all are people who Scott says would have used marijuana before falling ill. In America the views of older people were formed in the 1940s and 1950s, and they're still too influenced by the press and movie campaigns of that era to risk a bout of reefer madness.

Colin Davies obviouslv wasn't persuaded bv Scott Imler's advice to hold fire with his medical marijuana co-op and wait for a change in the law. In November 1998 the police raided him for a fourth time after waiting, Colin suspects, till the Government had decided to reject the House of Lords' recommendation that medical cannabis should be legalized or tolerated. But while one lot of medical cannabis plants was being seized from Colin Davies's flat, a much larger number were thriving, with Government approval, in a glasshouse complex in the South of England. Their owner was a forty-four-year-old Englishman called Dr Geoffrey Guy.

I first saw Geoffrey Guy in the ornate but dignified setting of the House of Lords' Committee Room No 3. He was sitting facing the semi-circle of peers and offering an impromptu seminar on the science of cannabis smoked in joints. Although smoking obviously wasn't medically acceptable, a joint actually worked very well as a delivery system. Inhalation bypassed the liver, meaning that the THC was not broken down as it was when you eat it, producing the even more hallucinatory byproduct 11-hydroxy- THc. Also, as the effect was immediate, patients could adjust or 'titrate' their dose, so that they'd get enough of the drug into their bloodstream to relieve their symptoms without, he said, actually getting stoned. Next, he argued in favour of giving patients cannabis rather than cannabis derived medicines; experience showed that they preferred the whole plant to pure THC (which is prescribed quite widely in the United States under the brand-name of Marino 1), and it was likely, as with other whole-plant medicines, that the sixty different cannabinoids found in the plant interacted and modified each other's action.

The lords on the committee clearly took a shine to the young medical entrepreneur and in their published report they 'warmly welcomed' his initiative. Afterwards, in the high-ceilinged,

wood-panelled corridor that runs down the upper floor of the Houses of Parliament, I competed for his attention with other members of the world of cannabis lobbyists and pressure groups.

'You're writing a book about cannabis - another one?' he asked. I batted the question back: 'Are there lots?' In reply he tugged at his briefcase to suggest the physical weight of the rival tomes. 'So what line are you taking? Is the main angle about Britain or America - I mean, are you calling it "cannabis" or "marijuana "?' Why did I have to tell him that my current working title was 'dope' (which sounds old-fashioned anyway)? Perhaps in response to the Victorian surroundings I'd unconsciously structured this encounter along the lines of one of those nineteenth-century Punch cartoons which end with the phrase, 'collapse of stout party'. In fact a cloud did briefly pass across his good-natured features, and later his PR people wrote expressing concern that there should be any blurring of the issues of legalizing 'medical' and 'recreational' cannabis. But actually the non-smoking, non-drinking Dr Guy was developing a certain relish for the subject. I told him that I had recently been in the hashish-producing Rif region of Northern Morocco. 'Ah,' he said, suspecting not just research but indulgence. 'Soap bar, eh?' Geoffrey Guy was interested in soap bar, not because of its naff reputation, but because of the high ratio of the less well understood CBD (cannabidiol) to THC in Moroccan hashish.

Quite soon afterwards he gave me an interview at the offices of his PR company over sandwiches and Chilean Sauvignon Blanc (he drank water). He'd set aside an hour, but didn't then tell me my time was up, so I stayed and stayed, filling a whole notebook with a kind of outsider's guide to cannabis. Many cannabis experts spend years or decades talking to the converted, with little expectation that they'll make a difference. Geoffrey Guy, after only a year, has been faced with the task of persuading the Home Office and the Medicines Control Agency to accept him, in effect, to run Britain's medical cannabis nrozramme. The result was that he was firing on all cylinders. We talked about hashish in Indian and Arab culture; the work of Dr William O'Shaughnessy, the Indian army surgeon who in 1842 introduced cannabis into the mainstream of British medicine; the sociology of the legalization and anti-legalization lobbies; the progress of Proposition 215 and other state initiatives in America; the intrinsic difficulties of getting whole-plant medicines accepted by the regulatory bodies; the new systems of cannabis receptors recently discovered in the brain, and lots more.

Geoffrey Guy has a good CV for the job he's invented. As a multi-millionaire he could contemplate spending £10 million of his own money on the project should other investors fail to bite. The main outlay has gone on leasing the glasshouse complex with its capacity to grow 20,000 plants, and high-security defences against all kinds of criminal predations including ram-raiding. 'It doesn't look like a World War II concentration camp,' he explained. 'More like something between Greenham Common and Porton Down.' You can imagine that a pharmaceutical company would blush at having to explain such an investment to its shareholders and the press - though Geoffrey Guy envisages that he may sell his products to the major names in the business if it all works out. The other necessary qualifications have been belief in the project, and experience of running clinical trials in getting medicines licensed.

It was also important that Guy spent a formative period in France, a country whose policy-makers have a phobic dislike of cannabis, as it happens. In 1981, at the age of twenty-seven, he threw in a career in obstetrics and instead went to work for an old family-run company called Pierre Fabre, based at Castre, near Toulouse in southern France. This firm's core business was in plant-based medicines, but Guy's job as Clinical Trials Coordinator was to launch the company's new range of synthesized drugs in Britain, and in particular to prepare the dossiers on them required by the Medicines Control Agency. The experience showed him that modern synthesized single molecule medicines were being promoted for reasons that did not necessarily relate to their effectiveness.

Medicines are evaluated according to the criteria of quality, safety and efficacy. 'And it's important to understand that it's in that order of importance,' said Geoffrey Guy. 'If you're unable to make your product consistently, even ifit's safe and effective it won't be approved. After all, not all drugs are safe: take steroids or cytotoxic drugs, for example. And that's why synthetic chemicals are deemed to be good starting points, not only because you can get patents, but because you can test your quality. Plant extracts were frowned on quite heavily in the late seventies and eighties. Most Anglo-Saxons were saying "typical French" - but things are changing now.'

The new climate of the 1990s allowed Geoffrey Guy to develop a plant medicine for eczema. Increasing numbers of children suffer from it in a severe form, and find steroids, the only existing treatment, either to be ineffective or to cause bad side-effects. He had heard stories of children being cured by Chinese herbal medicine. But although a particular herbal mixture seemed to work it could never become a licensed prescription medicine, because it varied from batch to batch and from practitioner to practitioner, and because of fears that some of the rather obscure ingredients such as 'Yellow Emperor's Extract' might be contaminated or even toxic. His former company Phytopharm has created a standardized form, which has been put into clinical trials at the Children's Hospital, Great Ormond Street. One measure of the new attitude is commercial; Phytopharm has sold the licence [or a plant-based anti-obesity medicine to Pfizer, the makers of Viagra, for no less than £32 million.

It was a conference at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society in 1997 that oarachuted Guv into the new area of medical cannabis - which, he comments, is hardly unexplored territory. 'What's extraordinary is to have so many reputed applications for something that doesn't even legally exist as a medicine.' It was following this conference that he made the vital connection with HortaPharm, a friendly rival of Maripharm run by expatriate Americans. HortaPhann had for a period been licensed by the Dutch Government to breed cannabis, but as outsiders felt they were unlikely to get an illegal supply network unofficially condoned. The British Government, meanwhile, continues to smile on Geoffrey Guy. His programme means that officials can go on opposing legalization without appearing heartless in the face of the demands of MS patients and other campaigners for medical cannabis. On the other hand, although he's never going to be a hero to the legalization activists, his project is helpful to medical marijuana around the world. Until now, especially in America, campaigners have been called irresponsible in asking for a treatment that hasn't been clinically proven; yet governments have placed severe restrictions on anyone wishing to make an illegal drug the subject of clinical trials. Guy's work promises to break the log-jam.

I came to see him as a kind of representative figure: John Bull introduced to Senor Marijuana, in a turn-of-the-century Punch cartoon. Though the epitome of 'straightness', he feels comfortable with the legalization lobby. 'I'd thought it was quite clear that there would be a medical scientific group and the illicit group, but it's actually very difficult to make this distinction.' He told me about a major forthcoming event - a conference on 'Regulating Cannabis' ('regulating' in this context means 'legalizing') organized by both Release and the American Lindesmith Center, which is funded and supported by the billionaire financier George Soros.f This was subsequently held at Regent's College on the Inner Circle in Regent's Park, formerly part of the University of London (see Chapter 11). As an ex-medical student he chiefly remembered that it had 'a terrific bar', though I'm not clear that he ever drank alcohol. He sat next to me while awaiting his tum on the platform, offering a stream of bluff asides, such as 'The French would string the lot of them up', referring to the session with Dutch coffee-shop owners, growers and campaigners. His own speech offered little to the assembled lobbyists and drug workers; in fact, with its emphasis on novel delivery systems like inhalers, patches or suppositories, and a generous tribute to the Home Office, it was rather coolly received, I thought.

But there's no mistaking the relish for his new work. 'I've got beyond the point of being surprised by anything that this amazing plant can do,' he told the Lords, on being asked about some medical application or other. He's also a kind of bridgebuilder between cannabis users and the world of science: and among pharmacologists, biochemists and neurologists, cannabis is currently a hot subject