When documentary-maker Angus Macqueen travelled to the United States to film a segment for his three part documentary called 'Our War on Drugs', he could never have foreseen the man who would become the star of this, the second episode in the trilogy, a small time drug dealer from Queens named Thomas Winston, would not live to see the program hit its broadcast date.
RIP Thomas Winston 1980 - 2009
By the time it was shown on Channel 4 (August 9th 2010), Thomas Winston, a likeable character who had drawn a bad hand of cards from the life deck when he was born some 29 years earlier, had been stabbed to death.
In the program, Thomas is first seen campaigning against the 'Rockefeller' drugs laws in New York State, where sale or possession of small amounts of drugs are given
a mandatory sentence equivalent to second degree murder, and have long been seen to be both discriminatory and draconian.
A newly-licensed medicine containing naturally occurring 'chemicals' extracted from cannabis plants, (cannabinoids), has been essentially banned by the Primary Healthcare Trust 'NHS Calderdale' and there are fears that blocking its use could criminalise a proportion of the 300 or so multiple sclerosis patients who are covered by NHS Calderdale, who may resort to acquiring and taking the class B drug version of cannabis to treat their multiple sclerosis instead. And who would blame them?
Sativex - legal cannabis, but unavailable due to cost
Sativex is a whole-plant extract, meaning if a cannabis grower had access to the same strains as are grown by sativex manufacturer GW Pharmaceuticals, its a relatively simple process to harvest and refine the trichomes into an 'oil'. Which many MS sufferers do. Its a relatively safe means of ingesting cannabis without resorting to smoking, which is bad no matter what material is being smoked.
