There's a lot of that about at the moment. Our local plods are going about heavy handedly busting small time dealers. The vacuum has been filled with more organised nasty criminal types.
Thank you police farce for making the town more dangerous. Useless statistic-chasing cunts.
This reminds me of something that happened a few years ago in Clapham North in London a few years ago. 2003 I believe it was.
There is a shop just round the corner to the local tube station, and next door to it was (or maybe still is) am Egyptian-style cafe that's all set up like a sūq. This shop is a fruit and veg shop that was owned by a Jamaican yardie family. You would turn up to the shop and buy a coke or a banana or whatever, and then you would be allowed access to the back of the shop where there would be a couple more yardies sitting with two black bin liners. These bin liners would be full of £20 deals. One containing shitty Jamaican brick weed, and the other would contain high-grade skunk.
You would make your purchase according to your tastes and then go into the Egyptian sūq next door and buy am extremely overpriced (but very very tasty) smoothie, or rent an equally overpriced shisha pipe and then sit and smoke your weed and maybe buy a beer too.
This is where the story turns weird. I had been frequenting this place for quite some time without any bother whatsoever. The fruit and veg shop had become that popular that there would be a rather substantial queue there if you visited on a weekend. The queue would consist of middle class students, not the thugs that maybe some would expect. And there was never any trouble.
I had bought myself a nice bag of skunk one day and was sitting sipping a beer in the sūq when the owner came running in, in quite a flap and started urging everyone to hide their beers. I was quite stunned at the fact it was the beer that he was concerned about and not the huge amount of people smoking their bud in there. Anyway, shortly following the entrance of the owner, came the arrival of the police. They asked us all to get up and leave as the owner of the establishment was not in possession of a license to serve alcohol! They made no mention at all of the stinking weed, and it's not like any of us patrons were going to take up the issue of police professionalism at a time when we were all holding contraband ourselves.
I came back to the sūq next week, with my weed from the Jamaicans next door and was politely told by the management that the usual unusually relaxed smoking policy had been reviewed and that they had had to make some changes. Fair enough, I thought, all good things have to come to an end, and I felt that I had had a good run at the place. So I left again, only to return the next week to both the sūq and the fruit and veg stall to be closed but with police in attendance outside informing people that they would have to buy their greens from another fruit and vegetable purveyor.
Well now I was even more disappointed as not only had I lost a nice place to chill out with my weed, I had also lost the source of the actual weed. On to the point I am trying to make, is that now that the filth had shut these people down, there are still all of these people visiting the area looking for weed to buy. The local street urchins cottoned on to this fact pretty quick and obviously there was not only much competition between the local factions involved leading to violence etcetera, the bastards were also out robbing people left right and centre. My friend and I got skanked one time and I chased the little bastard down the road only to be turned upon with a knife. For the sake of £10 I decided that my life was worth more than that and proceeded to beat a hasty retreat the way that I came when chasing the little thief.
So in the end, the police think they are solving a problem and doing the area a favour when in reality they had done the exact opposite and right royally fucked things up. Not only for the weed smokers, but for the residents of the area too who would now have to put up with all manner of dodgy activity being carried out in the street by all sorts of different people. It was much safer when the whole show was "organised" by the Jamaicans.
It is high time cannabis is legalised, or at least decriminalised so that common sense can prevail, and we can avoid situations such as the one I have outlined above.
Also, people seem to like to shout about the amount of taxes that could be raised if legalisation took place, but what about all of the employment that would be created too? And all of the small businesses, I can imagine a huge amount starting up. Imagine the people currently with large set-ups on the go, they would have a ready made business! All they would have to do is get registered properly. And of course all of this extra employment and business ventures taking off, there will be of course lots more taxes coming in! In all shapes and forms such as VAT etc.
>>6656 I don't understand the connection between people selling weed and muggings.
Also wouldn't it just be sold in tobacconists and places that sell alcohol? Not many more small businesses.
The connection between muggings and weed comes when you meet with an unknown person in an urban jungle and then attempt to make a clandestine deal with them in a secluded location. You pull your money out and get mugged instead of stoned.
>>6658 >wouldn't it just be sold in tobacconists and places that sell alcohol?
This covers everything from corner shops to supermarkets. Now that I think of it, I quite like the sound of Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Thai Stick.
>My friend and I got skanked one time and I chased the little bastard down the road only to be turned upon with a knife. For the sake of £10 I decided that my life was worth more than that and proceeded to beat a hasty retreat the way that I came when chasing the little thief.
It's OK. I think he is having a rather poor attempt at trolling by being generally obtuse. You are correct, though, if he can't work out the meaning of the word "skanked" in the context of the post in which it is written, he should get the fuck off of the internet.
Op here. It was Jamaicans I had bought the street deal from. Never had any troubles with them. Younger black hip hop kids or scally white kids are the only ones who have ever skanked me.
Used to know a couple of drug houses called 'blues' in my youth run by Yardies too. Seems it really is sacred to them.
Mind you, this is only the ones who weren't crackheads. If they are, all bets are off.
>>6656 The police, and the rest of the criminal justice system, know full well that allowing some controlled trade keeps down street violence. The problem is that whenever some politician or journalist wants to get a quick headline, they can do it by being "outraged" at such illicit trade being tolerated, and get on the blower to the chief constable to "act decisively".
Result: Crackdown on lower-level peaceable trade (as it's easy to target); Good headlines for the journos and politicians; frightened middle-Englanders temporarily reassured.
And whenever anyone in the system says "Ermm actually this isn't working..." they are hounded into resignation.
