The Journey 83. Daniel Boughen: Grow Your Own Peace

Publisher RA “Kris” Millegan talks with Daniel Boughen about growing your own “bannakis” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), the benefits of “Thomas-Henry-Charlie,” the ridiculousness of criminalizing an ancient textile and remedy, and Daniel’s TrineDay book, “Medical Growing: A Garden of Peace.”

Kris: [I’ve long said that] the laws against it really cause more problems than marijuana itself [as well as] the lies that [are told] about it. Because once the kids see those lies, they don’t believe anything that the people [in authority] say.

Part of my posit has been that they targeted the kids who were teens and pre-teens in the 1960s with marijuana and that whole idea that “marijuana is a gateway drug” was part of that propaganda to get us kids to go finally to heroin. To opium. But a bunch of us didn’t go all the way to the needle. We stopped at the rolling papers and basically we had a counter-culture and a big part of that was marijuana.

Daniel: When I was eight I was a burn victim. And when I was in the hospital they gave me morphine. I recall being okay but crying to the doctor that I was in pain because I wanted more of that drug because I had experienced something extraordinary. It had an effect on my perceptions. So when I was fourteen and my brother [got me high with cannabis], I got a certain sense of relief. Because I had been in withdrawal from my morphine experience since the age of nine.

After I had gotten out of the hospital, my parents commented that I was not the same person. I was quieter. More introverted. But after I was introduced to cannabis, it changed everything. The first thing I did was start a country and western band with my brother. I sang all the songs and my brother played the piano and we went out and got gigs. It was a lot of fun. So my experience with cannabis was really one of opening. Re-opening. Because the opiate experience I had had – an eight-year-old kid – that shouldn’t happen.

Kris: So that kind of healed you, you might say.

Daniel: Yeah.

Kris: Marijuana is not just about getting high.

Daniel: No, it’s not. In some ways it’s about repairing. Like you said, a lot of us, we didn’t go any farther. Cannabis gave us what we wanted without harming us. And we didn’t even know how much good it was doing our endocannabinoid systems at the time. Many of us are healthier today because we used cannabis in our youth and it kept our immune systems quite strong. Cannabis oil helped cure my prostate cancer. It’s essentially a full extraction of the entire cannabis plant. The entirety of the plant has medicinal value.

Kris: And your book tells people how to make a grow room and has lots of explanations about what happens to the plants while they’re growing [and all about the lighting].

Daniel: That’s right.

Kris: It really is an amazing plant. Cannabis and bamboo, I truly think, can save the world. One reason that CBD is having such an effect is that it’s been out of the diet of people for [about] a hundred years. Most of the fodder that the milk cows ate and the animals ate, a lot of that had cannabis fodder. A lot of your brown breads and stuff that we ate as a people used hemp seed and hemp was a major part of our diet and our “matera medica” for millennia. At the top of the Himalayas, the tribes up there, all they do grow marijuana. It’s their main food. It’s their cloth. It’s what they build their houses out of. It’s an amazing plant that has been around mankind for millennia.