For somebody who has achieved so much in the past ten years and could comfortably rest on his laurels for the next fifty, Paul Birch is surprisingly restless, almost impatient. Sitting in his big, airy home in North London on a sunny morning, he is fidgety and disquieted as he outlines the manifesto of Cista (an acronym for Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol), the political party he set up in February of this year.
In 2005, along with his brother Michael and Michael’s wife Xochi, Birch founded the social network Bebo, which became wildly successful while Facebook was still limited to students; the website was later sold to AOL for $850 million. A couple of tech ventures and ten years later, Paul Birch decided, only three months before the General Election, to dedicate himself to the founding (and funding) of a political party that would strive to change the “farcical” drug policies in the UK – and so Cista was born, “quite late in the day,” he admits, “but in time”.
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