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Hassan believes the ruling represents a landmark case for head shop owners all over the UK."If we had lost in the appeals court then that would have set a precedent where the police can go to the magistrates court and say they found them guilty with hardly any evidence," he tells me. "We were in a position to be able to fight, but someone else not in our financial position might not have been able to do something. When you are running a business you can't get legal aid for this sort of thing anyway."Hassan says he and Owen invested $64,000 in fighting the case to defend their estimated $230,000 worth of stock. Another unnamed head shop in the UK gave them a small donation towards their legal fees.Despite the expense involved, Hassan insists he had a duty to take a stand."We decided to do it more for the industry than anyone else," he says. "Sometimes you have to say, 'I've had enough of this rubbish and I'm going to fight it.' They're talking about all these issues of freedom of speech in the media, and you don't have the right to go out and buy something with a cannabis leaf on it. They had no evidence against us that we knowingly sold those items for consumption.""We were in a position to be able to fight, but someone else not in our financial position might not have been able to do something."
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