Is There More Than Meets The Eye With UK Activist Group ‘CLEAR’?

If you follow TWB regularly, than you know that I like to highlight activist groups. I feel that hardworking people need to have their pursuits recognized so they will want to continue to contribute. A funny thing happens from time to time. I will post something about a group (always with good intentions), and the comments will fire up with explosive allegations and accusations. To me, it’s just as important to highlight people’s efforts that deserve it as it is to highlight groups that need to be called out. The last thing we need is people pretending to be doing stuff for the movement, when all the while they are just trying to fulfill their greedy desires.

If there is an article that exemplifies this commenting phenomenon it would have to be the article that I posted back in February. It was titled, ‘What Is UK Cannabis Activist Group ‘CLEAR’? It seemed like a straight forward article at the time. We get a lot of hits from the UK, so I Googled ‘UK cannabis’ to see if I could find some groups there to highlight. The first one I came across was CLEAR. About an hour after the article posted, I saw a comment on another article from what appeared to be an older gentleman commenting under the name Peter Reynolds. I vividly remember looking at it and thinking, ‘sweet, we finally are getting the older demographic!’ It turned out to be the head of CLEAR, who was poking around my website apparently.

After his comment, comments started flooding in like a hurricane on that particular article. Some comments were in favor, some comments were against, but almost all of them were full of fire and fury. Ninjasmoker and I were hanging out watching the drama unfold at the time. We got a hate e-mail asking us how we could ever support such an evil group, and I explained to them that I had no idea who they were or why they were evil or not. I simply shared the public information that was available.

But now my curiosity is going. It has been going since the comments started coming in on that article. I’m a very curious person, so I must know more. I keep asking friends online from the UK about it, and they always say that they don’t want anything to do with it for fear of retribution from Peter Reynolds. One reader suggested that I stop asking about it, because Peter Reynolds has censored a lot of stuff on the internet, and I could be picking a fight with a very powerful person. I then explained to the friend that messing with powerful people that are giving the marijuana movement a bad name is my FAVORITE thing to do most of the time. The friend asked how I could be so brave. I told him it’s the American way. We say what we want with our middle finger in the air and our other hand clutching a burning joint.

So what do you say UK? Anyone out there want to speak their mind about this topic? Anyone out there want to defend CLEAR? All view points are welcome. Unlike sites in the UK, The Weed Blog will not censor anything. We believe in freedom of speech at The Weed Blog, so have at it. Anyone that wants to try to bully us will get blasted as hard as we can give it to them :) I’m curious to hear what people have to say and what links they have to provide on both sides of the debate.