Having worked with a political party (until recently) - the Legalise Cannabis Alliance, one of our aims was to get tokers to vote for our LCA candidates. I must say that whilst campaigning on the streets, we saw a great deal of support, but this was never really reflected by the number of votes. Certainly a lot of people that we spoke with were not even registered.

Of course one cannot generalise I guess we can only ask the tokers themselves.

I was 42 before I ever used my vote, simply because I did not feel any of the candidates represented my interests especially regarding cannabis (that was 1992).

Then a group or people in Norwich formed a campaign group and planned to put up candidates; although they did not stand in 1992, my interest in voting led me to vote for the first time.

The second time was for Howard Marks in 1997 and I've voted ever since. In 1999 the Legalise Cannabis Alliance was formed as a registered party and started standing under that name with the leaf as emblem on the ballot paper; in Norwich we were fortunate enough to have cannabis candidates most years. LCA fought over 80 elections since. But this year in November we voted to de-register as a party.

Looking at it like this: if 10% of adults toke, most of those where LCA stood must have not voted, not been regsitered, or voted for another candidate. Although in local elections, LCA gained up to 8%, in the parliamentary elections it was usually well under 5%