Middle Tennesseans band together to help local farmer
On a smoldering day in late August of 2002, Bernie Ellis was peacefully tending to a berry patch on his farm in Maury County when loud whipping blades came slicing through the air above.
The Tennessee Marijuana Eradication Task Force came to pay him a visit.
The crime? Growing cannabis, which he provided for medicinal use to four terminally ill patients, free of charge.
Looking up to see a helicopter barely above the tree line is a contradiction to the calls of hawks, rustling breezes and trickling waterfall Ellis has come accustomed to in his forty years on Trace View Farm.
Because of his solid standing in the community he helped cultivate, Bernie was never arrested. He was quietly charged with manufacturing 100 or more plants, which the local police confiscated.
What should have been nothing more than a slap on the wrist turned into an all out debacle when the federal government became interested in the case nearly three months later.
Bernie contemplated his options while the government went back and forth on its position, finally offering a plea bargain. Without his knowledge, the government changed its position on whether to charge him by the weight or the quantity of the plants?the difference between a mandatory five-year sentence and probation.
Facing up to 40 years in prison, Ellis had dozens of supporters with him in the courthouse despite the 48-hour notice. The federal judge took into consideration over a hundred letters written on his behalf by widows of former patients, friends and neighbors. Letters were sent from as far away as Wyoming and Montana.
These, in addition to his good local standing and clean record, helped his cause and he was sentenced to four years probation and a supervised release program.
In November 2005 he left his home, his dogs and the farming life he’s known four decades for the swarming life of Dismas Charities halfway house in Nashville where typical housemates are ex-convicts as well as other men and women on probation whose stays seldom lasts longer than six months.
“I was very fearful what life was going to be like in a regimented environment, learning to accommodate guards, rules and regulations,” he admits, “but it’s not nearly as bad as I’d feared.”
He’s seen housemates come and go, has even taken time to trim the hedges and do some landscaping.
Now, roughly five years since the fiasco began, Bernie is nearing the end of his eighteen-month stay and his “debt to society” is most certainly paid, so why are the feds still trying to take his farm through their bogus civil asset forfeiture action, demanding $200,000 to release the lien?
The Middle Tennessee community has banded together to come to his aid, creating saveberniesfarm.com to raise awareness and planning a benefit to help with legal fees and hopefully save his farm on April 25 at Belcourt Theatre.
Bernie is an enigmatic man who refuses to let his legal woes get him down. He continues to work for election reform and as a public health consultant when he can, although he admits being incarcerated in the halfway house limits his potential.
And that’s a shame. Ellis is a well-informed community servant who, after receiving his bachelor’s degrees in psychology, sociology and political science from Vanderbilt went on to earn masters’ degrees in sociology from University of Texas at Austin and Epidemiology from UCLA Berkeley.
He’s been published in countless medical journals and has participated in health-related conferences and on advisory boards across the country. He has spent over twenty years working to prevent substance abuse and alcoholism, dedicating his life to making the world a livelier, healthier place.
In the late ’80s, Ellis helped establish the Tennessee AIDS Program for the state health department and more recently aided the state government of New Mexico in creating a medicinal marijuana program that he’d like to see spread across all 50 states, though currently only 12 states have such a program.
“Every federal commission since Nixon has recommended reclassifying marijuana, allowing it to reenter the medical pharmacopeia,” Ellis informs.
The truth about marijuana and most importantly, its medicinal benefits, is extremely skewed by the U.S. government and the press. Marijuana has been illegal in this country for barely over 50 years, though widely considered beneficial for centuries prior. The hearty herb grows freely all around the world and has a healing history that dates back more than 5,000 years. There is not a death on record caused by marijuana and millions benefit from the use of cannabis to manage the effects of diseases like multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, diabetes, HIV and most forms of cancer. Its benefits range from calming nausea and increasing appetite to suppressing pain, reducing tissue inflammation and more.
The fact of the matter is it’s time for a change in regard to cannabis laws, which are outdated and unreasonable. Nicotine and alcohol are far worse for the body and cause thousands of deaths a year.
According to Ellis, who used the herb himself to regulate the pain of his fibromyalgia, the only effects are marijuana are “to make you talk too much, eat too much and laugh too much.”
There’s no fault in any of that, now is there?
