Reflections ►
The Rebirth of Plant Medicine by Dolores Halbin, contributing writer
With every day gone by, I am awed by what I didn’ t know at daybreak but have learned by bedtime! Coming into my 7th decade on this third rock from the sun, as the saying goes,“ We don’ t know what we don’ t know, that we don’ t know.” Thus, often, what I learn surprises me. In addition to learning, we are also unlearning nearly a century of falsehoods that began in the late 1920s.
As it turns out, our beloved cannabis plant was not the only plant hijacked in this decade. While Big Oil was injecting lies about cannabis, Big Pharma was hijacking the rest of the plants used since time began. Medicinal plants became weeds and were replaced by pills, leading to the current practice of spraying toxic carcinogens to kill the medicinal“ weeds,” leading to cancer, leading to more pills.
As chemists got better at replicating the plants growing around us, albuterol replaced mullein; Valium replaced valerian root; aspirin replaced willow bark; eye drops for glaucoma replaced cannabis; and on and on and on. Over time, the knowledge passed down through generations, the knowledge of“ the weeds,” was lost to modern medicine.
Grazing Mother
Years ago, I was standing on my little brother’ s front porch, celebrating our mother’ s 75th birthday, when my brother yelled,“ Mom! Quit grazing.”
Our mother was raised in a log cabin in the rolling hills of Missouri’ s Ozark Mountains. She was the second child of her then 18-year-old parents. By the time she and her older brother Carl were nine and ten, if there wasn’ t a chicken to butcher or meat available, my grandmother would send the kids out to shoot squirrels.
Gathering greens was a daily affair. Every part of the spring dandelions yielded a new delicacy. Thus, our mother was a grazer. Being raised by a grazer, I was honored to join my EVOLUTION team on a spring foraging walk with a master grazer, author, forager, and recently recognized National Treasure, Bo Brown.
Katie Thomas of Blue Key CBD, also a master forager and, for the time being, my neighbor here by the river, arranged the walk. I’ m pretty hard of hearing, and Bo is quite soft-spoken, so I bailed halfway through. Asking the person next to you,“ What kind of plant did he say that was?” must be annoying, so I bought Bo’ s book and added it to my mother’ s book collection on foraging. I have all summer to learn. Books do the hard work for us. All we have to do is read to learn. In this way, history is saved.
Seeing the practice of foraging for medicinal plants, not just cannabis, grow around the country is encouraging. Food is getting too expensive to overlook the free, nutrient-rich salads each season provides.
Mom and Weed
“ I just don’ t understand why you would elect to have your eye plucked out over smoking marijuana,” my mother admonished my husband. Mom was a born storyteller, so she continued to speak while my husband and I tried to wrap our heads around her declaration. It was February 2011, and we had brought lunch to Mom after being kicked out of the surgical suite at Truman Medical Center in downtown KCMO.
“ I know you kids smoked marijuana when you were teenagers. I smelled it on you.” Gene and I got together when I was 15 and he was 16. And yes, back in the late 60s and early 70s, we were around for Acapulco Gold and Thai Sticks. And yes, we smoked a lot of weed.
But time passed, we married, had kids, and DARE infiltrated the classrooms. Our kids had a mission to seek and destroy. There was no hiddy-hole in the house they wouldn’ t find and pitch our stash. Alcohol was cheap and legal. We quit smoking.
38 July July 2025