Section:GDN 1N PaGe:22 Edition Date:190906 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 5/9/2019 20:32 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
- The Guardian Friday 6 September 2019
(^22) National
Boy, 15, dies six days after
stabbing in north London
PA Media
A 15-year-old boy has died almost a
week after being stabbed in London.
Perry Jordan Brammer was found
on Willan Road in Tottenham, north
London, shortly after 11am last
no further action being taken, police
said. DCI Neil John , who is leading the
investigation, appealed to the public
for information. He said: “This attack
happened in broad daylight and we
believe there are people out there who
know what happened.
“This was a sustained attack which
has led to a boy aged just 15 losing his
life. We are determined to fi nd the
individual responsible for this mur-
der. W e believe he fl ed the scene on a
yellow bicycle, which was later found
abandoned nearby in an alleyway. We
would urge anyone with dashcam
footage which may show the attacker
or the incident to come forward.”
The death is the latest in a series of
murders of teenagers in the capital.
A 15-year-old boy was found fatally
stabbed in Stratford , east London, on
Tuesday evening after offi cers were
called to reports of a fi ght.
Santino Angelo Dymiter , 18, was
stabbed to death in Plaistow, also east
London, on 26 August.
The week before, Amrou Green idge ,
also 18, died in hospital after being
deliberately knocked off his bike by a
vehicle in Fulham, west London, and
attacked as he lay on the ground on
18 August.
Solomon Small, 18 , was knifed to
death in Brixton in the south of the
capital on 15 August , while three days
earlier Alex Smith, 16, died after being
repeatedly stabbed with a machete in
Munster Square , Camden.
The murder in Tottenham is the
94th recorded homicide in London
this year.
By the same date last year the homi-
cide rate had reached 99, with the fi nal
total for 2018 reaching 128 deaths – the
highest number this decade.
Friday, having suff ered multiple stab
wounds. The teenager, who was from
Tottenham, died in hospital yester-
day, the Metropolitan police said. A
post mortem will take place next week.
Three men aged 20, 21 and 24, and
a 17-year-old boy, were previously
arrested on suspicion of attempted
murder but were all released with
Call to recruit dealers to
assist in UK cannabis
trade if drug is legalised
Henry McDonald
Former drug dealers should be
recruited and trained to produce
safe, legal cannabis if Britain decides
to legalise marijuana, the head of a US
programme overseeing the sale of the
narcotic has urged.
The commissioner in charge of legal
cannabis sales in Massachusetts said
Britain should follow her state’s exam-
ple of recruiting ex-drug dealers and
others from communities involved
in what was once the underground
market for marijuana.
Ahead of talks with members of
parliament at Westminster this week,
Shaleen Title revealed that a project in
Massachusetts – which legalised the
drug in 2016 – was retraining former
cannabis dealers to enter the legal
marijuana industry.
Title’s call echoes that of Michael
Semple, the EU’s one-time special
representative to Afghanistan and a
former negotiator with the Afghan
Taliban, who said that a future British
government would have to open
“peace talks” with drug gangs if the
UK went down the legalisation route.
He told the Guardian he believe d
that government, police and other
authorities must open dialogue with
dealers who would face going out of
business.
Semple said British policy makers
would not be able to ignore “the people
most directly aff ected ” by a change to
the law. “Given the sheer number of
people involved in drug dealing, and,
internationally, the scale of violence
associated with the ‘war on drugs’, it
should not be diffi cult for drugs policy
makers to envisage a peace process
with drugs gangs,” he said.
On the Massachusetts experi-
ment, Title said 150 people had been
recruited so far, including ex-dealers
and people from areas of Boston and
the wider state where drug arrests ha d
been highest.
“They have skills already of course,
gleaned over a long number of years. It
is a way to give people and the voters
that backed legalisation in our refer-
endum what they wanted. They did
not want to hand the industry over to
a few giant corporations that are going
to exploit it.
“We put out a bid to vendors who
can teach them how to produce canna-
bis that is regulated. It also includes an
ownership programme to train people
who were once entrepreneurs in the
underground market.”
Title defended the project to absorb
ex-dealers and those with drug con-
victions , saying: “The general model,
not only in Massachusetts but also in
Illinois and California, is to reinvest the
now legal industry into those commu-
nities because it’s a fundamental issue
of fairness and justice.
“If for years under drug prohibition
you have this security focus on these
communities then after legalisation
you can hardly say to them, ‘Oh never
mind now, big corporations will take
this business off you, they will take it
from here.’ How is that fair?”
Title addressed the Lords this
week along with Sanho Tree , from
the Washington DC based Institute for
Policy Studies , and Kathryn Ledebur ,
the director of the Andean Informa-
tion Network in South America. They
argued for the need to liberalise the
UK’s drugs laws in the same way as
many US states had. New York and
New Jersey are expected to be the next
two states to legalise cannabis use.
Tree pointed out that cannabis
use had even been legalised in the US
capital, Washington, “where the sky
hasn’t fallen in, where people still go to
work and where kids still go to school ”.
The trio were guests in London this
week of the Transform Drugs Policy
Foundation, which campaigns for the
legalisation and regulation of drugs
in the UK.
▲ Cannabis plants in Massachusetts,
where 150 dealers have been recruited
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