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Valerie Whitcomb | United States | 2018 | 1:42:47

Bernie was bush hogging a pasture in 2002 when he noticed a helicopter circling above him. When it lowered to just over the treetops in a tight circle, he knew his life was about to change forever. Trace View farm was raided by the police that day and over 100 mostly small cannabis plants were confiscated as evidence by the police. Those plants had only around seven pounds of usable medical cannabis estimated to be on them. For almost 15 years, Bernie had been growing cannabis. Besides using it himself for his own ailments, including a degenerative spine and fibromyalgia, he was providing it for free to terminal AIDS and Cancer patients that he knew or who were referred to him.

Turns out, Bernie knew a lot of them. He worked, before his arrest, for the Tennessee Department of Health and the CDC, setting up Tennessee’s AIDS program during the height of the epidemic. He knew a lot of people that were dying and suffering and he also knew pot could help them. After he admitted growing medical cannabis, Bernie went from earning over $100,000 per year in his field to living on food stamps unable to find work with an arrest record.

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Valerie Whitcomb