cannthropology
WORLD OF Cannabis PRESENTS
42
Lepp’s legendary garden circa 2003.
Eddy Lepp is a medical marijuana POW whose courage and compassion have secured him a place in Cannabis history.
leafnationmd.com
Reverence for the Reverend Born in Illinois in 1952, Charles “Eddy” Lepp was the son of a soldier who spent his childhood moving around before eventually settling in Reno. In 1968, he enlisted in the Army alongside his brother, and was shipped off to Vietnam. After returning home, he spent the next two decades struggling with addiction, depression and PTSD – self-medicating with drugs and alcohol and engaging in self-destructive behavior. But when his father got cancer in the 1980s, he decided to get clean; the only intoxicant he didn’t give up was Cannabis. “I used marijuana for years to keep from killing myself,” confesses Lepp. “I was using Cannabis to treat myself, but I didn’t realize that I was medicating because we didn’t have the information.” That information came after Lepp met Dennis Peron and his future hero/ mentor Jack Herer, and his life changed forever. “Back in the ‘80s I met Dennis and Jack, was very interested in what they were talking about, and got to be friends with them,” he recalls. “After that, I
FEB. 2021
was kinda fucked, because you can’t be best friends with Dennis Peron and Jack Herer and not devote your life to marijuana.” After his father died in 1988, Lepp checked himself into the National Center for PTSD in Palo Alto, Calif. It was there that he met his future wife – a young woman named Linda Senti. With the help of Linda, the Center and Cannabis, he was finally able to get sober and begin to heal. “Cannabis was critically important in shaping my recovery and the man that I was going to become,” Lepp attests. “It allowed me to heal myself physically and mentally, and get back in touch with God as I understood him.” CALLED TO ACTION Eddy and Linda got married and eventually settled in Lake County, Calif. They became heavily involved in the legalization movement – helping to gather signatures for the Compassionate Use Act, then setting out to fulfill its promise by supplying medicine to patients … starting with Linda herself who, like Eddy’s father, had contracted cancer. In 1996, with Peron’s help, Lepp planted a garden of 132 plants for her – which he was arrested for later that year. When his case got to trial in 1998, he cited Prop 215 as his medical marijuana defense, and it worked – making him the first person ever acquitted under the aegis of the new law. At the time, few doctors were willing to recommend Cannabis, so the
