Police action against Cannabis Social Club in San Sebastian
[This release is courtesy of Iker Val at the Ganjazz Art Club in San Sebastian, Spain.]
Sunday 22 July
Greetings to everyone, from Iker, president of the Ganjazz Art Club in San Sebastián. I was arrested on Friday 20 July and released yesterday, Saturday 21 July. I am very happy with all the support received from all over the country and especially from our land Euskadi. During these 30 hours that I have been free I do not do anything else than reaffirming my thoughts that came to me in the 30 hours that I was arrested: EVERYTHING WILL BE ALLRIGHT.
I believe firmly in the work that our association has carried out in the past years and I believe in the strength of my arguments in the declarations to the police and the prosecutor, they are the fruit of many years defending an alternative to the policies that are applied to cannabis, a realistic alternative that we are promoting firmly, to respect some legal parameters and social criteria for normalisation and social integration of the cannabis consumer, in this so-called democratic society and its hypothetical state of law.
The entire collective plantation of Ganjazz was destroyed on Friday afternoon, in the course of a desastrous intervention in the seat of the association. The work of many years selecting plants and collecting genetical information has been destroyed, all the stored flowers that were used to develop our programme of activities was erradicated. And even so, we are satisfied, because where they hoped to find some drug dealers, with thousands of euros, with all kinds of substances, kilos and kilos, arms, prostitutes etc. etc., they have found to their own surprise a simple association, that implements its humble activities in accordance with its capacities and necessities. We know that good work is being done if there is absolute coherence between theory and practice and this has been the case of Ganjazz.
From now on, a new process starts for Ganjazz, in which we will have to regularise our activities. We believe that every negative event has its advantages, all this innecessary intervention in the daily life of our association has only made our conviction stronger, it has made us stronger. This experience will help us to transmit with more strength and courage the proposal to regulate the collective and individual cultivation for personal consumption. At the same time we know that society is ill in many different ways and that the reaction to all these systematical attacks on our lifestyle will change as long as we maintain this effort to organise us and reivindicate our rights as cannabis users through activities that improve OUR QUALITY OF LIFE.
So our message is: Let's go forward and support all these initiatives that create a gap in the wall and increase our capacity of developing means to use our rights that we have as consumers within the law, yesterday in Euskadi we were three associations, today there are more than ten and this will increase in the near future. In various corners of the state similar projects are surging and developing really well.
Greetings to all those who have been concerened with my personal situation, to all people who participated in the manifestation, to all people in the Cannabiscafe, to the RCN, to associations and growshops who have expressed their support, I have felt very supported by many people and this reaffirms me in all my ways of acting against the prohibition of cannabis.
Thanks to everybody, I will continue to inform you through various media about the legal case and its resolution. On the moment our activities have not ended, nor has the club been closed, so we will be up and running shortly again. STRENGHT AND CHEERS.
Iker Val.
President Ganjazz Art Club http://www.encod.org/info/@[email protected]
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