Cushion Costs of Continued Reefer Madness for Bernie Ellis
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Bernie Ellis is a retired public health epidemiologist whose research around HIV/AIDS and substance abuse has been replicated in 30+ states and includes numerous well-received publications in the Library of Congress and the National Library of Medicine. He is also a strong proponent of cannabis for its medicinal properties and its utility for helping people break more deadly and destructive addictions to alcohol, tobacco and other truly dangerous drugs.
Beginning in 1987 when he helped establish and administer the Tennessee AIDS Program, Bernie provided cannabis free of charge to terminally ill AIDS and cancer patients. That continued for fifteen years until the feds raided his Tennessee farm and tried to confiscate that farm and put Bernie in prison for 10-40 years, once again for providing free cannabis to terminally ill patients. With the strong support of his neighbors and professional colleagues, the feds basically failed on both counts.
In 2020, Bernie moved to New Mexico which has some of the best medical/recreational cannabis policies in the country. In 2022, Bernie was licensed as a cannabis micro-producer which allowed him to harvest up to 200 cannabis plants for the dispensary marketplace. His one and only harvest (in 2023) was praised by NM labs for its purity and potency. However, even though they recognized the quality of his crop, New Mexico cannabis dispensaries (the only “customers” Bernie was allowed to sell to) offered him less than one sixth of the price they intended to sell his cannabis for to consumers, offers that he had no problem refusing. He continued to try to sell his harvest through 2024 but he never received a reasonable offer – in fact, the offers kept dropping due to the saturated and restrictive NM market.
With only weeks to go before his micro-producer license expired in November, 2024, Bernie decided to give his crop away at two public gatherings. Since New Mexico law allows any adult to gift up to two ounces of cannabis to any other adult (with some restrictions), Bernie believed that these giveaways were completely legal. Both giveaway events went well with no incidents and both were well covered by the NM press, including front page articles in the Taos and Santa Fe newspapers.
When those newspaper articles were published, Bernie attracted the ire of the New Mexico Cannabis Control Division (NMCCD) that filed a complaint against him for violating three of their regulations. These violations (which included 202 separate counts) carried with them the possibility of a $10,000 fine PER count, placing Bernie at risk of a $2 million+ fine for giving his cannabis away free of charge to adults who were medical and/or recreational cannabis users.
These charges necessitated that Bernie hire an attorney at the cost of $2,500 and drive 150 miles to Albuquerque to negotiate his “punishment” with NMCCD. In the end, Bernie was fined $20,000 and lost his license to grow cannabis for three years. Although this fine was much less than it could have been, it still amounted to about sixteen months of his Social Security checks, his only source of outside income. (Bernie is 75 years old.)
This GoFundMe campaign was established by Bernie’s friends to help him recover some or all of the retirement funds he used to pay the fine and his associated legal fees. If you believe that this fine and related punishment went overboard and was inappropriate, please review some of the background on Bernie here and consider making a contribution of any amount to this campaign. As progressive as New Mexico’s cannabis policies are, the state should expand the opportunities for cannabis producers to sell or give away their harvests if NM cannabis dispensaries continue to low-ball producers and overcharge their consumers. Your contribution will help Bernie and will send an important message to the New Mexico legislature that its cannabis-related policies and practices need to be modified to free cannabis producers from the stranglehold that NM dispensaries now enjoy over producers and allow those producers to sell or give away cannabis under revised regulations. Thank you in advance for your support.
Bernie's original medical cannabis-related struggles with the federal government received a great deal of local and national media coverage and was the subject of an award-winning documentary that was screened at a dozen film festivals and selected "Best Documentary" at three of them. Here are three representative links:
Marijuana Martyr | Pith in the Wind | Nashville News | nashvillescene.com
Bernie has written up three articles for his Substack account ("Here As In Heaven") on this recent cannabis giveaway that resulted in his fine by the New Mexico Cannabis Control Division. Here are links to those articles:
Organizer and beneficiary
Isabel Cohen
Organizer
Vadito, NM
Bernard Ellis
Beneficiary