BERNIE ELLIS'S SEVEN-YEAR NIGHTMARE WITH THE LAW IS OVER-BUT HIS ADVOCACY
OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA BURNS HOTTER THAN EVER

By the time you read this, Bernie Ellis will be home on the farm he's
had for nearly four decades in the Fly community 12 miles south of
Leipers Fork. There'll just be less of it. His farm will be 25 acres
smaller, but Ellis is willing to live with that-considering the
federal government almost took it all, and meant to throw him in
prison to boot. Last month, Ellis, a respected public-health
epidemiologist with a 35-year career, signed civil asset forfeiture
papers handing 25 acres of farmland over to the U.S. government. The
agreement ends a nightmare that began seven years ago when he was
raided for growing marijuana-a small amount he used only for
medicinal purposes, and to ease the suffering of the terminally ill.

The agreement wasn't made lightly, Ellis says. In recent weeks, the
avuncular 60-year-old with the stocky outdoorsman's build has avoided
walking the ridgetop he knew he would lose. He didn't want to see the
pasture and surrounding woodland that would belong to Uncle Sam, or
the artesian spring that feeds them.

"I'm not walking around it," Ellis says, "because if there's any
vestige of pain or regret to this whole enterprise, it'll be affixed
to that land."

But in prosecuting Ellis-or persecuting him, as his many supporters
claim-the government may have given a face to what medical-marijuana
and cannabis-reform activists argue is the fundamental injustice of
the drug war. In 2002, drug agents in helicopters and on
four-wheelers stormed Ellis' property looking for marijuana plants.
To this day, he believes they were tipped off by a local
dealer/informant fuming because Ellis wouldn't sell to him.

A tactical field report indicated finding 537 plants, though for
reasons Ellis doesn't understand this was amended a month later to
300. (The actual number of usable adult plants, he maintains, was
closer to a couple dozen.) Nor does he understand why some of his
plants were left standing-plants he documented in photographs, with a
neighbor as witness-only for them to disappear a few days later,
after a visit by marauders who cut his fence.

Whatever the case, Ellis readily admitted that he was growing small
amounts of cannabis to relieve his degenerative spine and hip
condition. What's more, he said, he was sharing it free of charge
with AIDS and cancer patients to offset their pain and nausea.

A classic dealer's dodge, right? Only Ellis received testimonials to
back him up. There was the doctor whose patient, wasting away from
metastatic renal cancer, took her only comfort from the marijuana
Ellis supplied, free. "It was the only thing which relieved that
unremitting nausea, the only thing that allowed her real respite,"
the doctor wrote. "[When] she died, she was so thin I could have
carried her to the hearse alone."

There was the neighbor whose husband of 34 years began an agonizing
death from lung cancer. On the advice of his nurses, who suggested he
obtain marijuana, the dying man went to Ellis for help and got
it-again, free. "The marijuana Bernie Ellis provided...made it
possible for [him] to rest and to sleep," his widow wrote on Ellis'
behalf, "and it helped keep his appetite up."

These and some 200 other testimonials fill a notebook four inches
thick-and a bulging, well-worn manila folder, and another folder
still. Peter Strianse, the criminal defense attorney who has
represented Ellis pro bono for the past five years, believes that
Ellis would not be in his current situation "if the raid were done
now, in the fall of 2009, and the government were fully aware of the
mitigating circumstances." His opinion carries some weight: Earlier
in his career, Strianse himself was an assistant U.S. attorney and
drug task force prosecutor.

Had Ellis been in California, Colorado or any of the 11 other states
that have legalized medical marijuana, the outcome might have been
different. Had his troubles occurred in one of those states after
Oct. 19 of this year-when a widely publicized U.S. Department of
Justice memorandum asked federal prosecutors to lay off
state-sanctioned medical marijuana users-he might have escaped
prosecution entirely.

But this was Tennessee, where marijuana remains both illegal and the
state's No. 1 cash crop. Ellis faced a battery of charges. Although
he still disputes the amount and weight of what the agents found, he
pleaded guilty to manufacturing cannabis plants in late 2003 to
pre-empt more severe action. By 2007, he'd lost his livelihood and
gone $70,000 in debt. Worst of all, he faced losing the 187 acres of
farmland he'd accumulated since 1973.

"If I were a rapist, the government couldn't take my farm," Ellis
told the Scene in 2007. "I grew cannabis and provided it free of
charge to sick people, so I run the risk of losing everything I own.
That just doesn't compute to me."

It didn't compute to a lot of people. To the embarrassment of federal
and state drug officials, Ellis became a cause celebre. A packed 2007
benefit at The Belcourt netted thousands of dollars in support. More
than 100 testimonials-from doctors, neighbors, state representatives,
public-health officials, even the Republican former governor of
Delaware-begged the presiding judge in Ellis' case, U.S. District
Judge William Haynes, for leniency.

Support came in more direct ways from the close-knit Fly community.
While Ellis was confined to a halfway house for 18 months, limited to
one visit each month to his farm for the last six months, his
neighbors fed his dogs and paid his electric bills.

Haynes eventually sentenced Ellis to four years' probation, later
reduced to two--a lenient sentence, considering he was facing 10 years
in prison. During his halfway-house stay, Ellis says, he learned some
valuable truths about the drug war from "my homies." The first thing
they told him, he recalls, is that they didn't smoke pot--not because
they didn't prefer its mellow buzz, but because it took too long to
pass through the body to beat their mandatory drug tests. So they
would find something faster. "Use meth on Friday, piss clean on
Monday," ran a user's credo.

The second thing they told him, he says, was that "there's no
negotiating with the feds."

Ellis completed his halfway-house stay, along the way using his
personal and professional experience with recovery programs to start
the house's first 12-step program. But for the past two years, the
threat of losing his farm has remained a grave possibility. After an
unsuccessful attempt to withdraw his guilty plea, he still had to
satisfy the $250,000 settlement required by the government, lest he
lose all his property.

On Nov. 19, Haynes signed off on Ellis' land forfeiture. Ellis would
give up 25 acres of his farmland, thus settling the matter--at least in
the government's eyes.

"I do not diminish or devalue what I am giving up," Ellis wrote in an
email to his supporters. "In fact, the 25 acres they are getting
represents almost the entirety of my investments from a
three-decade-long successful public-health career....Now the feds will
have it, and be here (for at least a while)." The fate of the land has
not been determined, though a waggish friend of Ellis' suggested it
become the Bernie Ellis Wildlife Sanctuary--"wildlife spelled as two
words," Ellis says with a chuckle.

Ellis takes comfort (and sees no small amount of irony) in what he
describes as "a tidal wave of shift in public policy toward cannabis."
First came the Department of Justice's memo in October, read by many
as a show of cautious sympathy toward medical marijuana by the Obama
administration. Last month, in a perhaps more significant turn, the
American Medical Association urged the federal government to end its
classification of cannabis as a Category I controlled substance--on par
with LSD or heroin--with no medical benefits.

Sadly, the issue has become not just personal for Ellis, but perhaps
critical. Last month, as his sojourn in legal limbo was finally coming
to an end, Bernie Ellis was diagnosed with cancer. How severe, he
doesn't know. But the diagnosis only strengthens his conviction that
for the seriously ill, marijuana is neither an indulgence nor a vice,
but a quality-of-life necessity.

Back on the remaining 150-plus acres of his property, with its eight
valleys, four creeks and a waterfall, Ellis says he wouldn't recommend
that anyone else take the same risks he has. But he can't say he
regrets them either.

"Seven years ago, I was making $100,000 a year doing socially
meaningful work, and I was happy," Ellis says. "Today, I'm broke and
doing socially meaningful work, and I'm happy. Every day, it feels
like another block's been removed from my back. I can sit on my porch
at sunset and not lose this place where my heart lives."