My belief in cannabis started the very first time I used it. I had been struggling with anxiety and depression during my first year of college, and it was destroying my self-confidence. Despite my incarceration for it, I believe that cannabis is the most medicinally beneficial plant on the planet based on my own life experience, what I see in others, and from information I’ve gathered through outside sources. I believe it’s time for the United States government to recognize cannabis for the medicine it truly is.

Picture this: sitting on a bucket full of baseballs with tears streaming down my face. Thirty-something college-aged guys looking at me with a mixture of pity, sympathy, and cruel humor. I was the odd duck on the baseball team. The homeschooled kid with no car, no license, and no cell phone. I’d never tried alcohol nor seen a drug in person, let alone taken one. I’d finally broken. I couldn’t throw the ball back to the pitcher. I was having some kind of mental block like the guy from the movie “Major League.” While I eventually stopped crying and my anxiety attack ended, the tightness in my chest and the depression that followed didn’t. Then I used cannabis for the first time.

The summer after freshman year, my best friend started using cannabis, and his cousin was coming into town with a quarter ounce. I decided I wanted to try it. We stayed up all night using a hookah to smoke. I was high as a kite when my mother’s voice on my friend’s answering machine got me off the couch. I had a baseball game at 8 a.m. I hadn’t planned on showing up. I asked everyone at the house what I could do to hide how high I was. There was no hope for me. I hopped in the back of my mom’s conversion van and tried to fall asleep.

I don’t know if it was the grin on my face or the redness of my eyes that could be seen from a football field length away, but the guys on my team knew I was high long before I reached the dugout. I was the kid on the team who didn’t do that type of thing. They were all in disbelief. I wound up hitting a home run that game and never struggled to throw the ball back to the pitcher again. Using cannabis made me relax in a way I didn’t know was possible. It helped me see that life is supposed to be something we enjoy. Now, even when I can’t use cannabis because of drug tests, I still tap into that same place of inner calm and know that everything will be ok.

I’ve worked in the service industry since I was nineteen, bartended since twenty-three. The service industry is the cash business that supports the ultimate cash business: drugs. There is no doubt in my mind that alcohol is the most dangerous drug on earth. Just a handful of stories of what I’ve personally witnessed behind the bar is a testament to the veracity of that statement. I’m no fool—I know other drugs are dangerous—but cannabis simply isn’t one of them. Comparing cannabis to alcohol as a harmful drug is an insult to basic human intelligence. Alcohol is the cause. Cannabis is the cure.

I used to be like everyone else and thought medicinal cannabis was a joke, just an excuse for potheads to get high. Then I attended a rally for medicinal cannabis in Columbia, SC in 2015. I thought it would be like other weed festivals I’d attended earlier that year where everyone was smoking pot openly and a bunch of awesome bands played. I was completely wrong. I watched two parents give a passionate, tear-filled speech while their child sat in a high-tech wheelchair. Hundreds of seizures a day had destroyed his body and mind until his parents were desperate enough to try cannabis. The results were astounding, but to get the medicine their child desperately needed, they had to move to another state, to risk arrest and losing the very child they were trying to save. That was the moment I realized this fight is about so much more than getting high.

I started to view cannabis in a different light. What are we all really using it for? When I’m hungover from the night before, I smoke a blunt and drink a Gatorade the same way that someone else might pop an Aspirin. I thought of my friends who use it for anxiety, depression, headaches, pain, and everything else life throws our way. The truth is we can all go to a doctor and they will prescribe us some pharmaceutical drug for every single thing we use cannabis for. We don’t need medical degrees to know our own bodies and minds. If a natural plant works for me, why do I need to take an Aspirin, Xanax, or prescription opiate? We all use cannabis for medicinal reasons, whether we realize it or not.

When my bartending wife found out her father had cancer, she was devastated. He was an amazing man who led his family from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina where he’d been a pastor and started a new church in South Carolina. He’d never used cannabis, but his daughter talked him into trying it to deal with the side effects of chemotherapy. I provided whatever he needed free of charge because I knew he really needed it. Hearing that the cannabis vape pen he hit with his wife while they ate and watched T.V. together were the only moments of pain-free happiness he had left made me feel incredibly useful, like I was doing the right thing no matter the cost. Even if that cost included my freedom.

I started researching the true “why” of cannabis prohibition. How could a country that claims to be free not allow us to use a plant that can help with so many things? The real answer to that question is so infuriating that it makes me want to tear the war on drugs completely apart.

There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music—jazz and swing—result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.

FROM THE BOOK WAR ON US BY COLLEEN COWLES, 2019

These words are from Harry J. Anslinger, the father of the DEA. Imagine that statement as a tweet by the Drug Enforcement Agency in 2022. The cancel culture would demand the entire agency be shut down immediately. People would be outraged. There would be protesters lined up for miles outside their doors. Unfortunately, in 1937 when Harry made this and many other blatantly racist statements, telling white America that their wives and daughters might sleep with black men caused the same kind of outrage, but in a different direction. He effectively made cannabis illegal by placing a tax on it that couldn’t be paid, and white America was on completely on board.

In 1971, when Nixon declared the “War on Drugs,” there was a sinister reason to place cannabis on the schedule 1 drugs despite the unanimous recommendation of the commission appointed by Nixon to decriminalize cannabis for personal use. This is a quote from John Ehrlichman, who was Nixon’s personal counsel and assistant:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: The anti-war left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.

FROM THE BOOK WAR ON US BY COLLEEN COWLES, 2019

So here we are as a society, stuck in a slow uphill battle to legalize cannabis, while the leaders of this country claim we need more time to make sure it’s safe. Children are suffering from epilepsy, cancer, and other diseases that cannabis is known to alleviate and even cure while politicians use cannabis as a political chess piece. Real human beings are becoming addicted to much more dangerous pharmaceutical drugs because of a racist and an agenda behind a war we never should’ve been in. Here I am, in federal prison, for providing the most medicinally beneficial plant on the planet to adults who believe cannabis helps them. Stuck in a drug class that still treats cannabis as if it is really a schedule 1 drug. For me this fight is personal. This means everything to me. I’m told daily that nothing I say matters, that no one cares. I refuse to believe there’s any truth in that statement. I refuse to quit fighting for my freedom and for what I believe. 

(Author’s Note: All quotes are taken from War on Us by Colleen Cowles. Chapter 4 “Why an epidemic now? How did we get here?” pages 33 and 35 respectively. A must-read book for anyone interested in the truth behind “the war on drugs.”)