By Joan Brunwasser, Voting Integrity Editor, OpEdNewsApril 5, 2006
I first encountered Bernie Ellis in Cleveland last fall.I was at the People Count 2006 election integrity conference.Bernie wasn’t actually in Cleveland himself.As it turns out, he was already serving time in the half-way house where he is finishing up his eighteen-month sentence for distributing medical marijuana to terminally ill patients (through their social workers). I 'met' his celluloid self via David Earnhardt’s Eternal Vigilance, which I have, by now, seen a number of times.It’s a fine documentary about the Nashville National Election Reform Conference, held in April 2005 which gathered several hundred concerned citizens from 30 states, equally divided between ‘blue’ and ‘red’. Since it took place so close on the heels of the 2004 election, the conference had a sort of post-mortem feel. We survived, we're grieving, we're together. Now, what are we going to do?
This conference was organized by Bernie Ellis and had such a profound effect on me that I felt somehow that I was there, although I first heard of it after it had already taken place.The poignant and always-pertinent words that Bernie used to bring the conference to a close have stayed with me:“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”.To me, the meaning is clear:it’s up to us, individually and en masse, to bring about change which will not happen any other way.Not of its own accord, not haphazardly, not by a few select ‘activists’ alone, not without a huge concerted push by concerned citizens everywhere. It's become something of a mantra for me. No more lolligagging, no more sitting on the sidelines. It's time to jump in. Now!
Bob Koehler has written an article about Bernie Ellis that I’m confident you will find both interesting and inspiring.I have Bob’s permission to include his piece (below) with these words as a forward.I wanted to nominate Bernie for OpEdNews’ “Local Heroes” corner, and this seemed like an appropriate time and manner to do so.I am filled with deep admiration for him.Let me know if you agree.
So of course a guy like Bernie Ellis — who signs his letters with this catchphrase, and who lives it in so many ways, doing what needs to be done, putting himself in the vanguard of vital social movements like the one for fair elections (which is how I know him) — would eventually get nailed for crossing a line.
How easy to have played it safe, but Ellis, who until a year and a half ago lived on a 187-acre farm 40 miles southwest of Nashville, Tenn., and worked as a public health epidemiologist, had been growing, along with other crops, a small amount of medical marijuana on his farm. The recipients over the years, via their social workers, were terminally ill AIDS and cancer patients, who obtained nausea and pain relief from what has been called (by no less than Francis Young, a Drug Enforcement Administration law judge) “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.”
For reasons that will probably forever remain murky, Ellis’ farm was raided in August 2002. A few days earlier, a local dealer had tried to buy some pot from him and was told to shove off, so the suspicion lingers that the dealer turned him in. Two helicopters swooped overhead and eight or nine officers of the Tennessee Marijuana Eradication Task Force entered his property — a lot of hoo-hah, you might think, for seven pounds of weed, worth about $7,000.
Ellis was interrogated for two hours and freely “confessed” to his activities. Indeed, at the very moment of the raid he’d been crafting recommendations, at the request of New Mexico’s then-Gov. Gary Johnson, on how that state could establish a program making cannabis available immediately to patients in need. He gave the officers a printout of his proposal. How guilty can you get?
“I said this from the beginning,” Ellis told me. “I’m not ashamed of what I’m doing.”
And he wasn’t arrested. The Task Force officers did some checking around and learned that Ellis was not only well known but highly respected among county officials. His troubles didn’t begin till the federal government became interested in his case — and this gets at the core outrage of the whole matter. The zeal to keep marijuana criminalized in the face of so much evidence — it has 50 to 100 therapeutically beneficial subcomponents and has been studied in connection with the treatment and control of Alzheimer’s, brain tumors, epilepsy, MS and even schizophrenia, among much else — emanates from the federal level.
Welcome to the Bush administration’s other bogus war: the war on drugs. Science be damned. Rationality, compassion and state’s rights be damned. What matters is the continual drawing of random and arbitrary borders, which are then ruthlessly defended no matter what. And with the drawing of borders comes the creation of enemies, and in the world of herbs, marijuana is the enemy — the devil weed, no matter how medically useful.
As Ellis noted, “Every federal commission since Nixon has recommended reclassifying marijuana, allowing it to re-enter the medical pharmacopoeia.” Yet the feds have been known to prosecute medical marijuana growers even in states that have legalized it. Twelve have done so, including, most recently, New Mexico, whose law, signed last month by Gov. Bill Richardson, incorporates the recommendations Ellis was working on at the time of the raid.
No matter. In federal court, Ellis was prosecuted as an ordinary drug dealer and convicted. Though his sentence was relatively lenient — an 18-month term in a federal halfway house, which ends in May — he has incurred some $70,000 in legal debt and, far more frightening, faces the loss of his farm in a federal civil action.
The Nashville community has rallied to his support, and a series of benefits are planned. If you’re interested in contributing to the cause, see www.saveberniesfarm.com.
“If you really do believe what you’re doing is not wrong, then you’ve threatened the foundation of their legitimacy,” Ellis said. “You’ve raised your head above the foxhole.”
For my friend Bernie’s sake, I truly hope the forces of rationality are successful. And I recoil at the idea that his beautiful farm, where he has lived for four decades, could be fed into the maw of “example,” a reminder to like-minded others that an ignorant and arrogant administration is in power right now and will impose the Dark Ages on all of us for as long as it can.
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Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.
Authors Bio: Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.
Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which exists for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. We aim to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Electronic (computerized) voting systems are simply antithetical to democratic principles.
CER set up a lending library to achieve the widespread distribution of the DVD Invisible Ballots: A temptation for electronic vote fraud. Within eighteen months, the project had distributed over 3200 copies across the country and beyond. CER now concentrates on group showings, OpEd pieces, articles, reviews, interviews, discussion sessions, networking, conferences, anything that promotes awareness of this critical problem. Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005.
he is doing his thing for one issue that is important to many. good work. we need to rally the public to come stand on the street corners of our towns in dissent, and for something better. P
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3424 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 8:38:23 PM
Thank you for taking up Bernie's cause. I went to my first voting reform conference in Nashville two years ago... Bernie had a vision and we all came together to each share our piece of the puzzle. d.
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3424 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 8:41:13 PM
Joan, Thank you for sending me this article about Bernie Ellis, a man worth knowing about, even if I will never know him. So many people, such as people with glaucoma, have been helped by medical marijuana, but, of course, it's not funding either the pharmaceutical industry, or corrupt officials, so they'll do their best to punish people like Bernie. I hope lots of people read that article and contribute to his cause. Reading about people like Bernie gives me hope. No matter which tradition you follow, may you have a joyous season of hope and renewal! SE
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3424 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 8:57:06 PM
I had read other sources about the therapeutic nature of the medicine. I was at a party once more than thirty years ago, got very ill, and went home. Found out later from another person at the party that some of the people at the party, in another closed room, were smoking pot and what I suffered was a “contact-high.” Apparently, I am allergic of sensitive to it, even as I am to a good many things.
I did know that the medicinal value of marijuana has been known by more enlightened cultures for 5000 years. I also know that several university hospitals within the last few weeks after thorough testing called it a ‘wonder-medicine”.
Just in case you don’t all know this, as i suspected, this is not simply a hypocritical moral issue concerning marijuana, it is as I was certain a business issue. Several huge drug-dealer corporations, the ones that make the herbicides and pesticides that cause cancer and other diseases, also make the toxic drugs that treat cancer. They well know as anyone but an idiot would, the therapeutic value of it. They also know the prescription street value in profits very well. They have been trying to synthesize it for some time and are getting closer to make a petroleum-waste-by-product that simulates marijuana because they cannot patent the original, all-natural plant and it’s fruit. They claim they are doing this, as they have claimed about other natural medicines that not enough can be grown to fill the need and not cheaply enough, either.
How Bullshit is that? We grow enough mushrooms for America and enough corn and wheat for the world, and cheaply, so we can grow enough anything, including antibiotics, but the Bushites want to sell Petro-by-products, toxic as they are, and so the allergies and chemical sensitivities grow in parallel to the number of Petro-chemical waste material we make drugs from. The drug companies’ need to ne nationalized and turned over to the major universities, which do the best research anyway and cheaper than the drug lords of the DOW. All is a scam, all the time, with everything the avarists touch. Thy need to go to Madam Guillotine
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