Greetings, and welcome back to Jef Tek’s Growing concern….

By Reverend Jef Tek

It was, has been, and always will be my intention to teach as many people to grow their own medicine as I possibly can: the simple act of nurturing a seed, watching it sprout and grow into a seedling, watering and feeding that seedling until it is a plant, watching it outgrow its container like a hermit crab outgrows its shell.

Going from literally a few drops of water that it takes to germi-nate one single seed all the way up to the gallons of water it takes to finish flushing a full-bodied plant during its final stage.

The progression is as mesmerizing and as therapeutic as the actual medicine is.

The medicine I am referring to is also known as grass, weed, pot, marijuana, marihuana, ganja, etc…. I call it a life saver.

I’ve suffered from arthritis for as long as i care to remember. (The lower case i was intended!) Many people suffer from many ailments that can be treated with cannabis. For some it is simply a life enhancer, but for many it is life.

My wife, Michelle Rainey, lost her battle with cancer in October last year, and I know for a fact that medicinal-grade cannabis greatly extended not only her life but her quality of life as well. So much infor-mation about this miraculous plant has been and continues to be repressed that it should make the average person mad. Her whole life was dedicated to enlightening every-one she touched, that marijuana helped ease her Crohn’s symptoms as well as let her eat, live, and work with minimal difficulty.

We are all dealt a set of cards, and what we do with them is entirely up to us. Some folks are dealt a nice hand, like Howard Hughes or Charlie Sheen, and muck it all up. Some are dealt lousy cards, but maybe a wild card will pop up later in life. I know that cannabis is my wild card, and let me tell you, reader, this has been one hell of a ride, the ups, the downs, the daily grinder. I wouldn’t trade it for the whole world.

I miss Michelle and I had to take a few months off from writing because I was afraid I’d short-out my key-board with all the salt water spewing from somewhere behind my ocular members, making it difficult to see and write. I’m still in the process of starting The Michelle Rainey Foundation, and the Web site is com-ing together nicely.

On St. Patrick’s Day (March 17, 2011), I had the honor and privilege to go on Vancouver’s classic rock radio station Rock101 with Brother Jake. I was on air with Mike Reno, famous frontman of Loverboy, as well as Al Harlow of Prism, promot-ing medicinal marijuana and dis-cussing Michelle’s life’s work, and in walks B.C.’s brand new Premier Christy Clark. I can’t believe I got to be on the radio and meet our babeli-cious Premier. Word has it she believes in medicinal cannabis, too — woo hoo!

One down and only about a million more politicians to go. I also dropped a shout-out to Treating Yourself magazine, saying, “TY is the only journal for patients done by patients.” Like I also said on the air, I do still need to drop an over-the-counter pain remedy when the pain in my back gets to be too much, but for most of the last 12 years, cannabis has been my main medicine in my arsenal against arthritis.

If you live in Canada and you have a doctor’s diagnosis of one of the many ailments cannabis is known to treat, you can get a specialist to sign and then you send off about 30 pages of forms to Health Canada. In a year or less, you will be licensed to grow, possess, and use cannabis to heal you. Now, in keeping with my origi-nal goal of teaching everyone possi-ble to grow pot, I am also adding the desire for everyone with anything from simple dermatitis to intraocular eye pressure (which is something that 80% of us all have) to go get signed.

Get their license, force Health Canada to expand their Medical Marijuana Access Division, or what-ever they’re calling it now, force the whole bureaucratic member to swell like buds in bloom, crashing the sys-tem and freeing the thousands of people forced to live in fear of reprisal. Everyone from the doctors who are bullied not to sign marijua-na patients’ forms, all the way up to and including the fact that cannabis hemp has been removed from colle-giate doctors’ curriculums for more than three decades, leaving fledgling doctors literally in the dark about a plant, a plant that does have healing powers. I don’t get it.

I’ve personally educated my chiropractor, his staff, and many friends or their significant others who never puffed, ever. Some still don’t person-ally partake in the medicinal benefits, but at least they have a viable understanding of what IT is, and what it isn’t. I feel good when I dis-pel a myth or two, or when a pre-menstrual cramp is alleviated with a single puff of potent pot, and I see their eyes soften up, and breathe a sigh of relief. That makes me happy.

To know that we are doing good.

Growing your own medicine should be as simple as growing your own vegetables or fruit. Man has done this for centuries, but in the last half of the last century, more and more things keep coming from stores that aren’t using any more ingredients. We have become a society of shop-pers, and if we cannot find it at the shopping center, we give up.

Cheer up, you will still need to shop for some staples, like pots, lights, timers, soil, etc., but you will not have to shop for swag any more. No more tentative, waiting-for-my-so-and-so to get back from wherever-the-hell. No, you will be the one who is in the driver’s seat, calling the shots, and providing for you and your loved ones.

Making a difference in someone’s life will make a difference in your life. It surely has in mine. There are as many varied ways to grow marijuana as there are as many varied personalities.

There’s no real secret, just persistence; knowledge will come in time. Every journey begins with the first step. Good luck and stay informed….