I started out as a mental health writer. I was taught the unquestioned ideology that ‘drugs cause mental illness’.
One of the things I hope to teach my daughter is to question everything and come to her own conclusions. Sometimes being unquestioning is comfortable. Others choose to live outside the Matrix!
What led me to be a hemp writer?
I came to be a hemp and marijuana writer from left field…
Bath bhongs, eating half an ounce of hashish dissolved in yoghurt, smoking footlong spliffs? I’ve been a bit caned from time to time, though there is a limit for someone for whom life has got too much and their outlook becomes distorted by their own wayward brain chemistry.
Why then be a marijuana writer when I can’t touch the stuff myself?
A cannabis epiphany
I was a leading UK mental health nursing journalist for several years. I spoke to a lot of leading lights in the field until one day a New Zealand psychiatrist and I were talking and he asked me, “What if LSD was the opium of psychiatry?”
That sent me into a new direction. I made new friends and contacts and soon did marijuana writing with Treating Yourself Magazine, also publishing hemp and cannabis stories in some unlikely locations such as Mental Health Today and a defence procurement magazine.
So today I am working as a cannabis blog writer, while having pretty much the only illness that you can have where it is ill advised to touch the stuff.
Weird? Instead people find me an asset as someone who understands the facts around hemp and cannabis and still thinks it should be legalised. In the UK we are in the campaign phase – you may well be in the business phase as your own world wakes up to sensible drug policies.
Beyond to Herbs and Mushrooms
Sitting in a Force 9 gale in a tree with 150 psilocybin mushrooms inside me, watching an oil refinery while at university, I never guessed I’d make more money out of writing about drugs than I ever spent on them!
During lockdown in Spring 2020 I expanded my interests by doing a course in psychotropic herbs.
Now installed in my new house in the wilds of West Dorset, I am planning a medicinal garden to include everything from catnip, to wormwood to brew beer with, mugwort to meditate with, poppies for pain relief, passionflower to chill out, and even a few plants that remain legal to grow but not to harvest (like my two peyote buttons!).
As with my interest in the ancient teachings of the Veda, I am slowly learning that our ancient ancestors probably worked it out long before our much vaunted ‘civilisation’ ever did…
Could we work together to fight the system to make for a just world where we can all partake of what Mother Nature invented for us herself?
The scientists are right on certain things – COVID and climate change – but I do wonder why they have to make artificial THC or artificial LSD when there’s probably something perfect in the woods already… Sassafras, mushrooms, and even common herbs in the British country garden like Mugwort and wormwood are pretty amazing without having to reinvent the wheel!
