Written by We’re halfway into a new year and hope is on the rise in the hearts of our homeland. Only days ago our family built on the brinks of compassion founds it’s way back into the masses at the county fair where our love and compassion for each other was once again naturally on display. The obvious changes in our lives due to cannabis only we are aware of – unless one has been watching on.
A trip to the her favorite place in the world just 36 hours ago will be followed by another tomorrow as Genevieve’s Dream of having a carousel available to her 24/7 doesn’t stop every single day. Thankfully the fair is in town for a couple of days and we have a place to go – it’s such a blessing. Let’s look back for a moment before looking ahead.
A normal calendar year has 365 days – a half million minutes or nearly 32 million seconds. That’s a lot of time. But every 4 years our calendar adds a day to make up for leftover hours. We call it the Leap Year.
2020 was a leap year. But… Good God… it certainly felt much longer than 366 days. So much happened in 2020. And we lost so much. I do not doubt that in the hearts of 7 billion people, this was the longest year in human history. Especially if we count our days in human misery.
We ALL hurt, even if we hurt for different reasons. The only thing that can offset that type of hurt is compassion – true and real care for others.
Family members were sickened. Too many died. Every night an unstoppable evil crept into our homes, hurting and killing the ones we loved. In the beginning, there was nothing we could do to bar this villain from our homes. We could only be afraid; we could only be anxious. And the use of anti-anxiety drugs rose to the highest level ever. We consumed 34% more of these drugs. Antidepressants and sleep aids rose by a similar level.
Opioid drug overdoses, already at historic highs in 2019, leaped forward another 29% in 2020. For two decades before the pandemic, mainstream healthcare had been hard at work overprescribing opioids to people in pain. The result? More than 2 million opioid addicts in pain.
Many of these addicts were in greater pain, were more depressed, and felt greater hopelessness than the day they were given their first opioid prescription. Those who cared for these shattered people spent years trying to get mainstream healthcare to accept responsibility for the problems they created.
Just before the pandemic, Big Pharma came up with their Big solution. Cut off legal opioids, and they aren’t responsible. The real, and totally predictable result? Addicts were driven into the arms of the illegal drug industry. And then the Pandemic hit.
During that year of pain, some suffered more than others, but everyone suffered in their own way. In the past pain usually happened to someone else…. your neighbor’s son overdosed on heroin. A friend’s daughter was a relapsed drug addict. A depressed friend of a friend committed suicide.
Or was that their daughter? With so many stories of pain, it was difficult to keep it all straight. Now, after a year of empathy, of feeling our own pain, will we still be able to ignore the millions who suffer from depression, mental disorders, cancer?
(Genevieve was once cannabis compassion patient with Autism and Epilepsy, after receiving oils through a program I ran that gave away plant medicine to the less fortunate, slowly the Cannabis Love Story was created and she became my daughter. )
I became part of the compassionate care world over a decade ago. Compassionate (or compassion) care means personally helping people in pain, usually by providing care that is not available in mainstream medicine. My area of expertise has been the use of Cannabis and natural medicines to ease the pain of cancer, depression, neural damage, trauma, and even to provide an exit path for opioid addicts.
You need to care, but you need to do more than care. You need to act, even if that includes pushing the boundaries are what is accepted mainstream medicine vs. what actually works.
I am a researcher, a public advocate, a cannabis supporter, and a former opiate addict, and I’ve had to use all of my expertise and life experiences to help those who fall outside of traditional healthcare treatment.
There is a growing body of scientific evidence about cannabis’ ability to break the cycle of addiction, as well as to address many forms of pain. But the politics of cannabis has greatly limited the ability of that evidence to be published and followed by our healthcare systems.
Offsetting this governmental blockade of the power of compassion has allowed people to heal with medicinal cannabis in the modern era for quite some time. Dating back to legendary Rick Simpson, cannabis oil has been gifted to people for use in their personal health battles in a very public way for decades and decades. This type of giving has an exponential ability to fuel more and more love, as unlike other types of politics it only knows this one thing – that everybody and everything needs more love.
Fade back to the controversy and callousness of our government. Until 1942 cannabis was an approved and essential part of mainstream medicine. It was a common remedy that the AMA or any American medical college actually fought to keep legal – but lost in the famed Marihuana Tax Act or prohibition. Many don’t know this was a sudden political movement unexpected by other governmental agencies that favored the Hemp plant.
Opinions on why it was taxed and slated to be banned in 1937 vary, but most medical historians agree that it had less to do with science and more to do with politics. Cannabis was associated with Mexican and Black culture, and (worst of all) Jazz musicians. The hypocrisy and history is incredible so we’ll keep it brief.
In the creation of the ‘Reefer Madness’ campaigns it was the former slave still working on the farm that was the hard target along with anyone crossing the borders into the U.S. from Mexico. Two birds with one stone type of thinking created racial animosity and the hatred for a plant.
A movie about ‘Mary Jane’ or Marihuana in Spanish coupled with the fact that many former slaves worked on farms with hemp created the perfect storm for the prohibitionist – and an ability to scare the gullible American that was once oh so willing to give up their wedding ring for yet another bullet to be made. If one thinks about this in simple ways such as things were done back then – it didn’t take much to scare us away from the cure and lead us to illness.
While the American Medical Association fought to keep cannabis legal, few medical researchers were willing to take on the complex politics of Cannabis to produce the needed research. Today, however, state after state is hard at work legalizing cannabis.
I have provided compassionate care to thousands of people and personally seen the positive results. I’ve also worked with respectable researchers who have quietly and carefully (more like extremely carefully) performed the breakthrough studies that the world has been waiting for.
There is a lot of talk about the Politics of Cannabis. It is definitely real, but for the moment, let’s just focus on the Politics of Pain. Opioids can and do relieve pain… if they are used correctly. When used incorrectly, they bring a lifetime of pain and misery. I know. I was an opioid addict.
I had every excuse in the world to be an addict. In 1995 a brutal racing track wreck nearly took my life and left me with a broken body and brain injuries. I was paralyzed and regularly had seizures. In 2003, I had the first of several battles with cancer. I was in excruciating pain all the time. My pain was extremely real. This pain gave me an “automatic okay” for pain medications. Any pain medication, usually in any dosage.
It might have been the medication or the seizures, but these were blurry and blackout-filled
years, where I often woke up in my wheelchair wondering where I was and who were the people around me.
No doctor ever said, “I think I’m giving you too many pills.” Instead, it was, “Mike we’ve got a new drug that won’t make you sick like Morphine. Here’s a prescription for the maximum dose. It might help.” These were good intentions by good doctors. My trusted doctors didn’t know how dangerous these prescriptions were. They too had been lied to by Big Pharma.
For years, I helped others end their opioid addictions, but it wasn’t until 2019 that I followed my own advice and used Cannabis as my “exit drug”. Good thing too, or I would have been dealing with addiction during the COVID lockdown. Cannabis was a big part of my exit from opioids. But it did take something more. It took Anne Mari and her daughter Genevieve.
I met Anne Mari and Genevieve – an angelic 13-year-old stuck in a world of Autism, Epilepsy, and severe OCD, in 2016. Her mom reached out for compassion care, but when I got to their house (the place I now call home), I met more than another child needing cannabis. I met an angel.
An angel that lost her biological father a decade earlier to addiction. Her father was addicted to the same drugs that I used for the last decade. When I first met Genevieve, she had the mental development of a very young child. Now, she is developing again in unimaginable ways due to both plant medicine and love – and at the rate of a teenager.
After living a life that had become limited by her seizures and disabilities, Genevieve now thrives. Genevieve’s story is not unique. Many other families have followed our journey, and they too have learned how to fight off health issues with cannabis and hemp extracts – as well as the plant itself.
But what about the addiction industry? Where are these terrible drugs coming from and why are they so terrible? Many don’t aske these questions about medications that most people no longer want to take – medications that are sold on the streets and used by many that are addicted and can’t get real help.
We need to start with a little-understood concept. We have all heard how Big Pharma corporations spends vast amounts of money on research. But what isn’t understood by most consumers is that most of this type of research is not “unbiased”. It is very much biased, and designed for one and only one purpose.
To sell drugs.
That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact. Drug testing is primarily performed by the drug companies themselves. These companies don’t spend billions of dollars to test if common inexpensive compounds have health benefits. They only test that they can patent and have an exclusive right to sell profitably.
As a medical researcher, I know how easily a clinical trial can be made to emphasize more positive results, and how to make inconvenient evidence disappear. This sort of manipulation is not just something that happened with a single drug, or a single drug manufacturer. It is an industry wide problem, and that problem seems to be growing every year.
It’s such a horrific problem that most of us have personally experienced it ourselves or with a family member and almost all of us have faced a tragedy due to it. There’s not a family in America that is free from addiction or some type of drug related issue – this is just fact. But we must ask why we haven’t had the proper oversight – why is cannabis regulated so heavily while these dangerous and deadly drugs are not?
Generally, regulators do not like fining the industry it regulates. There are many questionable actions and products that are never fined. Yet the industry did (finally) investigate allegations about Perdue Pharma’s popular opioids Oxycodone and Oxycontin. This incredibly dangerous drug created hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of drug addicts.
I should know, I was one of them for 24 years until a personal choice was made on January 26, 2019 to say no more.
Let’s get back to the politics of pain. When a pharmaceutical corporation is in trouble they get a ticket much like anyone who speeds or drives recklessly. To be fined a mere few million dollars requires some pretty illegal activities. Purdue Pharma was fined a
record-breaking $8.3 billion. Wow! How far does Purdue need to stray from “Acting in the best interests of its customers” to be fined $8,300,000,000?
In a joint letter, two dozen state attorneys’ generals described Purdue as a “criminal enterprise”, the equivalent of a drug cartel. Absolutely terrible with no doubt – but unique? Sadly, no. GlaxoSmithKline was fined $3 billion for misrepresenting the addictiveness of their products, deceptive marketing, and illegal kickback schemes.
This problem of addiction and the politics of pain is far from new – it’s just been rebranded like many other issues that face America. The ongoing minimalizing and marginalizing of a mere plant while giants utilize and kill masses with synthetic drugs that harm has created an environment of harm for tens if not 100’s of millions of children to live in. There’s so much more to this than fines to pharma but let’s go on.
Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion for kickbacks, deceptive marketing, and falsified government reports. Johnson & Johnson was fined $2.2 billion for misrepresenting their products and illegal marketing practices. That’s just a few of the recent fines. Just about every major pharmaceutical firm has been filed for the same or similar unethical practices, essentially making a profit on lying to doctors and customers and turning patients into addicts.
How does addiction happen? Our brains have many chemical receptors, and each receptor matches up with different chemicals. Many of these chemicals are made within our own bodies, including opioids. When our bodies are flooded by opioids, we make more opioid receptors. Often, more than we need. Then, to keep this simple, a secondary action may occur that causes us to “crave” opioids, whether we need them or not.
Big Pharma opioids make this problem even worse, by slowing our production of natural opioids (B-endorphin). More receptors, less natural opioids, and then you begin to crave opioids.
You’re addicted.
Once addicted, it is very difficult to break this cycle. I began my incredible journey as a Compassion giver many years ago – closer to a decade. Last year, my Compassion career culminated in the 100 Million Milligram giveaway. The largest compassion giveaway of all time. I’ve been humble but proud of the work I’ve done, and yet I am fully aware that it was just the beginning- it’s just a small start.
For years I’ve known that my true goal, my “next act”, would be to create Genevieve’s Dream, a creation that fuels a non-profit dedicated to helping families who are caring for their own Genevieve’s. I don’t want to blow my own horn, but due to my Compassion care experiences, I’ve discovered and developed products that are more advanced than what’s on the market today.
This means that I need to get organized so that I can finally market retail products that I used to happily hand to people in need as an act of love and kindness. Moving into selling instead of giving away means that I can relieve more pain, for more people, and it means that I can use those funds to build what we know as the Genevieve’s Dream farm for families that cannot afford to pay for the care they need.
Quickly around us we see our world changing once again, masks are being removed as signs come down. Smiles are upon faces and bright cheery people all about seem so happy to be in a world that has so much to offer. The world saw serious angst in 2020 but now it’s a whole new world in 2021. Maybe we have all learned a bit about pain and the need for compassion.
In all of this Cannabis has been a rock star – being named as ‘essential’ was the highlight for many of us in the industry over the last year if we could find one. It’s becoming increasingly legal. New York, Virginia, and New Mexico have legalized cannabis in the medicinal and recreational arena now, and other states are likely to follow suit that way as well making it very accessible.
Dozens of cannabis reform bills have been proposed on the federal level. If ever there was a time for Genevieve’s Dream CBG farm = this is it!
In the past 18 months, we all had our taste of hopelessness. Each of you, like me, has the ability to do something, something significant, for all the families that have lost hope. Now is the time for all of us to get together and build Genevieve’s Dream. How can we do it?
Well, that is a story for another day. But, if you’re very serious about getting involved please reach out to me as Genevieve is a true testament to the power of compassion. Because of her people have gained help all across a country that’s seen way too much despair. Because of Genevieve smiles have been on faces and happy people are ready to go places and get on a ride.
Genevieve is truly love – and that’s powerful.
-Mike Robinson, Medicinal Cannabis Patient. Founder, Global Cannabinoid Research Center. But most of all – Genevieve’s Daddy.
