T<\/span>he human toll of the drug war cannot be overstated, nor can it be\u00a0fully enumerated. The U.S. government has squandered\u00a0at least $1 trillion dollars since Richard Nixon\u2019s declaration of war in 1970, but this figure does not include the lost productivity, the lost generational wealth, and most importantly, the lost lives and communities of those oppressed by the War on Drugs.<\/p>\n In short, in order for cannabis to be slowly re-legalized in America, and in order for scientists and the public to rediscover and accept the palliative power of the plant, people had to suffer in the public eye. It is right and proper, then, to occasionally pause, reflect and remember the giants on whose shoulders anyone visiting a legal cannabis storefront is standing. Here are some of the marijuana legalization movement\u2019s heroes.<\/p>\n This year began with the shock sudden death of Franco Loja, the internationally famous strain hunter. A legend in the insular world of cannabis genetics for his skill as a master breeder, Loja shot to mainstream marijuana fame as the Indiana Jones-like mind and face behind VICELAND\u2019s Strain Hunters series. True to form, while in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, searching for yet another landrace cultivar of pre-contact cannabis,\u00a0Loja succumbed to what was most likely malaria<\/a> on January 2. In a cruel twist, part of the mission for Loja and the Strain Hunters team in the jungle was to investigate how cannabidiol might be used in treating malaria, which continues to kill numerous people across the globe.<\/p>\n Some form of medical marijuana is now available in more than half of American states. Eighty-eight percent of Americans<\/a> support medical marijuana, a groundswell that extends to deep-red regions like Georgia and Texas, where lawmakers are making accommodations for sick people to access cannabis oil. How did we get here? Suffering and death, and lots of it. California\u2019s push to legalize medical marijuana in 1996 began with the AIDS apocalypse. As President Ronald Reagan ignored and denied the crisis, hordes of gay men withered away and lost their lives. One of the few bright spots was the discovery, somewhat by accident, that cannabis soothed pain \u2014 and for that discovery, \u201cBrownie\u201d Mary Rathbun, the brash diner waitress who distributed pot brownies to patients at San Francisco General Hospital\u2019s AIDS ward, is owed much of the credit (her obituary in the New York Times recognized this<\/a>).<\/p>\n Following the work of AIDS activists, suffering children continued to demonstrate the need for medical marijuana. By the time he died at age 15 from complications from cerebral palsy, Colorado teenager\u00a0Jack Splitt had influenced massive changes in medical marijuana policy<\/a>, allowing for cannabis on school grounds. For every Jack Splitt, however, there are countless Cash Hydes.\u00a0Cash was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor before he turned 2 years old<\/a>. He died before he turned five \u2014 but only after officials in his home state of Montana changed the state\u2019s medical-marijuana law to cut off easy access to the cannabis oil that had given him some measure of relief and allowed him to live at least a semblance of a normal life. Needless suffering and death goes on like that today in many prohibition states, even as investors and entrepreneurs scramble for a slice of the billions and billions of dollars available in the legal marijuana economy. Those dollars have come at a great cost.<\/p>\n The author of \u201cThe Emperor Wears No Clothes,\u201d the seminal 1985 book on the power and magic of the Cannabis sativa<\/em> plant \u2014 that is, the one you don\u2019t smoke, the one we call hemp \u2014 Jack Herer died as he lived, succumbing to complications from a heart attack <\/a>he suffered moments after speaking at a Portland, Oregon marijuana rally (a decade after surviving a stroke at yet another hemp festival).\u00a0Today, his name lives on mostly in the fruity, uplifting sativa-dominant strain bearing his name, but it\u2019s good to remember the grassroots and sometimes guerrilla tactics that jumpstarted the legalization movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s: Jack Herer and a gang of colleagues and followers on buses, traversing the country, speaking to anyone who would listen about cannabis\u2019s awesome power. For him, it was a lifelong vow fulfilled: Herer and \u201cCapt.\u201d Ed Adair, another legalization advocate whose career began in the early 1970s, swore to campaign for legalization until weed was legal, everyone in prison for it was freed or until they turned 84. Neither man made it. And so neither man quit the mission.<\/p>\n The loneliest voices whispering from the wilderness often speak the most truth. So it was with\u00a0Robert Randall,\u00a0America\u2019s first legal marijuana patient, and the man whom longtime NORML director Keith Stroup called \u201cthe father of the medical-marijuana movement.\u201d Randall,\u00a0who died in June 2001 at 53, first came to fame 25 years prior,<\/a>\u00a0when he convinced a Washington, D.C. Superior court judge that the cannabis he grew on his porch in Capitol Hill kept him from going blind. What convinced the courts was the applied knowledge rediscovered and reintroduced to America by a man who risked his livelihood in order to do so.<\/p>\n A physician and dedicated researcher<\/a>,\u00a0Tod Mikuriya\u00a0pored over 130 years\u2019 worth of dusty medical research papers to prove to the public what the medical establishment had known all along: Marijuana has real and accepted medical value. Mikuriya briefly led a government research arm into cannabis before he realized the government only wanted \u201cbad things\u201d to be known about cannabis. He applied that knowledge and made it public when he published the first volume of \u201cMarijuana: Medical Papers in 1973.\u201d More than twenty years later, his reputation and scholarship were personally assaulted by Gen. Barry McCaffrey. Undaunted, Mikuriya founded the Society of Cannabis Clinicians in 1999, before suffering yet another blow: an investigation and punishment from the Medical Board of California, punitive actions he believed were politically motivated and that contributed to his failing health.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong> who did you honor on this Dia De Los Muertos?<\/p>\n The post Honoring The Marijuana Movement\u2019s Deceased Heroes<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
This Dia De Los Muertos, Cannabis Now remembers and honors those activists who have since passed that paved the way for progress. The human toll of the drug war cannot be overstated, nor can it be\u00a0fully enumerated. The U.S. government has squandered\u00a0at least $1 trillion dollars since Richard Nixon\u2019s declarationContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2252,50,99,139],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20834"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20834"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20835,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20834\/revisions\/20835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Franco Loja<\/h4>\n
Brownie Mary Rathburn and the victims of the AIDS crisis<\/h4>\n
Jack Splitt, Cash Hyde and all pediatric patients<\/h4>\n
Jack Herer and \u201cCapt.\u201d Ed Adair<\/h4>\n
Robert Randall, Dr. Tod Mikuriya and the fighters for science<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Honoring The Marijuana Movement\u2019s Deceased Heroes<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"