MEDIMAN'S MIDDLE NAME MUST BE STEALTH. Not only am I standing right beside his grow room, but I’ve read the part of his book telling you how he hides it AND I’ve been directed to where it is by the man himself just seconds ago. Yet I still can’t find the fucking thing.
Eventually he saves me from languishing in my own inability to follow instructions and moves aside the piece of fake wall that serves as the entrance to his grow room – and it’s like entering Narnia. To say I couldn’t even see this room only seconds ago, before me is a phenomenal sight; a precision grow room, running at the best of its ability, with a sea of thick, healthy buds begging to be harvested. Like, almost literally begging. As Mediman tells me, one of his favorite tricks is to let his containers dry out completely after the plants are matured. He then leaves them in the dark for 2-3 days. “This makes them want to protect themselves from the stress which will produce and increase your trichrome production almost instantly. The plants are finished and dying anyways, so it does not hurt your grow.” Somewhat sadistic, perhaps, but having sampled said bud, I can confirm that it definitely works.
For someone so young, Mediman certainly has a stack of growing tricks under his hat. It makes sense, though, that he would be both safety-conscious and ingenious, after everything he’s been through with medical marijuana. In fact, it’s amazing that he’s standing at all. Having been diagnosed as terminally ill only a few years ago, he never expected to be standing here breathing, let alone writing a book and becoming something of a medical marijuana expert in Canadian media. We sat down over a bowl of his amazing Nepalese Fruit and he told me how he turned his diagnosis around and made a success out of his situation.

In the introduction to your upcoming book, Marijuana Made Simple, you talk about the fact that you were born with a rare genetic condition called Wilson’s. What is Wilson’s disease?
It’s pretty hard to understand fully, but basically it’s degenerative disease that mutates particular genes in your body, especially a liver gene which then does not allow the removal of copper from your body. Each person has their own set of mutations, and though most of the cases just have the one liver mutation, and a smaller group of people like myself have many. In my case, the disease was not discovered until I was 24, by which time my entire blood stream and organs were poisoned with copper at a life-threatening level. I remained terminally ill for about 8 years, and I survived with the help of marijuana until my doctors were able to bring my copper levels to non life-threatening levels.

Wow. So pretty heavy! What was your life with Wilson’s like before you discovered medical marijuana?
It was and still is very lonely, as the mutations in my brain have made me very different to everyone else. I thought, moved, talked and behaved in a way that people just did not understand. As a boy for example, I went to a higher learning school, where I was studying the violin, vocals and drama plus playing competitive hockey all over Ontario. Everyone knew I was weird and hard to handle but since I was excelling so much, no one had any idea that the situation was as bad as it was, which left my disease undetected. I knew there was something going on the entire time and since there was no one else like me or able to understand me, it made me feel completely alone in the world.

How did you get introduced to medical marijuana and how did you become a legal grower?
In grade 9 a few friends and I split on a gram of hash oil. I got three one-paper joints out of the deal and smoked them all in a row. It made most of the craziness in my brain go away and I was able to act like everyone else for the first time, and I have been a daily user ever since. I got a license to grow at a time when you had to be terminally ill in order to qualify and because my doctors could not do a thing for me, they felt compassionate and signed the papers.

Read the rest and more in SKUNK volume 7, issue 4