HARRISON FORD

THIS MONTH, THE LEAF DEBATES...PHARMACEUTICAL POT

JOINT/COUNTERJOINT

Are you with Joint or Counterjoint? Where do you stand on the issue of pharmaceutical-scale and style Cannabis growing and methods? #JointCointerjoint

Each month, we task two Leaf Nation contributors to debate both sides of a controversial subject. As with all debates, these are assigned positions that are being defended for the sake of an argument and education, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the writer, our staff, or our organization.

Should we turn our natural

plant over to the same big JOINT BY WES ABNEY

pharma companies that poi-

While the average soned our country for profit with opiates and massive overprescription stoner is drooling over the Weedmaps menu in legal states, big pharma has been of pills? I say no! The future of Cannabis medicines will certainly involve science – so don’t take me for a “whole plant and nothing but the plant” type of activist. After plotting their all, I love getting scientifically processed and purged concentrates that are profit-driven takeover of pot for the last 20 years. tested for harmful pesticides and chemicals, which produces a much tastier product than the open-blasted BHO of my Cannabis youth. But we must not let our quest for safer products lead to handing control of our plant over to either government regulators or big pharma. Cannabis has been consumed by humans for thousands of years, and many states are still fighting to have access to Cannabis medicine, let alone getting baked recreationally. While the average stoner is drooling over the Weedmaps menu in legal states, big pharma has been plotting their profit-driven takeover of pot for the last 20 years. Need proof? Google Sativex – GW Pharmaceuticals’ attempt to patent and control Cannabis medicine in the UK and beyond, with a terrible synthetic version of a tincture that can be made in any home kitchen. There’s also the Phylos BioScience betrayal of thousands of growers – who submitted their genetics to learn about their plants’ lineage – but later learned Phylos was harvesting information to submit patents and had ties to big pharma money. Their goal? To create genetically modified plants that can be grown with minimal human contact. Personally, I want to smoke GMO (Grandpa’s Mouth Odor) flower, not genetically modified garbage from a mega-grow.aklEAF.COM We’ve proven in the last decade that Cannabis provides incredible benefits naturally, whether by smoking the flower, vaporizing concentrates, eating edibles or extracts like FECO, or through topicals and transdermals. There are thousands of high-end products that are produced naturally, with love, by a human being paid to get their hands dirty as they grow our favorite plant. Do we need big pharma to change this? Absolutely not. We should free the plant for all people to grow and share, not regulate it further and take it out of the soil and the hands of farmers. You can make nearly every product necessary for a medicinal treatment in your kitchen, and anything you can’t is readily available from a focused, local craft producer. That is freedom – choosing our own medicine, who makes it, and with an intention to heal – not just profit.

COUNTERJOINT BY TOM BOWERS

There’s a simple beauty in being able to plant a seed and grow your own medicine.

As homegrown, plant-based therapy, Cannabis provides safe, clean relief for millions of people. But not everyone can grow their own Cannabis plants. In fact, most people can’t – and those people rely on increasingly larger companies to produce their medicine.

Cannabis continues to transform from homegrown medicine into large-scale industry, and as more and more consumers come to rely on its benefits for their lives, it’s a foregone conclusion that the modern pharmaceutical and medical industry will play a role in this growth. It’s already happening. While this development will bring its share of complicated When it comes to medicine, a few indispensable traits come to mind: It needs to ‘‘ downsides – these are the same people accountable for the opioid crisis, after all – there are upsides to the situation. When it comes to medicine, a few indispensable traits come to mind: It needs to be clean. It needs to be consistent. It needs to be precisely dosed. It needs to be widely available. be clean. It needs to be The modern pharmaceutical industry already has the infraconsistent. It needs to be precisely dosed. It needs to be widely available. structure, distribution channels, standards and processes to meet these criteria. Their labs are among the most clean, controlled environments on the planet – and they are accustomed to producing and distributing billions of precisely dialed doses of their medicines globally, with an efficiency so ingrained that it almost seems effortless. Imagine what that level of organization could do for bringing Cannabis medicine to people all over the globe...

Sure, there are glaring downsides. In a bloodthirsty quest for shareholder value, the pharmaceutical industry will attempt to patent genetics and processes, seek to outlaw home cultivation, and will no doubt try to force their own, proprietary synthetic cannabinoid blends on the public.

It’s like that person you work with who’s amazing at their job, but is also a complete asshole.

We will have to learn to work with the modern medical industry before we get to where we’re going – that’s unavoidable. We need to be creative and unwavering in our fight for the plant and the rights of the people who rely on it, and at the same time, try to reap the benefits of infrastructure provided by a monolithic global capitalistic behemoth – without being destroyed in the process. Easy-peasy.

Highly Likely highlights Cannabis pioneers who paved the way to greater herbal acceptance. Harrison ford

Whether playing the cosmic smuggler-turned hero Han Solo, the intrepid archeologist Indiana Jones or the CIA patriot Jack Ryan, Harrison Ford is one of the most widely recognized actors on earth today. This true

Hollywood icon is ranked #4 on the list of highest grossing actors of all time. He’s also, according to anecdotes from those who have spent time with him, a down-to-earth person who is still known as one of Hollywood’s most private actors.

fORD’S PATH TO STARDOM WAS NEITHER DIRECT, NOR EASY. For over a decade he took bit part after bit part in television and film. Here he toiled in obscurity, before all but abandoning acting to take on work as a selftaught professional carpenter to support his wife and two young sons in the mid to late ‘70s. It wasn’t until the late ‘70s that Ford finally found his footing in Hollywood, with a minor role in George Lucas’ “American Graffiti.” Of course, this paved the way for the actor’s entrance into perhaps his most iconic role: Han Solo. The rest, as they say, is history.

While this column could take up the rest of this magazine talking about all of the acting accomplishments that Ford has made throughout his storied career – that’s not what we’re here for. Our real question: Did Harrison Ford smoke weed? While he’s never weighed in on the subject personally, many in his orbit over the years have revealed a penchant for the flowers of our favorite plant.

In her memoir “The Princess Diaries,” Carrie Fischer describes Ford as having access to a “brutal strength” Cannabis that caused her to “forget most of 1976.”

TAKE CARRIE FISCHER (who played Princess Leia alongside Ford in Star Wars) for example: In her memoir “The Princess Diaries,” Fischer describes Ford as having access to a “brutal strength” Cannabis that caused her to “forget most of 1976.” She also recalls a time “where at the onset it was all giggles and munchies and floating in a friendly haze – it suddenly became creepy and dark and scary … This was when I was about 19, while I was filming “Star Wars.””

During a joint photo-shoot/interview for GQ magazine and the British tabloid Ritz, the publisher David Litchfeild reportedly asked Ford why he was rolling his own cigarettes, to which Ford responded, “You want a toke of this allAmerican reefer?” The publisher responded, “Can you work on this stuff?” To which Ford said, “Nope. I can’t even admit it exists.”

Then there was the time that talk show host Bill Maher outed Ford on his program in a segment about Cannabis legalization saying, “There are a lot of prominent people … I’m not going to mention any names – Harrison Ford, Ted Turner – who smoke a lot of pot and need to stand up!”

While Ford has never admitted publicly to a love for consuming Cannabis, there are many more anecdotes from those who have worked with him through the years about it.

From Greg Proops’ story of Ford vaporizing it out of a kitchen saucepan (while riding in a Jaguar through London during the filming of “The Phantom Menace”) to the alleged tales of Ford and Shia LaBeouf’s Dad Jeffery having a smoke-out on the set of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”

While it’s true that Ford has never admitted publicly to a love for Cannabis, these stories from those around him certainly paint a picture of someone with a long relationship with the plant. Perhaps it says something about the unfortunate staying power of prohibition and its legacy that now, even with the tide turning on acceptance of this powerful salve for society’s woes, that some of our biggest celebrities still feel the need to stay in the dark about their use of Cannabis.