Latest Marijuana News Reports

Church’s & Pot Cannabis

Pot Games

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The couple sent out about 22,000 of their bars and made no secret on 
their website of the special ingredient that made them so popular.

But that ingredient was to lead Mr and Mrs Gibson into the dock at 
Carlisle Crown Court yesterday, where both are accused of conspiring to 
supply cannabis.

Along with a family friend, Marcus Davies, 36, they set up the campaign 
group Therapeutic Help from Cannabis for Multiple Sclerosis and on their 
website, www.thc4ms.org, offered their “Canna-Biz” chocolate bars, the 
court was told.

Mrs Gibson, who suffers from MS, her 42-year-old husband and Mr Davies 
made no secret of their campaign to legalise cannabis for therapeutic 
pain relief.

They made no charge but there was a request that each “buyer” establish 
that they were an MS sufferer and that they make a donation to meet 
production costs.

Over a period throughout 2004 and up to February last year about 22,000 
of the 150g (5oz) bars were despatched, each one of them laced with 3.5g 
of cannabis. A mailing list with 460 addresses was later found by police.

Mr Gibson and his wife, from Alston, Cumbria, along with Mr Davies, from 
St Ives, Cambridgeshire, who is said to have operated a post office box 
address for the cottage industry, deny the conspiracy charges against them.

Jeremy Grout-Smith, for the prosecution, told the jury that while the 
trio might be well intentioned, they had no defence against the charges 
which carry a maximum sentence of 14 years’ imprisonment.

“To supply cannabis, even if you believe it is doing some good, is not a 
defence,” he said.

The court was told that police became involved in January when the duty 
manager at the Royal Mail sorting office in Carlisle contacted them 
about a package which had spilled open during sorting. Officers seized 
33 Jiffy bags containing the Canna-Biz product. Each of the packets 
carried a PO box address in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, as the return 
address. The wrappers also carried the website address which was later 
found to be run by the three defendants.

Mr Grout-Smith said that they were not conventional drug dealers but 
believed their actions would help to alleviate the pain of a 
debilitating illness. MS is a progressive disease which attacks the 
central nervous system.

Officers raided the Gibsons’ home in February, discovering cannabis 
chocolate bars, labels, packages and a mailing list.

Mr Grout-Smith said: “They also found some machinery for the manufacture 
of the bars, pots, pans, and a grinder, all to be used in what was 
really a cottage industry to make chocolate bars impregnated with cannabis.

“When analysed they were found to contain 3.5g of cannabis each, ground 
up and distributed throughout the 150g bar.”

Several months later officers pursued their investigations to Mr 
Davies’s home where they found cannabis plants in two sheds. The 
householder insisted the cannabis was for his own use.

Details were found of three bank accounts, registered in the name of Mr 
Davies’s girlfriend, in which about £40,000 had been deposited during a 
two-year period.

At least two of the accounts were thought to be used for money related 
to the cannabis chocolate enterprise.

“So this seems to be distribution on quite a large scale and, to some 
extent at least, the defendants may have benefited financially, although 
the Crown does not claim this was their main motivation.”

During a police interview, Mr Gibson admitted sending 22,000 bars to 
addresses around the world. But first they had sought proof that the 
recipients were MS sufferers.

The jury was told that Mrs Gibson suffers from MS.

A juror who made it known to the judge that she had a relative in the 
family with MS was told this was no bar to deciding guilt or innocence 
in the case.

The trial, expected to last seven days, continues.

The facts, man
# Cannabis is derived from Cannabis sativa or Cannabis indica, a plant 
related to nettles and hops that is thought to have originated in India

# The first written account of cannabis use can be found in Chinese 
records dating from 2800BC.

# Herbal (grass, weed, skunk) is the dried flower buds of the plant; 
resin (hash, soapbar, black) is the buds formed into a block and then 
heated and crumbled before use; oil is by far the strongest form and 
made by dissolving, filtering and evaporating the resin

# The main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis is 
delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC