Rufus Harris

Rufus Harris, campaigner, charity worker and paralegal: born London 20 March 1946; (one daughter with Gillian Langton); died Hove, East Sussex 7 April 2007.

Rufus Harris was the co-founder with Caroline Coon of Release, the oldest independent drugs charity in the world. The pair had met in June 1967, under the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus, that icon of the youth movement. Harris and Coon had both been marching in demonstration against the News of the World's vilification of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards; the Rolling Stones pair had recently received prison terms for petty drugs offences in a case instigated by the newspaper's complaints to the Metropolitan Police.

Discovering that they shared a sense of outrage at the treatment of young drug users at the hands of the courts and the police, Harris and Coon began a friendship, shortly afterwards founding Release to help young people arrested on drugs charges. The organisation - the "welfare branch of the alternative society" - was to become a counter-cultural institution.

Harris and Coon were both art students at St Martin's College, and Release launched its strategy for a changed world in the basement of Coon's Notting Hill studio. A 24-hour helpline was set up, enabling people in trouble over drugs to obtain free legal advice. There was drop-in centre, too, and young lawyers and doctors who shared the Release ethic turned up to offer their services.

The venture rapidly took off, quickly outgrowing Coon's basement; the first purpose-built offices were nearby in Princedale Road. Soon Oz moved in next door, and Time Out was up the road. Release's know-your-rights "Bust Card" was handed out at the UK's first legalise cannabis rally in Hyde Park. George Harrison donated £5,000 and the organisation's ongoing costs were funded by a small "community" tax on the door receipts of clubs where the new generation of bands played to audiences of turned-on youth.

In 1969 Harris and Coon published The Release Report on Drug Offenders and the Law, detailing police corruption and excessive drug sentencing. While Harris and Coon were the co-founders of Release, hers was the public face, and perhaps the better known of the pair; but he provided the steady hand that guided the project. All those who knew Harris speak of his ability to reach out to people across social and cultural boundaries. While he was entirely at home in the flux and chaos that made up social life in the counter-cultural underground, he possessed an uncanny ability to relate to those outside it.

On one occasion the Release office was due to be raided by the Drugs Squad. Thanks to the relations he had cultivated within what was then known as "the establishment", Harris received advance notice of the visit. Together with a supportive lawyer, he decided to pull up outside the offices and await the moment: when it came, he stepped out of the car and said to the police who were just on the point of forcefully entering the premises, "No need to break down the door, officers." Coon tells how he then proceeded to conduct the bemused constables on a tour of the building "as if such a nocturnal visitation was quite normal". It was typical of Harris's style - unruffled in a crisis, ever ready to defuse scenes of panic and confrontation.

By the mid-1970s Release had gained recognition for its work, receiving charitable status in 1972 and its first Home Office grant in 1975. Harris stayed with the organisation until the end of the decade, thereafter acting as a consultant. He then worked as a paralegal, preparing cases for the solicitors Fisher Meredith and many other law firms. For a while he lived in the Isle of Wight before moving to Brighton.

I met Rufus Harris when he made a visit to Release and, as the organisation's current director, was curious to see how he would view our present handling of his baby - and perhaps just a little apprehensive; while we adhere to the same fundamental principles, the organisation has had to adapt. We are a long way now from the Summer of Love.

I needn't have worried. He hung around the offices for hours in his own quiet way, talking to me and the latest generation of Release people, taking in the atmosphere amidst the hum of voices, phones and PCs. When we said our goodbyes he expressed his firm intention of attending the Release conference on 18 June this year, which celebrates the organisation's 40 years at the sharp end of the UK drug scene.

Rufus Harris was a modest man, not given to self-promotion. He was an activist on behalf of all those on the wrong side of power-relations: a humanitarian, someone who took little notice of praise or blame, but was simply there to get the job done.

Sebastian Saville

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