A CROWDFUNDING campaign has been launched to pay for a £3,000 court fine given to an ex-Army serviceman who formerly dealt cannabis grown at his city home.

However, Paul Taylor has said he uses the class B drug for medicinal purposes and will use the funds to continue his campaign to have it legalised in the UK.

The 49-year-old was prescribed opiate painkillers after being diagnosed with PTSD and chronic pain after leaving the military which he said didn’t work and left him feeling suicidal.

During a trip to Amsterdam with his wife, 20 years ago, he tried cannabis for the first time, and it helped alleviate his symptoms, he claims.

“I am not saying cannabis is a cure, I’m saying cannabis helps – all we want is to be responsible for own health,” he said. “Cannabis is non-toxic, it’s only if you over indulge, the same with any substance.”

He claimed: “A psychiatrist said to me, ‘if cannabis works for you, do not stop.’

“So, I didn’t stop, I grew my own clean cannabis and I made it available to other people.

“That is my only crime, I’m not a profit and gain person, particularly where legality is concerned.”

Since November, medicinal cannabis products can now be legally prescribed to some patients across the UK in a limited number of circumstances where other medicines have failed.

However, Mr Taylor believes this needs to go further, making it more readily available because he believes cannabis is less harmful than substances like alcohol or tobacco.

He said legalising cannabis will also help to stamp out the criminal aspect and allow for clearer government guidelines and research to be undertaken into its effects.

“We need to legalise and regulate this product and get it off street,” he said.

“I am being criminalised because I found a natural substance that helps me combat my PTSD and my pain.

“When I was under the mental health service, I was introduced to other people who had similar issues.

“The only way we could source cannabis was to go to the street, to the criminals, where our money would be invested in crime.”

After being raided by police in 2017, Mr Taylor accepted charges of supplying and producing the class B drug at Worcester Crown Court last August, before being ordered to pay £3,195 at a proceeds of crime act hearing on January 23.

But Mr Taylor, who lives in the Cathedral ward, denies he had anything to do with the GoFundMe campaign, which has already raised £666.

Though he says he will use the money to further his campaign.

“There’s a stigma attached to cannabis – propaganda and prohibition and an ideology that we’ve followed from America since 1971,” he said.

“That ideology is now changing, and the propaganda is now changing in America.

“They are the ones who instructed this war on cannabis in the first place, but now their stance is changing, so I can’t understand why our government and our country have not taken the same attitude.”

Mr Taylor, who despite not producing cannabis anymore, admits to still smoking two joints a day, said the UK government refuses to properly research cannabis, unlike the likes of the USA and Israel.

“I want to be able to be a businessman,” he said. “I want to be part of the recreational market that supplies the medicinal market, because we have the ability in this country to test whatever we grow without question.

“We can make sure it’s clean and goes by government guidelines, but the government won’t introduce guidelines – they are keeping the thumb on people like me.”

He went on to say he has researched cannabis for 20 years and there are “no white papers to suggest cannabis psychosis exists”.

“What does exist is substance abuse and that can be of any substance. These substances that are unregulated, unmarked, and dangerous.

“We’ve always had cannabis,” he continued. “It’s been around since we were on the planet.

“Animals ate it. We in turn hunted the animal, killed it and then we ate that.

“Inside that animal are cannabinoids, we ingest that. They just discovered in the human body the endocannabinoid system and it mirrors cannabis.

“When we put cannabis into our system, we increase the effects of our endocannabinoid system, which is what the human system needs to fight illness.

“It controls your moods, it controls everything about your body, the ECs.

“The plant is the medicine, pharmaceutical companies are keeping their thumb on the plant because they like to isolate molecules because when they isolate molecules they will find out what one molecule does and they’ll put it in a tablet and they will provide that tablet to the NHS market at a cost.

“Then behind that comes, say, five tablets and they’ve all come from the same raw ingredient, they’ve just been put into a different tablet.

“They are different molecules in a different tablet. You end up with five packs of tablets prescribed.

“It’s a safety aspect, because they don’t really understand what’s going on with cannabis.

“Israel are far more educated about cannabis than we will ever be. They have got far more white paper of mounting evidence as to why cannabis shouldn’t be criminalised.

“We are ignoring this out of detriment to everybody in this country at the moment.”

However, a person who wished to remain anonymous, said Mr Taylor is a phony who has only started his campaign to legalise cannabis after being raided.

They described him as a “low-level dealer” who sold drugs to teenagers before going to court and described the GoFundMe campaign as “joke”.

“He’s trying to be a hero, but he’s not – he’s a criminal,” they added.