Where weed brought me

Yes. I believe we have extremely similar visions of where we need to be but I think we have very different viewpoints on where we are.






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I wrote that almost immediately after you emailed me, that and a few more sentences which I deleted. The thing is, trying to start this conversation with you has proven very difficult for me. When I look out at the world I see something very different than most people. I tend not to involve my self in conversation most of the time, not because I disagree with people conclusions but because I reject the unspoken assumptions that are included in most arguments. This is not something that is easy to explain, and it comes with risks to admit. With that in mind I have contemplated how best to proceed with this line of inquiry I have for you. If I am right and we do have the same destination in mind, but we have differing opinions on where we are, I think I should tell you where I am, or rather how I got here. May be it would be more accurate to say that something brought me here. That thing is marijuana.






The first time I was ever exposed to weed, a co-worker at the firehouse restaurant in windsor pulled it out of his sock. It was rolled up in a sandwich bag. He didn't unroll the bag so all I got from that was that there was something green down underneath those many layers. I don't remember what I thought really. I didn't do anything about it or say anything to anyone. A couple years later, 3/4 of the way through my freshman year at CU my new best friend Bruce decided I needed to be properly introduced. He had started smoking as a high school student, was very much a fan and assumed that I would be too.






My first real shock came when he showed it to me and I was able to examine it up close. It was a plant. I believe the first words out of my mouth were "It's a fucking plant!?!?!" I had no idea it was a plant. Many years of anti-drug education and no where in any material had anyone mentioned to me it was a plant. I had some how missed images of DEA agents chopping them down and tossing them on a fire. Probably most of those images were of bales of the stuff but either way, that fact had skipped me entirely.






I have always been pretty cautious so I made it clear to Bruce that I would not be proceeding with out feeling fully informed. Over the next couple weeks I asked a lot of questions, and did a little research and was surprised to find that weed was nothing like how it was publicly perceived. Shortly there after I did have some and was quite surprised to find that it indeed seemed relatively harmless. It certainly was not literally harmless but relative to other things, including alcohol I found my self a little confused as to why it was being billed as enemy number 1.






This is where the questions started. What is it that's so bad about weed? Why such stringent prohibition? Why the lies? Why, alternatively, is alcohol so readily available?






Early on I remember starting to think, well no wonder it's illegal, using it starts to introduce an anti government angle in one's mind. I don't think that is so much true these days. There is an element to weed that is independent because you can grow it your self and governments are reliant on dependents, but what emerged was a picture that weed was extremely useful both as an intoxicant and as industrial crop in the form of hemp. A little research quickly turned up that much of the marijuana prohibition was funded by industrial companies who stood to lose a lot of profit if we ever switched over to hemp. It's a lot cheaper to produce which sounds like a good thing but the fact is that companies rely on profit which is a percentage of cost. The less the cost, the less the profit. Hemp grows more per acre, takes less chemicals to reach the end user and lasts a lot longer. A pair of socks that last twice as long is half the profit to a company like Fruit of the Loom. I suppose this was the seed that was planted that eventually led me to the conclusion that market place is striving to deliver the least efficient product to the market in the most efficient manner. I've seen a couple light bulbs last for years and I've seen thousands blow out after 50% of their rated life, but that's a whole other paper.






There is no point in getting into any detail with regard to 4 or 5 years that passes between my initial impression of weed and my next big revelation but notably, every time I came across a piece of information during that time I then wondered "well, they lied about the weed, how do I know they aren't lying about this?" This mindset created a backdrop for what eventually made me realize that I could see no downside to getting into the business.






When I started smoking weed pretty regularly, and making friends that did the same, it was a common occurrence to have conversations with regard to who was going shopping and when. It didn't take very much time before it occurred to me that if I purchased 7 bags, the 8th was free and upon experimenting I found that my 7 friends used theirs up a little faster than I used up mine and thus my smoking became free. This continued for a year or two with only minor growth. Before things really took off I was probably selling 15 and smoking one which meant I put $50 bucks in my pocket every other week. It was at this point Talmage moved in. Talmage had some long standing customers, a little higher volume, and was not as good with money and was struggling with the costs of moving. I temporarily took over his client base while he got caught up on bills and consequently I made an extra paycheck that month. All of my "customers" were personal friends who were highly intelligent and interesting and I pretty much just got to kick back and wait for people to come over and hang out. Most days they left with a little weed and I was left with a little cash and I was doing it in one of the most weed friendly places in the world, Boulder Colorado. The combination of that and my day job quickly turned in to comfortable situation. When the tech company I was working for crashed because the CEO was more concerned about his credit line than his products, I decided I was going to get a restaurant job, work 25 hours a week and sell weed to everyone that works there, including the owners. I did. Around the same time I decided to try my hand at growing it. It took a little practice but before long it was obivous I was good at that too. I stuck to simple little hobby operations. A small bedroom was all you need to have a sustainable option that would pay for the whole house. For a couple years there I was making 50k and only paying taxes on 20k. My life was relatively simple and I had a good deal of free time. Free time I spent reading everything I could get my hands on.






In 2005 I moved into a house closer to work. A house I picked specifically because I felt comfortable having a little hobby grow in the basement. In the lease signing I got a good handshake from the Landlord ensuring me that he had no plans to sell his house and I could live there for quite awhile. I reminded him of this a year later when he called me to say he was selling the house. He gave me another 6 months because I practically begged him but in the end, moving out of that house was the beginning of the end.A friend of mine was renting a big house on a golf course in Westminster and he had the entire place to him self. I offered to pay the rent on one bedroom and he would get a very good deal on his daily habit, and he could sell what he didn't smoke. I learned an important lesson about business partners leading up to and during my move away from the previous house and so this time I was aiming to go completely solo. I had gotten pretty good at the whole thing, and I had a really good idea for a redundant system using one bedroom and one person working only about 20 hours a week. The room I built there was superb and I finished it right about the time medical marijuana was approved. I had as good a resume as any one in the business, and the business was about to boom. I was seriously thinking about starting the paperwork to go legal but I had a few more details to nail down. I had taken over the lease of the entire house, was only 2 weeks away from recovering my entire investment in one payment and I had already doubled my investors money so I just needed a few more weeks. That's when I got busted.






Suspicions at the local police department had been raised by someone. It's tough to know for sure. I suppose I should go back and read the discovery and see if it's there but there were lots of options. Honestly when it comes to running a business like this I was making a couple mistakes by not enforcing a couple key and well known rules. The first time my friend hit hard times he had a down grade in pay and was thus forced to take on a roommate. The roommate also sold a little weed and I insisted that he not deal in the house, he ignored my advice. When it all started it had the appearance of successful single-father enjoying his nice house. But the combination of his sex addiction and the new roommates selling weed out of the house was probably too much for some neighbor not to notice. Golf course people don't tend to tolerate flop houses. There was also this possibly that the woman who had been my roommate and had decided to divorce her husband during that time ratted on me when I didn't take her side. She verbally threatened to do so in a room full of lawyers. I wasn't there, but I was told she did.






The cops sent a car over to investigate a domestic disturbance one night and the couple living in the house had been prepped for this kind of thing. There was nothing anywhere on the ground floor to suggest that any cop had any reason to search the place and they had to leave empty handed. The smart thing would have been to tear everything down and relocated but I felt reassured the cops left empty handed and I hoped that would be the end of things. Unfortunately that was not the case. They had put together enough suspicion to get the water records which were high. This justified them staking us out and one snowy night a car that left this house with a fresh bag lost enough traction to warrant being pulled over. The driver promptly squealed on the whole deal. He would have gotten a ticket for $50 if he had said nothing. Instead entire police SWAT team closed down the street and blew down the door and stormed the house with tear gas grenades. I was informed of this by a friendly neighbor as he watch the renters escorted out in handcuffs.






The two main detectives who came to question me were undercover and one actually looked like Neil with blond hair. They looked like 40 year olds who smoked pot and listened to Led Zeppelin except they had badges on chains around their necks. I was brought in for questioning. At first it was pretty obvious they thought they were busting some big time grower but after a while they figured out I was just a kid with a hobby. They even apologized to me. "You know this isn't really our beat. We are supposed to be out busting coke dealers and major grow operations." In hindsight, if I had said nothing I would have walked away clean because I just visited the house and they had no actual proof I did anything. The paper's said that I was suspected of "building the room". I felt bad for the kid and his girlfriend who lived there and I wanted to take the entire rap if I could. I couldn't.






It took almost 4 months for the state to issue an arrest for my warrant. I was picked up at 9 am on Friday and because of how the courts work I couldn't get out till Tuesday after I saw a judge. Something about Judges not working on Mondays. Bye the way you don't actually see a judge. You look at one on a TV and he looks back at you on a TV in his conference room many miles away. I only spent 4 days in jail and I could talk for hours about all the stuff I saw in there but that's a different story. I used the added stress of my impending legal situation as fuel to my research. I spent countless hours pouring over the internet reading everything I could find about court and the law and by the time I was due in court I had developed, or may be I should say found, some interesting theories. I decided to test those theories in court and spent a full year defending my self with no legal representation. I'm not sure how much of that you know but that's a whole different story as well. The bullet points are three. I saw some things in court that proved, to me at least, that court is not what it claims to be, I ran out of time and money to defend my self, and by the time I was pleading guilty for felony possession of marijuana (6 years ago this month) I had already known for four months that marijuana kills cancer.






http://naturalsociety.com/marijuana-kills-cancer-cells-admits-the-u-s-national-cancer-institute/





At the time, the mechanism was even well understood. I was watching podcasts that broke down the chemistry by one of the leading researchers in the world and he was researching only a mile from my house. In fact a researcher in Madrid had found that marijuana killed 3 types of cancer in mice in 2000. Even more interesting, in 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found that it cured cancer and it was this study that had provided the inspiration for the Madrid study.






http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-armentano/what-your-government-know_b_108712.html






2 years later in 1976 Marijuana was rescheduled to a Schedule 1 drug, deemed to dangerous to even study.






I have a felony conviction for position of a substance that which cures cancer, and I knew that to be true 6 years ago when I pled guilty to the charge. The conviction still prevents me from having a job in that now legal industry, soon to be one of the largest industries on the planet, with the ability to replace a large percentage of the fossil fuel demand including plastic. It's also one of the most nutritious things on the planet.






I wrote the following on February, 15th 2010






when the truth about the wolds most beneficial plant starts to hit the main stream the "justice system" is going to be forced to look inward and start asking the important questions. Not to mention my family. I come from a very conservative family and I 'm sure the most of them were discouraged to hear about my arrest but soon they are going to have to start examining the ideals they have come to understand as truth





I recently went on a date with a woman who had recently left the justice system to seek an alternate career. She was an assistant district attorney in New Orleans, she smoked, and she looked for every possible excuse to get people out of marijuana cases even though she was the prosecutor. Don't tell anyone I told you that.






This is serious business. Weed is serious business and in order to admit that to your self you also have to admit that the prohibition of weed is serious business. It's time to take a stern look at everything you have been told and you should start with marijuana because it could save you life one day, it will definitely make the end more comfortable and affordable. And extrapolating from this fact you have to wonder why was it illegal. The free market should have embraced it. Marijuana solves an incredible amount of problems, it's impossible to vilify when exposed to the light of truth. So why didn't it?






Again, I postulate that we don't have a free market.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrOw0biG5eM