Vice
For weed smokers in the UK, the martyr right now is a 54-year-old pothead called Gary Youds.
Youds owns a cannabis cafe called the Chillin’ Rooms on Holt Road in Liverpool—a stone’s throw from Anfield football stadium—where members are encouraged to chill, smoke weed, and have a laugh. For operating this service, Youds has been sent to prison four times. In February this year, he was released from a three-year prison sentence related to the running of the cafe. And now, he’s at it again.
“The potheads have been discriminated against for too long,” Youds tells VICE. “All revolutionaries go to jail. But cannabis brings community together, that’s why I’ve always gone back to it. I want to build a golden bridge so the authorities can retreat from the war on drugs.”
His trailblazing crusade started in 2002, when he first applied to Liverpool council to convert a former taxi office into a “private members’ club” for cannabis smokers. When councillors rejected his proposals, the former property developer did it anyway, opening the Amsterdam-style coffee shop in 2005 and selling cannabis grown by himself and other locals. It quickly garnered around 400 regular members, who would hang out, play pool, attend jam nights, and “stay medicated and live the dream” as a sign inside read. On some days, Youds sold more than 1KG of weed, raking in more than $13,000.
Full article at https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bn93/the-uks-cannabis-martyr-keeps-getting-jailed-for-opening-weed-cafes
