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Hi, my name is Colin
Paisley and I’m proud to have been If someone had told me in 1964 that in
thirty years I would be Mayor of my home town, my first reaction would
have been to say: “What the hell are you smoking man?” In
fact, with the amount of methedrine (methyl-amphetamine hydrochloride
to our younger readers ed.) and heroin I was using I could have got
long odds on lasting 30 months. |
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I had had my first fix the previous year and was doing my best to win the
“William Burroughs Award for Productivity in Junkiedom”. Things
of course altered in 1968; GP’s could no longer prescribe, Drug Dependency
Units were set up; scripts reduced, in some cases refused. Prohibition
had begun, the rest is history. In 1970 I got a job as a shelf-filler for a national company, ironically selling cut price legal drugs - alcohol and tobacco. Less than two years later, I was a manager in one of their Central London shops - still fixing and refusing to fit into their idea of a junkie. While working in the shop I served many well known “heads” and celebrities. But only one, in six years, sussed that I was a user, he was an American actor appearing in the West End as Lenny Bruce. Lenny was widely known to be a drug user, he was a method actor, it was late at night when I served him and he spotted me yawning, scratching and sniffing. What happened after that might be the subject of another article. In 1976, the year of the heatwave, I was diagnosed with TB and hospitalised, effectively losing my job - the medication didn’t work, the doctors said that was because I was still using, so by 1981, my weight down to six-stone, I decided to come off. Mid-1981 I returned to Carlisle, my home town - to hide, to escape from the drug scene that had been my life for the previous 18 years. I had met the woman who was to become my wife, I was asked to support a group supporting families and friends of drug users; drug users living at home was a new concept to me; the last event was the miners’ strike. The previous year I had welcomed the People’s March for Jobs into Carlisle as secretary of the local Communist party branch, but now I felt I needed to belong to a more mainstream party. In 1985 I joined the Labour Party; one year later I was elected to the council; eight years later I was elected Mayor of Carlisle. Earlier this year I resigned from the Labour Party, partly because they refuse to debate the drugs issue. I joined the Liberal Party and I am now their drugs spokesperson and in October I will be calling for the legalisation of cannabis and the introduction of heroin maintenance, amongst other drug law reforms. I am also the Northern Co-ordinator of Transform, the campaign for an effective drug policy. Thank you for reading this - my best wishes to Monkey, I’m sure this will be the first of many editions. Colin Paisley, Northern Co-ordinator Transform |
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