AMA with legendary activist grower Todd McCormick Wed. Nov. 7th

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You do not want to miss this AMA

Who: Todd McCormick, Author, Producer, Activist and creator of TalkingCannabis.live
What: The Evolution of Cannabis Legalization
Where: Right Here
When : Wednesday November 7th at 11 AM PST

Hey GNET : I want to announce a very special AMA for next Wednesday, November 7th, at 11 AM PST with none other than ganja guru Todd McCormick. I spoke with @todd.mccormick yesterday and he very generously agreed to share his time and wisdom with all of us at Growers Network!

For those of you who don’t know about Todd, please allow me to share some of his story: Todd is a ten time cancer survivor who attributes his beating cancer to cannabis. As such, Todd has been a lifelong advocate for cannabis legalization. In the mid-1990’s, Todd worked tirelessly alongside other cannabis icons Denis Peron and Dr. Tod Mikuriya to draft the very first medical cannabis legislation ever passed in America: California’s Prop. 215. Were it not for the efforts of mavericks such as these, we may not have a cannabis industry. Both Dr. Mikuriya and Denis Peron have since died, so we are lucky to be able to have an opportunity like this. These trailblazers paved the way for all pf us!

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In 2000, Todd was sentenced to 5 years in prison after he was convicted for intent to distribute after police confiscated over 4,000 plants in his Bel Air mansion. For those of you familiar with the treating cancer patients with cannabis, once we start the treatment, it becomes a lifelong maintenance medication. Essentially a five year prison sentence with no cannabis represents what can amount to a death sentence to a cancer patient. Still, Todd beat the odds.

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Tod is the author of How To Grow Medical Marijuana and Co-Produced the movie_The Union: The Business Behind Getting High_. Todd wrote the forward for Jack Herer’s classic book The Emperor Wears No Clothes. In 2012, Todd was awarded a Cannabis Culture Award.

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We are very lucky to be able to host this special AMA. Please be sure to tune in and take part! Here’s your opportunity to interact live with a living legend!

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I’ve got a good feeling. This one is going to be…

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I agree with you!

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Well @dr.jdarrel - having cancer is not a competition, nor should it seem to be. And jealousy is as bad of a disease as cancer. Your life is your life, and you should take full responsibility for where you are in your own life, as It has nothing to do with anybody else.

Nothing about my life has been fortunate, because I was a pre-existing medical condition my family was poor, we were on welfare most of my childhood and government cheese was part of my reality. Having had cancer ten times, and having been prosecuted five times and spent five years in prison, I hardly feel “blessed”. I started getting tumors when I was only two years old, and I had nine of them in the eight years that followed. I had another tumor when I was in my mid-teens, and that caused me to not go to medical school and not become a pediatrician as I once dreamed. If in fact you are really a doctor, while you were in medical school, I dropped out of high school and did not attend college. I was taking a chance on life and moving out west all alone with very little money in my pocket and no security when I arrived.

I would also like to point out that I have grown my own cannabis as medication out of self defense, I did not sit around waiting for somebody to hand me the illegal medicine that I needed. I was smart enough to realize that it grew on trees and that I could provide it for myself, and I did so also in an Illegal environment that caused me to get raided and prosecuted five different times for simply cultivating my own medicine, and caused me to serve five years in federal prison, after CA supposedly legalized it in 1996. On that note, I have spent 5 of the past 20 years in a prison cell for growing my own cannabis, and honestly, it was worth every moment I spent locked up. Are you willing to stand up for what you need and believe in? I was, and that is why I am where I am today. I have repeatedly turned fertilizer into flowers and I recommend you learn how to do the same in your life.

If you’re happy for people, there is no “but”, there is no jealousy, there is no “woe is me”. If you were smart enough to become a doctor, you are smart enough to know that cannabis grows in any closet, and you are smart enough to realize that you are the leader of your own destiny. If you find yourself in a place you don’t like in your life, the “but” is on you.

A great book I highly recommend to you is by my former publisher Peter McWilliams and is titled: Do It! Let’s Get Off Our Buts

My advice to you is to get growing and stop making excuses for your happiness and stop wondering why life hasn’t given you all you want on a silver spoon. My life is where it is today because of hard work and determination, not blessings.

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That is why you make history, many don’t. Your story is very inspiring and I appreciate your message to all of us “just do it” unfortunately, the reality is that many people do not have that capacity, otherwise, human would live in a much more beautiful world. That is why world needs more leaders like yourself.
Thank you for sharing your story with us!

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Hey @todd.mccormick, good morning! It’s a real honor to have you join us today! I think this will be a great AMA!

I know there are some folks out there that have questions for you…I’ll try and kick things off with a touchy subject with which many of us are all too familiar: Cancer. It’s hard to argue that your cancer and introduction to cannabis were inextricably linked. You were first diagnosed with cancer at age 2; when were you first treated with cannabis and how?

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Good morning everybody, and thank you for having me on your community this morning.

I really like this forum because for me personally, being able to discuss cultivation with other growers was a very taboo subject when I started off, most the time we would not even admit to others that we grew cannabis because we feared being turned in. When I first arrived to Amsterdam and was able to sit in a coffee shop with other growers and discuss our techniques, I learned so much more so fast and realized that communication would bring this industry to the next level, so I thank you very much for having this forum.

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I first used cannabis as a medicine when I was nine years old, I had developed a tumor between my left lung and my heart and it was a very precarious place. Considering all of the other tumors had occurred in bone marrow, my doctors were afraid this could potentially be my last battle. My mother was sitting in a waiting room looking at the magazines and she stumbled upon a Good Housekeeping magazine from February 1978 that had an article in the doctors column about the medical use of marijuana and it being used by cancer patients. She brought this up to my pediatrician and he was not against it, so after treatment that day, my mother had me smoke a joint on the way home and it had profound effects.

When I got home, instead of being nauseous, I wanted sautéed spinach, and my mother thought she was really high.

The next day we came home from treatment without smoking a joint and I was immediately nauseous. She came up to my bedroom with a joint and we smoked it and I was the beginning of cannabis therapy for me.

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Good communication creates good growth! We find the ability to communicate without fear of prosecution or persecution has led to a spit of mutual growth. Ultimately, together, we can normalize the plant. Thanks for recognizing the bigger picture in what we are all trying to accomplish. This is a mission that we can only accomplish together.

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I love your attitude, I do believe this is a team effort, I had been growing for 10 years, 1984 till 1994 and I felt like I had a little bit of experience, but then I arrived in Amsterdam and I had an “oh WOW, that is how you are supposed to do it!” moment, as seeing professional cultivation on that level was like seeing a garden for the very first time.

I think we can all learn from one another’s experiences and even more so, from one another’s mistakes, and sharing the good and the bad of cultivation can only help cannabis get into the hands of more people, which is my overall goal: cannabis for all.

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@todd.mccormick I just wanted to say thank you for all that you have accomplished for cannabis. The industry we enjoy today was made possible by trail blazers such as yourself. It is a dream come true to have you on our forum. So thank you Todd, Growers Network would not be possible today without your actions.

Sincerely,
Nick

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Wow. That was a really bold move for your mother…especially in the 70’s! What a fortuitous sense of recognition she must have had! She sounds like a very courageous and caring mother!

Your story reminds me of Dr. Lester Grinspoon’s son, Daniel. Danny’s use of cannabis ultimately led to the first study of cannabis and chemotherapy drugs. I know you and Dr. Grinspoon are friends and colleagues. Have you every had that conversation with him?

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Thank you very much Nick, I share your sentiment about a lot of other people who came before me and have contributed to my education surrounding this amazing plant. I think this network is a much-needed hub of sharing in the emerging industry, and I am really happy to be part of it.

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Dr Lester Grinspoon and I have been close friends for 24 years and we have spoken specifically about his son and I always thought it was one of the reasons I think that he took me under his wing and was such a good mentor to me from the first days we met.

Lester was extremely supportive of our documentaries and graciously appeared in both of them, THE UNION: The Business Behind Getting High and The Culture High, he even took the time to do an interview about his son with us, but you can see here:

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@todd.mccormick Thanks so much for doing this AMA for us. I am aware that there is research documenting the fact that compounds in cannabis can slow or even reverse tumor growth, and many of us are anecdotally familiar with cases like your own in which cannabis saves a life. As far as you are aware, what is the most persuasive and powerful empirical study to have documented the medical value of cannabis?

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I am very honored to have Lester as a contributor in my next book titled GrowMEDICINE, which he writes about what he calls “Cannabinopathic Medicine”, makes a strong argument why cannabis will become its own branch of medicine, because of the discovery of the ECS, or EndoCannabinoid System.

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Hi @todd.mccormick ,

A little intimidating to be chatting with you because you are such a trail blazer and such a pivotal figure in our industry, but I’m very honored to have this opportunity. When you started your cannabis therapy at 9 the potency of cannabis and the methods available to consume were very different than they are now day. From your experience, is there a specific method of consumption that you believe works best for medical use vs recreational?

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Thanks for sharing that video, Todd. I believe you are correct in how Lester views you in his life. We all have Danny Grinspoon to thank for helping pave the way for the legalization of cannabis for medical use. We are thankful we are able to honor his memory today. Cheers to Danny!

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There are so many studies that it is hard to point to one of them, and for the longest time I did not believe that cannabis cured my cancer, I believed that it helped me with keeping food down, keeping my spirits up, helping me sleep, helping me with the mental anxiety of facing end-of-life issues, and simply, it made me smile at a time when smiling was very difficult.

Now after the discovery of the ECS, I do believe that cannabis use, or moreso, cannabinoid exposure and turning on the ECS - so to speak - could well be what caused me to go into spontaneous remission.

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Hey there, @memberdirectory, this AMA with Todd McCormick is off and running strong! I want you to jump in and join the party! Ask Todd those questions or even just take a sec to say thanks for helping to make this industry a reality! :bluntparrot:

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