24/04/2007 16:00:00
US: Marijuana Martyr Bernie Ellis
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Bernie Ellis gave comfort to the sick and dying. For that crime, the
government means to take everything he’s got.
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.
But for that crime—growing a little herb to ease his own pain and the
agony of a few sick and dying people—Ellis was prosecuted like an
ordinary drug pusher. Actually, if he had been one, he probably would
have been treated less harshly. He has mounted $70,000 in debt to his
lawyers, lost his livelihood and spent the past 18 months living in a
Nashville halfway house. Worst of all, he risks losing his beloved
Middle Tennessee farm—187 acres of rolling green hills along the Natchez
Trace Parkway. Prosecutors are trying to seize the property as a
drug-case forfeiture, and Ellis is fighting against the odds to save his
home of nearly 40 years.
“If I were a rapist, the government couldn’t take my farm,” 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 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 célèbre.
National organizations working for the liberalization of drug laws are
hailing Ellis as a folk hero and a martyr of the medical marijuana movement.
Here’s proof: supporters are throwing a “Save Bernie’s Farm” protest
concert starring Jonell Mosser, the Mike Henderson Band and Delicious
Blues Stew this Wednesday, April 25, at the Belcourt Theatre. Proceeds
go to Ellis’ cause, and the emcee of the whole shindig is Allen St.
Pierre, director of the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws (NORML).
“Bernie Ellis is a modern revolutionary!” St. Pierre proclaims, and all
Ellis’ new friends are hoping the publicity surrounding his case might
persuade the government to back off. At the same time, no one will mind
if outrage over his plight translates into greater public support for
changing the nation’s marijuana laws—which would be laughable if not for
their Draconian consequences.
“Bernie is fighting his own government for his own freedom—in this case,
the freedom to use cannabis as a therapeutic agent,” St. Pierre says.
“There’s no reason Bernie Ellis should be in this by himself. Because of
him, thousands of people are going to join NORML. They are coming out to
support one of their own against a malevolent federal government.”
Across the country, there have been many victims of the government’s
overzealous prosecution of medical marijuana users. In Oklahoma, Jimmy
Montgomery, a paraplegic who smoked pot to relieve severe muscle spasms
resulting from paralysis, was caught with 2 ounces in the pouch of his
wheelchair. For that, he received a 10-year prison sentence.
In Kentucky, James Burton, a Vietnam vet suffering from hereditary
glaucoma, started growing and smoking marijuana to keep from going
blind. He was caught with plants and 2 pounds of raw cannabis on his
90-acre farm. A government-approved physician testified at his trial
that pot was the only medicine capable of saving his vision. The feds
were not moved. Burton got a year’s hard time in a maximum-security
prison and lost his farm to the feds. The list goes on.
This month, New Mexico became the 12th state to permit the use of
medical marijuana. But despite shelves full of scientific studies that
show marijuana can provide nausea and pain relief to people with cancer,
AIDS and glaucoma, among other ailments (without the detrimental side
effects of narcotic painkillers), the rest of the country—including
Tennessee, of course—bans the use of pot in any situation. And no matter
what any state statute or medical study says (who needs science
anyway?), the Bush administration maintains a Reefer Madness mentality.
Backed by the Supreme Court, which believes in state’s rights only when
the justices agree with what the state is doing, the Justice Department
holds that medical marijuana use remains illegal everywhere under
federal law, even when state law declares it legal. The feds have
prosecuted sick people for smoking doobies in states that actually
permit medical marijuana.
There’s legislation in the Tennessee General Assembly to allow the use
of medical marijuana in this state. But even the bill’s sponsor—Sen.
Beverly Marrero, a Democrat from Memphis whose son-in-law has
cancer—concedes it has no chance of passage.
“Trying to alleviate suffering seems to me to be the intelligent and
logical thing to do,” Marrero says. “But legislators are very
conservative people. And they only think about an issue if somebody’s
calling to complain about it. Not many people are calling to discuss
this issue because everybody’s afraid. We’re talking about a society in
which they’ll come get you and haul you off to jail for smoking
marijuana. Anybody who cares about this issue is sick and dying and they
might not make it to the next election anyway. That’s the way too many
legislators think.”
Considering what he’s going through, which is the kind of stuff that
sends people off the deep end, Ellis isn’t showing much strain.
“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.”
But he never sold any of the marijuana that he grew. In one of the
story’s many ironies, that fact might have led to the raid on his farm
in August 2002. A few days before, Ellis had refused to sell to some
bubba who came to his place. “Have you ever known me to sell pot to
anyone?” Ellis asked him. Ellis has always suspected that this stoner
turned him in.
Ellis cooperated completely with drug agents during two hours of
interrogation. He allowed them to search the buildings on his farm,
which is 40 miles southwest of Nashville near the crossroads community
of Fly. As a consultant to public health departments, Ellis had become a
national leader in developing alcohol and drug abuse programs (another
of his story’s ironies). At the time, he was working on a blueprint for
then-New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson on how to make medical marijuana
available to patients in that state. Ellis even showed the drug agents a
copy of his proposal, some of which was eventually incorporated into New
Mexico’s actual plan.
The drug agents phoned around and discovered that not only was Ellis not
a known criminal, he was a known good guy, highly respected in the
community. At some point, much to Ellis’ surprise, the Task Force
officers just scratched their heads and left.
“They kept saying they’d never encountered anything like me,” Ellis
recalls. “They said, ‘No one has anything negative to say about you.’ ”
Photo
For months, Ellis heard nothing from prosecutors. Then the Justice
Department decided to make a federal case out of it—and that’s when his
trouble really began. If he had been prosecuted under state law, he
might never have been indicted at all. A grand jury chosen from his own
community might have recognized Ellis as an upstanding citizen and
rejected the government’s attempt to punish him for following a doctor’s
mandate to relieve suffering. Instead, he was indicted by a federal
grand jury. He pleaded guilty and suddenly faced five years in prison.
Ellis probably would have been sent to the slammer, except for what
happened next. In an almost unheard-of show of support, letters poured
in to the presiding jurist, U.S. District Judge William Haynes.
Physicians, neighbors, professional associates and medical marijuana
patients, their supporters and families, all pleaded for leniency. It
turned out that over the years he had been quietly touching a lot of lives:
l Doug Anglin, Ph.D., associate director, UCLA Drug Abuse Research
Center: “Your honor, I have known Bernie Ellis as a respected researcher
and colleague in the field of drug abuse research, as a truly decent man
dedicated to improving the lives of those around him in any way he could
who became my personal friend, and as a humanitarian who supplied me
with marijuana in the 1990s, before new medications...brought a halt to
my wasting…in my 10th year of AIDS. Now I am approaching my 20th year of
living with AIDS and have little doubt that Bernie’s assistance allowed
me to reach this longevity, not only due to the demonstrable
anti-nausea, anti-headache and appetite-enhancing properties of the drug
but also to relief from deep depression with frequent thoughts of
suicide during that physically and mentally debilitating period of my
life....”
l Mrs. Ellen Humphrey: “...I am the widow of David Humphrey Jr., who was
known as Junior.... I have been Mr. Ellis’ neighbor for the past 34
years. He has always been a good neighbor of ours, and has never
bothered anybody.... In July 1998, my husband Junior was diagnosed with
lung cancer. The nurses at the Ambulatory Care Clinic in Columbia told
Junior that he should find some marijuana as soon as possible.... Junior
went to Bernie Ellis to ask him if he could provide Junior with
marijuana. Bernie gave Junior some marijuana, enough to last him until
the end. Bernie wouldn’t take any money for the marijuana he gave
Junior; he gave it to Junior for free.... When a man like Junior is in
pain, he needs whatever it takes to stop hurting.... I will be happy to
come to court to speak on Bernie Ellis’ behalf.... He is a good neighbor
and does not deserve what is happening to him.”
l Barbara Fiebig Bennett, M.D.: “I have never met or spoken with Bernie
Ellis but he has supplied me with marijuana.... (My patient) Miacha
Slaughter was diagnosed with metastatic renal cancer.... At diagnosis,
it was in both kidneys, her liver, lungs and spine. The drug that gave
her the most relief was marijuana.... It was the only thing which
relieved that unremitting nausea, the only thing that allowed her real
respite. (When) she died, she was so thin I could have carried her to
the hearse alone.”
l Mrs. Margie Aderhold: “I am writing you to request leniency in the
sentencing of my friend, Bernard H. Ellis Jr. With Bernie’s direct
assistance, I am proud to say that I am a nine-year survivor of ovarian
cancer. Without Bernie’s help, I might not be here today to ask you for
mercy in his case....”
There were more than 100 letters like these, and Ellis’ anxious friends
filled the courtroom on sentencing day. Shrieks of delight went up as
Judge Haynes decided against sending Ellis to prison and put him on four
years’ probation instead, with the first 18 months to be spent in a
halfway house.
“I’ve never had a client who had so much support,” says Ellis’ lawyer,
Peter Strianse. “There was never any suggestion that he sold this
marijuana on the street corner. The undisputed proof is that he gave it
to sick and dying people to alleviate suffering, and the physicians of
these sick people were aware that Bernie was providing marijuana. He
really did confer some great benefit on some sick people in the final
stages of their lives.”
For a moment, it was like watching the warm-and-fuzzy climax of the
Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life, with Bernie Ellis as George
Bailey. His years of selfless giving to his fellow man were now paying
off, and all the people he helped had appeared in his hour of need. In
real life, though, while Ellis may have avoided jail, Uncle Sam still
wants his farm. If the feds win, bad old Mr. Potter is the one who will
emerge triumphant—and worse, he’ll make off with George and Mary
Bailey’s house.
On his website SaveBerniesFarm.com, Ellis has kept a diary of his time
in the halfway house, or as he calls it, “in the belly of the beast.” He
sleeps—or tries to, anyway—in a dormitory full of men who could “win,
place or show in the snorers’ Olympics.” “Meals,” he says, “are barely
edible—lunch sandwiches taste as if they are three days old and dinners
often include pasty instant mashed potatoes as the faux vegetable. My
favorite, though, is breakfast. When the house runs out of milk, they
don’t go buy more. They simply serve us dry cereal with red Kool-Aid to
wet it down.”
To his dismay, he found that even though his new home was “filled with
people who landed in prison because of their alcohol and drug abuse
problems (many of whom have come to the halfway house directly from a
90-day stay at a treatment center),” they weren’t allowed to leave to
attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or to hold their own. “Until, that
is, your favorite felon arrived,” Bernie wrote. “After six weeks of
pushing, we now are allowed to hold one AA meeting a week.”
Ellis got a job at the Turnip Truck organic grocery in East Nashville,
and he can go to work every day. But his movements are otherwise
restricted. He was allowed only two 12-hour visits to his farm during
the first year of his sentence, but now can visit once a month. His
sentence ends May 10. He misses his dogs—big black mutts named Duke and
Annie. His neighbors are feeding his pets and taking care of his farm
while he’s away. They’re even paying his electric bills.
“I fell in love with this place the moment I set foot on it,” a smiling
Ellis says, his dogs bounding toward him as he arrives at his farm on
one of his visits. “It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it
from here.”
It’s nothing fancy. The ramshackle farmhouse didn’t even have plumbing
until a few years ago. Ellis would bathe in the spring-fed creek that
runs by the house. Sometimes it was so cold that his hair would freeze
before he could run back inside. But there are pretty ridges and
hollows, almost all of it woodlands. There’s a graveyard dating back to
the early 1800s in a patch of periwinkle, and watering holes that were
used by early travelers on the Natchez Trace. Ellis bought his first
piece of the property in 1973 for $6,500, and he’s been adding on to it
every since. He figures the place is worth close to $1 million now.
Which may have been why the federal government went after Ellis in the
first place, instead of leaving the case to state prosecutors. It takes
a lot of money to fund the war on drugs. Ellis’ farm must have made a
tempting target. The Drug Enforcement Administration denies this. Harry
Sommers, special DEA field agent in Tennessee, says, “It’s not about
wanting the money. We enforce the law. That’s what we do. If you grow
marijuana on your land, then your land is forfeitable under the law.”
Ellis’ lawyers contend the government doesn’t enjoy carte blanche power
to seize the farm. In court papers, they argue that it would violate the
Constitution’s prohibition against excessive fines because it would be
“grossly disproportional” to Ellis’ crime: “Not only did the underlying
criminal case involve a nonviolent crime, but it also involved no
victims and, in fact, demonstrated that Mr. Ellis acted to actually
benefit other individuals, hoping to alleviate needless suffering at the
end of those individuals’ lives.”
Ellis is negotiating with prosecutors. But if there’s no settlement, the
fate of his farm could be decided by a jury. In a couple of weeks, his
sentence in the halfway house completed, he’ll go back to his home to
await the outcome of his case.
“I don’t want to appear to be obstinate,” Ellis says, “but there’s a
point at which you say enough is enough. They can’t have my home. My
community has rallied around me. I can’t honestly imagine how I’m ever
going to repay some of these people for their kindness and support. What
they’ve said over and over again is, ‘You’ve proven your worth to us and
we don’t want to lose you.’ ”
Does he regret growing marijuana? “There are a number of things I regret
in this experience,” Bernie Ellis says. “I regret being naive to the
process. But I do not regret using marijuana, and I do not regret
helping people.”
http://www.nashvillescene.com/
Source:
http://www.ukcia.org/news/shownewsarticle.php?articleid=12488
Author:
Nashville Scene via UKCIA
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