My Father’s Haunting Last Words: Beware the Green Rush

The last three men who wanted to date me also wanted me to help them build their cannabis/cryptocurrency/blockchain startup.

“It’s amazing darling! You can buy weed with bitcoin on the blockchain. Help me build my empire and we’ll become billionaires!”

The moment an entrepreneur utters these words, I begin to gag with disgust.

If my Father was still alive, he’d say, “You’re not dating a drug dealer!”

Why? Because he was a drug dealer.

My father, Stanley Kessel z”l died almost a year ago, February 20, 2017 at age 72. The ache of grief still seizes my heart.

One of our last conversations haunts me. To honor his memory, I want to share it with you.

I’m grateful 2 ? months before he died, I visited him and his wife Sherry, alone without my three sons.

I enjoyed the quiet presence of unconditional love and laughter without judgement.

I went with him to his Narcotic Anonymous (NA) meetings and saw how much he loved and cared for his fellow addicts who were struggling to rebuild their lives.

Driving home from a meeting in his signature white convertible corvette with red leather interior, we had our final quiet conversation before he died six weeks later.

“Daddy since you’ve been clean 31 years, have you ever wanted to use drugs again?”

“Yes, now.”

“Now?! Why?”

“Because I’m so sad. I can’t handle the pain. It’s the trifecta of devastation. My beloved dog Avi died, Trump got elected and marijuana is becoming legal.”

“I get the first two, but not the third. Why legalizing pot?”

“Because in 31 years of going to NA meetings, the first drug every addict starts with is pot.

“Grass is the gateway drug to hell. Not everyone who gets high on weed becomes a strung out addict who destroys their life, but every destructive addict I met started with a joint.”

I knew the devastation and destruction of drugs. It started when I was a little girl. My parents got divorced when I was two and my brother had just turned five. The divorce was bitter and ferocious.

I remember the occasional times my father would show up to pick us up for his scheduled weekend. The door of his corvette would open, smoke would pour out and the pungent smell of marijuana would fill the air.

My mother would scream in anguish,

“How dare you pick up our children high as a kite?”

Tears streamed down her face as he drove off with us scared and confused.

Throughout my childhood, he continued to use drugs. I didn’t know my Father sober.

But he wasn’t a pothead, he was a brilliant, driven computer genius. So like all drug addicts he knew, pot paved the way for his drug of choice, cocaine.

Cocaine fueled his brain to function at an insane capacity, seemingly able to work 24/7.

During my last visit, my Father told me stories from the height of his addiction when he worked for the colorful billionaire and eventual politician, Ross Perot at EDS (Electronic Data Systems).

According to my Father, Perot has a very distinct personality with three consistent qualities: an absolute conviction he’s right; an intense will that refuses to admit he’s wrong and a need to control every situation to fit these parameters.

That didn’t work for my Dad.

He was the smartest man in the room and he was coked up. When Perot was wrong, my Father would tell him to his face to f*ck off and let him do his job.

Perot fired him three times. Each time, he hired him back because no one could do what my Dad did. He told me with a big grin, each time he’d make Perot rehire him at a higher salary to do the same job.

During that time my Father sold cocaine to other computer engineers so they too could work at maximum capacity. He sold to colleagues, friends and eventually to anyone who would buy.

Cocaine enabled him to have everything he wanted; my brother and I weren’t part of his world.

We were a distraction. My mother’s continued fury and suing him to pay child support were a massive annoyance.

Thus, ten years after my parents got divorced, my Father gave up legal parental rights to my brother and me.

I was 12 years old. I was devastated. Daddy’s little girl was kicked to the curb. As I understood it, drugs were the reason.

Fortunately my mother had remarried a kind, loving man who adopted me and raised me as his daughter.

Yet still inside, I was broken and angry.

To this day, I hate drugs. I harshly judge those who use and sell drugs. I don’t care that pot is now legal and “everybody” uses. I’ve never tried a drug and never will. I pray my three sons will not genetically inherit an addictive gene and lose their lives to drugs.

The smell of pot is my kryptonite. The mere scent of it instantly rips off my psychological body armor to reveal the scared, sad little girl who lost her Daddy to drugs. If I smell it, I literally gag and my eyes well up with tears.

My heart aches for my good friends who worked hard to raise good kids, did all the right things and now their bright, beautiful children have no desire to go to college, work or build a life. They instead sit around and get stoned all day.

No matter how amazing their lives are, they live with the fact their adult child is an unmotivated pothead.

I wonder if you, the opportunistic entrepreneur who’s jumped into the “green rush,” our modern-day gold rush of making cash by selling and enabling the selling of cannabis/marijuana/weed/dope, has thought about the ethics of what you’re doing.

Do you accept the responsibility you are profiting off selling a substance that chemically alters the brain and has the power to destroy lives? Are you proud of that?

How do you justify it? It’s legal, therefore it’s moral and ethical?

Don’t feed me the bull sh*t, “I’m only selling medical cannabis for those with a physician’s prescription.”

My teenage sons tell me about kids at school who steal their grandmother’s medically dosed cannabis prescribed to lessen the chemotherapy side effects. They sell grandma’s grass at school and buy candy. Nice.

To take the idea a bit further I ask, what the drug companies and doctors who prescribe OxyContin think? Whatever happened to the physician’s moral code to “do no harm?”

Since 1996, the drug company Purdue started pushing their powerful painkiller OxyContin. OxyContin’s sole active ingredient is oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin which is up to twice as powerful as morphine. The $35 billion in profits they’ve made selling this drug has led to a opioid public health emergency with now an estimated 7,500 Americans dying each week from opioid overdoses.

Become a drug dealer and you too can make billions while destroying the life of millions.

One of my dear girlfriend’s daughter a few years ago was in an accident and the doctor prescribed OxyContin for her back pain. She became addicted and when the prescription ran out, like so many others, her daughter turned to heroin. Her daughter has been in and out of rehab for her young adult life and overdosed many times. My dear friend lives with the daily fear of finding her young beautiful daughter dead.

I’m not equating cannabis to OxyContin, but I want us all to think what will our country look like in 20 years? How will the legalization of marijuana affect our society?

I don’t know, but I suggest anyone who wants to make money off of selling cannabis to go to at least five Narcotic Anonymous meetings and listen to the stories of what heinous acts drug addicts did to the ones they love in order to get high.

To all those green rush entrepreneurs, I say you’re a drug dealer creating a new generation of drug addicts. If you were my child, I’d be ashamed of you.

I don’t only have romantic suitors in the industry, but also plenty of friends working in this sector and elected officials who voted yes to legalizing marijuana. They won’t like me speaking my mind. To them and you, I say,

My history is my truth.

Coming up on the one year anniversary of my Father’s death, I want to share how he felt. How depressed he was that marijuana was becoming legal.

You capitalizing on it, broke his dying heart.

Returning to my story, on my 15th birthday when my Father realized he could not legally call me to wish me happy birthday because he’d chosen drugs over his daughter, he overdosed and almost died.

He didn’t. Fortunately he saw it as time to get clean. And he did. He quit cocaine and went to narcotic anonymous (NA) meetings six days a week for 31 years. No matter what city he was in, he made time to go to a meeting.

He sponsored thousands of people to fight the long hard battle of addiction. He buried many friends. He saw friends get clean, yet sadly their spouses/children/siblings/parents never forgave them.

I forgave my Daddy.

When I was 22, ten years after he gave up legal rights as my Father, I called him out of the blue and wished him Happy Father’s Day.

One of the most important values in the Jewish tradition is the concept of Teshuvah. Teshuvah is usually translated as repentance, however according to Rabbi Baruch Gartner in his new book “Living Aligned,” Teshuvah literally means to return and restore — it’s about taking responsibility in the present for mistakes made in the past, so the future opens clearly before us.

I didn’t want so much for my Father to say he his was sorry and repent for his sins; I wanted to return to a place of feeling loved and secure and know in the future I could be in a loving and trusting relationship with my Father and eventually a husband.

My Father too needed to reconnect with me. In order for him to work on step nine of the NA 12 step program, “making amends,” he needed to not only acknowledge what he did, but also repair our relationship and maintain it.

Why? Because to stay close to the person you hurt due to your drug use, will keep you mindful of why you should never abuse drugs again.

When I called him 10 years later, I was so happy to learn he was drug-free, he loved me and he too wanted me in his life.

In the Jewish tradition, one of the greatest gift that G?d can give a person is the opportunity to rise above their past mistakes to reestablish an eternal connection with their family and the divine.

Being part of NA, my father learned to believe in a higher power, and the power of forgiveness and family. I am so grateful I had the last 24 years to know and love him.

Besides his family, his greatest joy and purpose was to help people rebuild their lives after drugs had darkened and damaged it.

I hope more voices than mine, warn those who are getting caught up by greed of the green rush.

I strive to live my life with purpose. Each morning I think, how can I positively impact the world today? Each night as I drift off to sleep, I count the ways that day I uplifted other souls.

I guarantee you, it wasn’t by helping them get high.

I love and miss you Daddy. I’m proud to heed your warning of the green rush and share it with others.

May your memory be a source of comfort to all of us who loved you.

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