Blogging for Freedom

"If I were a rapist, the government couldn't take my farm," Bernie Ellis says. "I grew cannabis and provided it free of charge to sick people, so I run the risk of losing everything I own. That just doesn't compute to me."

But a strange thing has happened while the US federal government has been trying to make an example out of Ellis. Colleagues, friends and neighbors are rallying around him -- along with a whole lot of people who had never heard of him before. The balding, bespectacled 57-year-old with the amiable manner of a favorite uncle has become an improbable cause celebre. National organizations working for the liberalization of drug laws are hailing Ellis as a folk hero and a martyr of the medical marijuana movement.

Life came unglued for Bernie Ellis on the day drug agents raided his farm like it was the fortified villa of a South American cocaine kingpin. Ellis was bush-hogging around his berry patches when two helicopters swept low over the treetops. Then, rumbling in on four-wheelers, came 10 officers of the Tennessee Marijuana Eradication Task Force. The war on drugs had arrived, literally, in Ellis' backyard. It was a major operation to strike a righteous blow against the devil weed.

It must have been a real disappointment. Ellis, a public health epidemiologist, readily acknowledged that he was growing a small amount of medical marijuana to cope with a degenerative condition in his hips and spine. He was giving pot away to a few terminally ill people too. There were only a couple dozen plants of any size scattered around his place -- enough to produce seven or eight pounds of marijuana worth about $7,000.

"I'm not ashamed of what I was doing," he says. He has provided pot over the years to perhaps a couple dozen terminally ill people -- mostly with AIDS or cancer -- who were referred to him through social workers and others. As he says, "Three things happen to marijuana users. They talk too much, they laugh too much and they eat too much. I don't see a problem with any of those things happening with sick folks." At the time of the raid, he was giving pot to four people. Three of them died within months.

Ellis, who has a proud face and talks in a warm, disarmingly direct manner, explains that he couldn't turn away a person in need. "I've grown marijuana off and on for 20 or more years," he says. He started giving it to sick people in the late 1980s when he was helping establish the AIDS program for the state Department of Health. "I decided back then if I'm going to take the risk to grow this for my own use, I need to at least be willing to help other people if they need help."

Read the entire story on Cannabis Culture.  The feds are trying to seize his land.  Save Bernie's Farm!