"The trip was transformational. The gratitude that every Israeli had for this volunteer mission, made me feel like the grinch, whose heart grew three times larger."
When I was told that there’s a Jewish grower named Adam in Nelson, British Columbia who went from legacy to legal and became legendary for the quality of his flower and his Menschlikeit character, it sounded like someone I had invented—a Canadian version of Jack Herer—as part of a sales pitch for Cannabis Jew Magazine.
We hope these Canna-Jewish reflections help provide context for the extraordinary contributions of Jews to cannabis culture, reseach and advocacy (and help explain Why Jews Love Weed).
Part of the reason why it’s hard to take seriously this notion of a “restored self” as a medical benefit of cannabinoid therapy is because we tend to think about PTSD as a pathology of memory or repression that can be cured with the right therapist or strain of weed.
It has given me no small amount of pleasure to learn that Israeli researchers are finding that with regard to understanding the medical benefits of cannabis, the biomedical model—based on mind-body dualism—just doesn't work.
As I was reading about this system that perpetually collects and analyzes environmental data in the grow room to correct for any problems before they occur, I kept thinking about a grower I know who spends most of his time collecting that data himself, and rarely leaves work.
In the tradition of Dr. Franz Fanon and his classic work Black Skin, White Masks (1952), we can think about being-Ashkenazi in terms of the psychic scars suffered from being racialized and living in the world as a remnant.