The Man

Rebel…Evangelical Christian…Loves Country…Dogs…Guns…Purveyor of…

WEED.

Yeah, weed.

Thus enter the dichotomy that was this man’s life until he found…

Medical Marijuana.

Profiteer turned caregiver…from non-initiated to true believer.

From the age of 17, when he smoked his first joint (and like most of us, didn’t get high), he has been a weed warrior and has been growing pot incognito. That’s almost 40 years.

Now he’s lead grower, with his wife, and operator of Psychedelic Purple farm on the southern edge of the Mendocino Triangle in northern California.

“Ben”

Meet “Ben.” To maintain his anonymity, his name and location have been altered. Thanks folks.

Ben is 56 years old and it wasn’t always easy for him – as a child, he suffered from undiagnosed anxiety. As a youth, all the confusion swirling around Ben kept him walking on eggs.

“I spent a lot of my teens sweating bullets. I couldn’t keep a dry shirt. I didn’t know it was anxiety,” Ben recalls. “I didn’t know [smoking] marijuana was medical, that it was saving my life and giving myself a place to hide away. People can be cruel and kids don’t understand that.”

But once he found the relief inherent in marijuana – he describes it as “… a sun screen for a soul that’s been singed by cruelty or trauma … from that searing sun that is society,” – he didn’t turn back.

Even though his dad was a law enforcement officer. The kind that busts drug users.

“But the funny thing was that there was this guy that was a weed grower,” recalls Ben, “and [my dad] actually liked this guy. He went woodcutting with this guy. I never actually got that.

The Rebel and the Farm

“But I’ve always been a rebel. When I didn’t use weed, I’ve always wanted to be a weed grower,” he mused. And a grower he is: Psychedelic Purple Farm offers about 40 strains of organically grown medical cannabis. Growing, says Ben, is not a science, “it’s just common sense.”

What’s the Bottom Line for Ben as a Grower?

It’s the sun. He is an all-natural farmer of cannabis, passionate about the sun’s rays and its ability to create potent weed. This is one of the basic tenets of growing for Ben.

“I’m betting money that sun-grown marijuana has a more varied and robust cannabinoid profile than indoor plants,” he says. “I know this as a fact. You can’t replicate the sun, I know it, you know it. The only people who don’t know it are the twenty-something year olds who think indoor marijuana is better. I don’t know how.”

Ben joked about how indoor-grown pot in the 80s was like eating Chinese food and being hungry again within an hour. “It hits you hard, but 45 minutes later you’re looking for the Fritos.”

Nothing Psychedelic Purple Farm does is special, Ben expounds. “All weed is good weed until someone cuts it down. That’s the problem. Even Mexican brick weed is good until someone cuts it down. It doesn’t always look like that. It is mistreating the weed.”

Ben likens the mistreatment of cannabis to a carelessly shared cake. “If marijuana is the cake, then the frosting is the cannabinoids…,” he explains. “If a person took that piece of cake and grabbed it with their hands, and the next person does the same and the next person…It’ll go through a few people before the cake is completely f**ked. No frosting.”

So for Ben, how the weed is processed is paramount to its success as a useful medication.

“We do it in a way that causes the least amount of harm [to the cannabis], so when our “cake” so to speak, goes to the lab, it comes back with a higher [THC] content than you would expect.

“It’s an honest approach,” he continues. “We are not doing anything else to try to produce by-products. Our processing preserves quality, which allows us to store our weed for a very long time without losing any quality or appearance.”

The Future

As with everything, pot technology has improved and Ben agrees that Psychedelic Purple Farms would like to add an element of indoor growing, but has neither the space nor resources right now. There’s always concern that local law enforcement will go too far. Is he worried about the feds busting his MMJ grow operation if he expands? (He now gets regular fly-overs by law enforcement and drones. Oh, and also officer visits.)

“Not at all,” he answers. Thanks to a 2014 federal budget amendment, the Rohracher-Farr amendment, the feds are not allowed to touch MMJ providers, caregivers or patients for their use and cultivation of cannabis so long as they are operating within the confines of state law. “I don’t see the federal government coming after small MMJ growers,” Ben says. “You’d have to be involved in other crimes.”

The amendment is good news for MMJ suppliers and users. Spread the word, not many medical cannabis growers are aware of it. Knowledge is power and this is certainly an essential piece of knowledge that needs to be shared. Ben watches everything MMJ and rec marijuana, and will probably let users and growers know if the Rohracher-Farr amendment has been rescinded. Keep an eye out here.

One last thing, Ben is working on legalization of all cannabis for all users. “I’ll keep fighting on, but I’m for all adult use, medical and recreational use,” says the guru once known only for MMJ. “It just makes sense in scientific, spiritual, moral, and economic grounds. The war on drugs is just an excuse in barbarity.”

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