HERE is a hypothetical scenario: it’s late at night and you’re walking home, alone, when you see a group of young men approaching on the pavement ahead. Would you rather the men had spent the evening consuming A) alcohol or B) cannabis?

It is safe to say that the majority of respondents to this question would opt for option B, and wisely so. Yet, despite this, it remains the case that alcohol is freely available to anyone aged 18 and above, while the use of cannabis is restricted only to those with a medical prescription.

It is a situation that VaporizerHut founder, owner and director James Bedding admits leaves him perplexed.

‘A person can go into a shop, buy a bottle of vodka, drown themselves in it and probably end up in hospital or worse, and yet if that same person had a little too much cannabis about the worst that would happen is they’d fall asleep,’ says the Jersey-born 40-year-old, chatting from his home in St Clement.

‘I’ve never seen or heard of anyone getting into a fight because of cannabis. It just doesn’t happen. Alcohol has one effect: it makes you feel drunk. But cannabis can be used to help with all sorts of ailments, from back pain and arthritis to depression, anxiety relief and insomnia.’

Certainly, there are few Islanders who can testify to the healing properties of cannabis better than James.

After suffering a traumatic spinal injury at the age of 15, the former De La Salle College student was left paralysed from the shoulders down and using a wheelchair.

Not surprisingly, James – who had been a keen skateboarder and surfer during childhood – was initially despondent in the months and years following his accident, with regular ‘discomforting and frustrating’ spasms in his otherwise immobile limbs.

It was the discovery that cannabis could be used as a means of preventing these spasms that provided James with a new lease of life and a sense of optimism for the future.

‘I’m not going to hide it: I’ve consumed cannabis for 20 years and it has absolutely changed my life for the better,’ he says.

‘Like a lot of people, I’d smoked it as a recreational thing with friends in my teens, but it was only after my accident in 1998 that I realised the health benefits of cannabis and how much it could help my body to relax. It stopped the spasms dead in their tracks and the relief was just exceptional. It has enabled me to get on with my daily life in a way that I couldn’t when taking strong prescription drugs. I’m so pleased that cannabis has enabled me to move away from them.’

As many readers will know, the laws on cannabis use have changed in Jersey in recent years, with Islanders now able to use the once-illegal drug if given a prescription from a medical professional.

And, having experienced firsthand the life-altering properties of the plant, James is now determined to highlight the many positive aspects of cannabis and help others to benefit from its use.

‘We have Islanders from all walks of life coming into VaporizerHut, from 20-year-olds to 80-year-olds and all ages in-between,’ he says. ‘I know a lot of pensioners who come to the shop with their prescriptions and who find it to be a safe place where they can chat and seek advice and consume their cannabis in the company of others.’

Located on Don Street in St Helier, VaporizerHut is an offshoot of the website of the same name, which was launched by James in 2016, and which specialises in supplying high-quality vaporizers and other related equipment for the legal consumption of cannabis.

‘I would describe VaporizerHut as a friendly and welcoming hub for anyone who has been prescribed medical cannabis,’ says James. ‘It is still illegal to smoke cannabis and so it has to be consumed with a vaporizer, which, to be fair, is the healthiest and best way to consume it. The problem is that people often don’t know how to use a vaporizer – they don’t even know what one is. We have people coming to see us who have been given a prescription from the doctor but they’ve never consumed cannabis in their life and so they haven’t got a clue what to do. We help them to find the best vaporizer for their personal needs and then teach them how to use it.

‘We want VaporizerHut to be the centre of the medicinal cannabis community in Jersey,’ he continues. ‘If someone is stuck in town, maybe working in an office, and they’ve been prescribed cannabis, then they can visit VaporizerHut, grab a coffee and enjoy a chat with myself or Ross.’

The Ross in question is Ross Barker, James’s business partner and a former customer who came to befriend James in the days when VaporizerHut was an online-only enterprise.

‘When lockdown happened, I was one of the first people in the Island to be prescribed medicinal cannabis,’ recalls James, discussing the origins of the VaporizerHut website.

‘I had a consultation with a medicinal cannabis clinic in the UK and I was prescribed 120 grams, which was then delivered to my house. I couldn’t believe it. I set up my own YouTube channel, Canna Quad, and recorded a live video talking about the experience, and I had so many people contacting me with all kinds of questions.’

It soon became apparent that there was a strong demand for vaporizers in the Island, as well as a demand for information on how to use them, and so James decided to launch his own business – and thus VaporizerHut was born.

‘It was then that I met Ross and we kinda became good friends,’ he says. ‘He was working in finance at the time. I knew I wanted to expand VaporizerHut and so Ross quit his job and we became business partners. Typically, you will find Ross in the shop and I’ll be working online, although I’m in and out of the shop whenever I can.

‘I certainly never envisaged VaporizerHut as being anything other than a website when I first launched it and so I’m really pleased at how it has grown,’ he adds. ‘Now, whenever someone is prescribed cannabis, they will often be advised by their doctor to come down to VaporizerHut and speak to us.’

Despite this, James admits that, for some, there is still a stigma attached to cannabis, although he is adamant that public opinion is slowly changing in the right direction.

‘There is a lot more understanding and education about cannabis than there used to be,’ he says. ‘The realisation that it’s not just a drug that people take to get stoned is becoming more commonplace. Cannabis actually has proper medical benefits.

‘I know of people who had been on morphine or some other really strong, really addictive prescription drug, and they have now been able to come off those drugs. And this is due to them being able to access cannabis legally.

‘Being able to get a proper medical prescription, it has taken away a lot of worry for a lot of people. I know people who spent years medicating illegally on the black market with cannabis and, as you can imagine, it caused them a great deal of stress and concern.

‘There are people who have nerve damage or they have really bad back pain and cannabis helps them enormously. They don’t have to rely on opioids or tramadol or some other addictive drug that sometimes leaves people worse off.’

Ever ambitious, James says that he envisages a day in the not-too-distant future when Jersey will have ‘cannabis bars and clubs’ similar to those found in Barcelona and the Netherlands.

‘I’ve travelled around a lot and visited these clubs and I have never once seen any kind of trouble in any of them. They’re really pleasant, peaceful, respectable clubs – not seedy like the ones you find in Amsterdam. People can go in and relax with friends or do some work and they can consume cannabis while there. The clubs don’t serve alcohol. There are never any fights or violence – it just doesn’t happen.

‘I’d like to see Jersey following the Barcelona model and introducing discreet clubs, nothing too in-your-face, with “bud tenders” – as they’re called – who would talk to customers about the different types of cannabis available.

‘At present, when you buy a prescription, you need to buy a minimum of ten or 20 grams, but sometimes you might not need that amount or you might find you’ve bought ten grams of a cannabis flower that isn’t suitable for your needs. In a cannabis club, you can just buy one or two grams if that is all you need, and this is obviously preferable for consumers.’

For those unfamiliar with the drug, it can be surprising to discover that there are multiple varieties – or strains – of cannabis, all of which generate a different response in consumers.

‘It’s like craft beer, only it’s craft cannabis, and, as with wine, you get different types of flavours and tones and so on,’ says James. ‘Much like wallflowers, cannabis plants have terpenes, which are fragrant oils produced by some plants and herbs, and there are hundreds of different varieties of cannabis plants, and so you have all these terpenes that each provide different psychological effects. This is why it is important that a consumer is given the right cannabis for their individual needs. If you want something to help with insomnia, you don’t want cannabis that is going to make you feel energised and stimulated.’

When he isn’t busy co-running VaporizerHut, James spends much of his time working on cicada.je, a Jerseybased ‘solutions provider’ with a mission statement that aims to ‘improve people’s lives through premium quality craft cannabis’.

‘It’s an outstanding local company and I’m proud to be a part of it,’ says James. ‘Cicada was founded by Evan Smith, who is brilliant, and, together, the Cicada team have patented something called the Terpene Effect Wheel. It is a colourful wheel that can be used by medical professionals to gauge exactly what strain of cannabis an individual should be taking for their specific requirements. We have shared it locally with doctors and, so far, the response has been very positive. They have been very impressed.

‘Ideally, we would like to see the Cicada wheel and fingerprints on the side of bottles of medical cannabis, much as you get labels on food packaging which inform you of the salt and sugar content.’ 

As our conversation draws to a close, I ask James about the oft-heard claim that cannabis is a ‘gateway drug’ which can lead consumers down a path towards harder and more dangerous substances. It is an argument with which he has little interest.

‘No, I don’t believe in that at all,’ he replies. ‘It is alcohol and cigarettes that do that. Alcohol, in particular, is far more of a gateway drug. I’m pretty certain that, when I was younger, it was alcohol that I was first introduced to before anything else ever entered my system. It is still much easier for a young person to get hold of alcohol than it is cannabis, simply because alcohol is available everywhere. And that doesn’t make any sense because, obviously, alcohol is the more harmful of the two. No one has ever started a fight or turned violent after consuming cannabis.’

•For more on VaporizerHut, visit vaporizerhut.co.uk, or call into the shop on Don Street

•For more on James Bedding, visit the Canna Quad channel on YouTube, or follow the End Cannabis Prohibition Jersey page on Facebook