Saturday 17 September 2016

OUT OF PUFF

Cannabis Rhyl

A reader has asked if I know the whereabouts of Jeffrey Ditchfield who began trying to run a cannabis café known as the Beggar’s Belief in 2002 in Water Street, Rhyl.

Mr. Ditchfield seemed to me to be using disabled people as a starting point towards supplying cannabis for recreational purposes. We wrestled in the letters columns of local newspapers like Holmes and Moriarty.

Although I never disliked him personally I hated the drugs image he was helping to give the town. Use of illegal drugs for medicinal purposes is a matter for the Government and NHS not cowboy operators.

Mr. Ditchfield was treated as a celebrity in some quarters. The Visitor newspaper went as far as asking him to name his favourite things and Rhyl Town Council gave him an award for his hanging baskets.

It took four long years for North Wales Police to put a stop to his illegal activities in Rhyl, and the force was virtually shamed into it by a TV documentary that revealed more about him.

[Local criminal Johnny Gizzi (John Damon Gizzi) had been a household name as a drug dealer for considerably longer before they got round to convicting him of his first drug offence.]

Do I know where Mr. Ditchfield is now? Nope.

What I do know is that sometime after he lost his final court case in 2006 he sold his Water Street premises to officers of Welsh Government and thereby pocketed a pile of our money.

No doubt he felt much obliged.

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