Pubdate: Thu, 03 Dec 2009
Source: Nashville Scene (TN)
Copyright: 2009 Nashville Scene
Contact: http://www.nashvillescene.com/Information/contact_us/index.php
Website: http://www.nashvillescene.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2409
Note: Prints and web posts email addresses of LTE writers
Author: Jim Ridley
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/af.htm (Asset Forfeiture)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?232 (Chronic Pain)

BERNIE ELLIS'S SEVEN-YEAR NIGHTMARE WITH THE LAW IS  OVER-BUT HIS ADVOCACY 
OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA BURNS HOTTER  THAN EVER

By the time you read this, Bernie Ellis will be home on  the farm he's
had for nearly four decades in the Fly  community 12 miles south of
Leipers Fork. There'll just  be less of it. His farm will be 25 acres
smaller, but  Ellis is willing to live with that-considering the
federal government almost took it all, and meant to  throw him in
prison to boot. Last month, Ellis, a  respected public-health
epidemiologist with a 35-year  career, signed civil asset forfeiture
papers handing 25  acres of farmland over to the U.S. government. The
agreement ends a nightmare that began seven years ago  when he was
raided for growing marijuana-a small amount  he used only for
medicinal purposes, and to ease the  suffering of the terminally ill.

The agreement wasn't made lightly, Ellis says. In  recent weeks, the
avuncular 60-year-old with the stocky  outdoorsman's build has avoided
walking the ridgetop he  knew he would lose. He didn't want to see the
pasture  and surrounding woodland that would belong to Uncle  Sam, or
the artesian spring that feeds them.

"I'm not walking around it," Ellis says, "because if  there's any
vestige of pain or regret to this whole  enterprise, it'll be affixed
to that land."

But in prosecuting Ellis-or persecuting him, as his  many supporters
claim-the government may have given a  face to what medical-marijuana
and cannabis-reform  activists argue is the fundamental injustice of
the  drug war. In 2002, drug agents in helicopters and on
four-wheelers stormed Ellis' property looking for  marijuana plants.
To this day, he believes they were  tipped off by a local
dealer/informant fuming because  Ellis wouldn't sell to him.

A tactical field report indicated finding 537 plants,  though for
reasons Ellis doesn't understand this was  amended a month later to
300. (The actual number of  usable adult plants, he maintains, was
closer to a  couple dozen.) Nor does he understand why some of his
plants were left standing-plants he documented in  photographs, with a
neighbor as witness-only for them  to disappear a few days later,
after a visit by  marauders who cut his fence.

Whatever the case, Ellis readily admitted that he was  growing small
amounts of cannabis to relieve his  degenerative spine and hip
condition. What's more, he  said, he was sharing it free of charge
with AIDS and  cancer patients to offset their pain and nausea.

A classic dealer's dodge, right? Only Ellis received  testimonials to
back him up. There was the doctor whose  patient, wasting away from
metastatic renal cancer,  took her only comfort from the marijuana
Ellis  supplied, free. "It was the only thing which relieved  that
unremitting nausea, the only thing that allowed  her real respite,"
the doctor wrote. "[When] she died,  she was so thin I could have
carried her to the hearse  alone."

There was the neighbor whose husband of 34 years began  an agonizing
death from lung cancer. On the advice of  his nurses, who suggested he
obtain marijuana, the  dying man went to Ellis for help and got
it-again,  free. "The marijuana Bernie Ellis provided...made it
possible for [him] to rest and to sleep," his widow  wrote on Ellis'
behalf, "and it helped keep his  appetite up."

These and some 200 other testimonials fill a notebook  four inches
thick-and a bulging, well-worn manila  folder, and another folder
still. Peter Strianse, the  criminal defense attorney who has
represented Ellis pro  bono for the past five years, believes that
Ellis would  not be in his current situation "if the raid were done
now, in the fall of 2009, and the government were fully  aware of the
mitigating circumstances." His opinion  carries some weight: Earlier
in his career, Strianse  himself was an assistant U.S. attorney and
drug task  force prosecutor.

Had Ellis been in California, Colorado or any of the 11  other states
that have legalized medical marijuana, the  outcome might have been
different. Had his troubles  occurred in one of those states after
Oct. 19 of this  year-when a widely publicized U.S. Department of
Justice memorandum asked federal prosecutors to lay off
state-sanctioned medical marijuana users-he might have  escaped
prosecution entirely.

But this was Tennessee, where marijuana remains both  illegal and the
state's No. 1 cash crop. Ellis faced a  battery of charges. Although
he still disputes the  amount and weight of what the agents found, he
pleaded  guilty to manufacturing cannabis plants in late 2003 to
pre-empt more severe action. By 2007, he'd lost his  livelihood and
gone $70,000 in debt. Worst of all, he  faced losing the 187 acres of
farmland he'd accumulated  since 1973.

"If I were a rapist, the government couldn't take my  farm," Ellis
told the Scene in 2007. "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."

It didn't compute to a lot of people. To the  embarrassment of federal
and state drug officials,  Ellis became a cause celebre. A packed 2007
benefit at  The Belcourt netted thousands of dollars in support.  More
than 100 testimonials-from doctors, neighbors,  state representatives,
public-health officials, even  the Republican former governor of
Delaware-begged the  presiding judge in Ellis' case, U.S. District
Judge  William Haynes, for leniency.

Support came in more direct ways from the close-knit Fly community.
While Ellis was confined to a halfway house for 18 months, limited to
one visit each month to his farm for the last six months, his
neighbors fed his dogs and paid his electric bills.

Haynes eventually sentenced Ellis to four years' probation, later
reduced to two--a lenient sentence, considering he was facing 10 years
in prison. During his halfway-house stay, Ellis says, he learned some
valuable truths about the drug war from "my homies." The first thing
they told him, he recalls, is that they didn't smoke pot--not because
they didn't prefer its mellow buzz, but because it took too long to
pass through the body to beat their mandatory drug tests. So they
would find something faster. "Use meth on Friday, piss clean on
Monday," ran a user's credo.

The second thing they told him, he says, was that "there's no
negotiating with the feds."

Ellis completed his halfway-house stay, along the way using his
personal and professional experience with recovery programs to start
the house's first 12-step program. But for the past two years, the
threat of losing his farm has remained a grave possibility. After an
unsuccessful attempt to withdraw his guilty plea, he still had to
satisfy the $250,000 settlement required by the government, lest he
lose all his property.

On Nov. 19, Haynes signed off on Ellis' land forfeiture. Ellis would
give up 25 acres of his farmland, thus settling the matter--at least in
the government's eyes.

"I do not diminish or devalue what I am giving up," Ellis wrote in an
email to his supporters. "In fact, the 25 acres they are getting
represents almost the entirety of my investments from a
three-decade-long successful public-health career....Now the feds will
have it, and be here (for at least a while)." The fate of the land has
not been determined, though a waggish friend of Ellis' suggested it
become the Bernie Ellis Wildlife Sanctuary--"wildlife spelled as two
words," Ellis says with a chuckle.

Ellis takes comfort (and sees no small amount of irony) in what he
describes as "a tidal wave of shift in public policy toward cannabis."
First came the Department of Justice's memo in October, read by many
as a show of cautious sympathy toward medical marijuana by the Obama
administration. Last month, in a perhaps more significant turn, the
American Medical Association urged the federal government to end its
classification of cannabis as a Category I controlled substance--on par
with LSD or heroin--with no medical benefits.

Sadly, the issue has become not just personal for Ellis, but perhaps
critical. Last month, as his sojourn in legal limbo was finally coming
to an end, Bernie Ellis was diagnosed with cancer. How severe, he
doesn't know. But the diagnosis only strengthens his conviction that
for the seriously ill, marijuana is neither an indulgence nor a vice,
but a quality-of-life necessity.

Back on the remaining 150-plus acres of his property, with its eight
valleys, four creeks and a waterfall, Ellis says he wouldn't recommend
that anyone else take the same risks he has. But he can't say he
regrets them either.

"Seven years ago, I was making $100,000 a year doing socially
meaningful work, and I was happy," Ellis says. "Today, I'm broke and
doing socially meaningful work, and I'm happy. Every day, it feels
like another block's been removed from my back. I can sit on my porch
at sunset and not lose this place where my heart lives." 
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D