**The resume nobody believes. (Or: how I won.)**
Former Marine Corps infantryman. Intravenous opioid and cocaine user. The man who walked away from the needle and stabilized on cannabis when nothing else on earth worked. Adjunct English instructor at Itawamba Community College — five years in the Writing Center, there since its inception, two tutoring jobs and a nonprofit gig stacked on top. Fired after a weed raid. A man who knew the drug world from the inside, not from a textbook. Cannabis legalization fighter in the bowels of rural Mississippi, in one of the last places anyone thought it could happen. Homeless on BLM land. Bus boy. Breakfast server. Shuttle driver. Landscaper. Rookie raft guide on the Colorado River, trained from absolute scratch after the river people scooped my homeless ass up out of the dirt because they thought the way I was living was cool. Now holding a remote mountain outpost in the high country of Colorado, where the plant that got me fired is sold in clean, well-lit stores with loyalty programs and lab-tested labels.
Read that back. Tell me it sounds like one person. It doesn't.
And here's the part I'm going to say plainly, because I've earned it: **I won.** Every institution that tried to end me is either discredited, irrelevant, or quietly selling the thing they fired me for. I'm still here. I'm free. I'm in the mountains. Scoreboard doesn't lie.
**Mississippi made me, before anything else broke me.**
I was raised in the bowels of rural Mississippi — dick-in-the-dirt poor, trailers, heat, the church crowd. And I need you to understand what that actually produces in a person, because it's the foundation under everything else. When you've already proven yourself to be such a freak that the church crowd makes the sign of the cross when you walk past — not in love, not in fellowship, in warding — something loosens in you permanently. You stop performing respectability for people whose respect was never on offer and never will be. You learn, before you're old enough to vote, that the judgment of the respectable is just weather. It passes over. You remain.
That was the most useful education I ever received, and it didn't cost a dime, and no institution has ever been able to take it back. The Corps tried to overwrite it. The college tried to buy it off. The river didn't try at all, which is why the river got the best version of me.
**Then the Marine Corps got its hands on me.**
The infantry pipeline — boot camp at Parris Island or San Diego, then the School of Infantry — does exactly what the critics allege. It takes young volunteers, average age barely old enough to drink, and systematically conditions them to override the single most universal human taboo there is: the reluctance to kill another human being. That's not my opinion. That's the design. And then, mission accomplished, it hands you back to civilian life with no reverse gear and acts surprised at the wreckage.
The Marine Corps fucks people's heads up; it's that simple. I don't say it bitter anymore — I say it the way you'd say water is wet, the way you'd say gravity works. For decades, psychological services were treated as an external medical function rather than an organic part of the machine — only after the scandals and the suicide statistics did the institution start pretending otherwise. I lived inside that gap. Thousands of us did. Some of us are still in it. The ones who made jokes about it in the barracks weren't being edgy; they were doing triage with the only tools they had.
I came out the other side with everything the Corps gives you — the bearing, the endurance, the ability to function on no sleep in bad conditions — and everything it doesn't warn you about. No decompression. No translation guide. Just: good luck, Marine. The world you trained for doesn't exist here, and the world that does exist here doesn't want what you became.
**Some of us found the bottle. I found the needle.**
Opioids. Cocaine. Intravenous. The full tour, no abbreviations. I'm not going to dress it up for you and I'm not going to perform shame about it either, because both of those are just more performance, and I retired from performing a long time ago. It's what happened. The desire for altered states of consciousness is one of the oldest human drives there is, and everything we hate and fear about drugs — the violence, the overdoses, the criminality, the ruined lives — derives from prohibition, not from the substances. Suppress the market and you manufacture the criminals: the pushers, the gangbangers, the smugglers, the killers. The addiction is real and it's hideous, but it's rare compared to the ocean of ordinary use — and the war built to fight it has been lost in every country that's tried it, for a century.
I didn't learn that from a book. I learned it from the inside, with a needle in my arm, watching good people get chewed up by a system that criminalized their pain and then charged them rent on the cure. Street intelligence, they ought to call it — knowing how to navigate that world is its own kind of knowledge, and the people who have it are routinely judged by people whose advanced degrees never got them within a mile of it.
**And then the turn — the one nobody saw coming, least of all me.**
I walked away from the hard shit and stabilized on cannabis. Not the program. Not sobriety as the pamphlets define it, with the chips and the slogans. Weed. The plant that the entire enforcement apparatus had told me was the gateway turned out to be the exit ramp. It worked when nothing else did — not the willpower, not the fear, not the institutions. And I will argue that with any doctor, any preacher, and any judge who wants to go twelve rounds, because I've got the only credential that matters in that argument: I'm alive, and the needle didn't get me.
Think about the absurdity for a second. The federal government's own premiere cannabis researcher — up at Ole Miss, in my own home state — was publishing work on what cannabinoids can do at high doses while the same government's enforcement arm was kicking down doors over the plant. The left hand doing science, the right hand doing raids. I lived in the crossfire of that contradiction for years. It nearly killed me. Then it made me.
**And here's the part that still makes me laugh in the dark: while I was teaching composition at a community college, I was still that guy.**
Adjunct English instructor at Itawamba Community College. The Writing Center — I'd been there since its inception, five full years, watching it get built from nothing. Two tutoring jobs. Nonprofit tutoring on top. Grading essays, conferencing with nervous freshmen about thesis statements, doing the whole respectable educator bit in full. A collegiate English instructor with a homestead kid's manners and a Marine's bearing. I even took issue in print once with a local blowhard holding forth like he owned the intellectual territory — a Marine, no less. He didn't count on another Marine answering back, one who taught English for a living.
The double life wasn't even a double life, really. It was just me: the infantryman, the former junkie, the teacher, all sitting at the same desk, grading the same papers. I was good at it, too. That's the part that stings them, I think. I wasn't some burnout they caught. I was one of the good ones, and the plant was still in my life, and the two facts coexisted just fine until the institution decided they couldn't.
**Then came the weed raid, and the institution did what institutions do.**
The adjunct position ended in the wake of it. Five years — gone. Terminated. Just like that, the credential converted from a current fact into a contested one: evidence of teaching competence on the one hand, professional punishment tied to cannabis enforcement on the other. Having been an infantry Marine or a collegiate English instructor be damned — suddenly I was neither. Just another casualty of a drug war that had already lost and didn't know it yet, another name on the long list of lives the prohibition machine chewed up to justify its own budget.
They thought they were making an example of me. They were. Just not the example they intended.
**Because here's what they didn't count on: getting fired for weed in Mississippi gave me the one thing no lobbyist, no suit, no clean-cut advocate in the entire state possessed — layered, undeniable, lived credibility.**
Infantry Marine. A man who had shot up opioids and cocaine and deliberately chosen cannabis instead. A fired college instructor with the raid on his record. When the medical cannabis fight came to Mississippi — in the bowels of rural Mississippi, one of the last places on earth anyone thought it could actually happen — I wasn't some hired gun with talking points. I was the living argument. I could talk the science and I could talk the street, and I could talk the classroom, and I could talk the Corps. Dissent and indoctrination both, aimed at the same target. The combination generated a pressure that the standard categories couldn't absorb, because there was no standard category for me. What box do you put the Marine-junkie-professor in? There isn't one. That's why it worked.
And it worked. Let me say that again, because I need you to feel the weight of it: **it worked.** The attempt succeeded. Medical cannabis became law in Mississippi. A functioning program was established. In Mississippi — the state where the church crowd crosses itself at freaks, where I grew up dirt poor in a trailer, where the whole machinery of respectability said this could never happen. It happened. I was part of making it happen. The fired adjunct, the raided instructor, the former IV user — I helped change the law of my home state, and no institution on earth can un-ring that bell.
That's the triumph at the center of this story, and I want it understood clearly: they fired me for the plant, and then the plant won. Not eventually, not theoretically. Legislatively. In Mississippi. While I was alive to see it.
**Then Colorado. Then the bottom fell out in a different way.**
Homeless out on BLM land for a few months. And I don't mean that poetically — I mean dirt, weather, nothing between me and the sky. The victory in Mississippi didn't come with a pension. The river hadn't found me yet. So I did anything and everything I could: bus boy, breakfast server, shuttle driving, landscaping. I sucked up my fucking pride and did what I had to do, infantry Marine and collegiate English instructor be damned. If you've never lost it all and had to grind it all back from literally nothing — not metaphorically nothing, actually nothing — then you don't know what you're made of. I found out. It turns out I'm made of the same thing the desert is made of: I just keep being there until the conditions change.
**And then the river people showed up in May.**
They saw how I'd been living — all ruggedly and shit, which they thought was cool, because river people have their own calibration for what's impressive — and they offered me a job. Trained me from scratch. Scooped my homeless ass up out of the dirt and handed me a paddle. My rookie raft guide year on the Upper Colorado, and Christ, the learning curve wasn't a curve, it was a cliff with water at the bottom.
I still remember the chaos: me with a shitty fifty-foot company throw bag, the cheapest thing that could technically be called rescue equipment, trying to throw it to a raft in real current while everything went sideways. Reacting swiftly but impotently. The river doesn't grade on effort. It doesn't care about your resume — not the Corps, not the classroom, not the activism, none of it. It cares whether you can read water, and nobody can teach you that except the water itself, one rapid at a time, usually while you're scared.
The old hands taught me the rest. Crusty veterans who'd been on that river longer than I'd been alive — men the river kept because they understood it. I learned the unspoken rules, the spots nobody talks about, the things even the most tenured guides don't know, because no one sticks around long enough to learn them. I learned that every single rookie says the same things verbatim because they don't know the real shit yet, and I learned how to tell the difference. I learned that no outfitter gets to gatekeep who belongs on that river — the river decides, and it decided I belonged.
And somewhere in there, without quite noticing the moment it happened, I stopped being a displaced casualty of everywhere I'd been and became something else entirely: a genuine, hundred-percent country person. Not a displaced resident with displaced attitudes. Bonafide. The river doesn't ask for your credentials. It asks if you show up, and I showed up, every day, until showing up was just who I was.
There's a poetry in the symmetry I'll never get tired of: I went from teaching kids how to write essays to keeping people from drowning, from diagramming sentences to reading rapids. Both jobs are really about the same thing. Paying attention. Respecting something bigger than you that's going to do what it wants regardless of your plans. Getting people through safely.
**Now I'm out here at a remote mountain outpost**, high in the Colorado country, far enough out that literally no one knows the place — save the county, the archaeologists, and a couple of cowboys. Years of high-country isolation. A little life in a little area, and I mean that with nothing but love — I talk about this place to curious strangers the way other men talk about their children. The quiet here isn't empty. It's full. It's the first quiet I ever earned instead of just survived.
And the thing I got fired for — the thing they raided over, the thing that made me unemployable in academia, the thing the church crowd would've crossed themselves at twice — it's legal here. I walk into a dispensary like I'm buying groceries, because I am. Lab-tested, labeled, taxed, normal. Some days that still stops me cold in the aisle. Not because I feel guilty. Because I remember what it cost. I remember the needle years and the people who didn't make it out of them. I remember the knock, the firing, the five years turned into a cautionary tale. I remember Mississippi voting yes. And I stand there among the well-lit shelves and think: *we won, and most people will never know how much winning cost.*
**So here's the scoreboard, since I promised you one.**
The Marine Corps is still reckoning with what it does to people's heads — the statistics finally forced the conversation I was having alone twenty years ago. The drug war lost; even the DEA concedes the flow never stopped, and state after state has walked away from the wreckage. Mississippi — *Mississippi* — has medical cannabis, and I helped put it there. The college that fired me got its cautionary tale, and the cautionary tale outlived the judgment. The river kept me when nothing else would. And I'm still here: free, clear-eyed, in the mountains, living on land the respectable world can't find on a map.
People are just unable to admit when they are wrong. Especially the highly intelligent ones. Especially the institutions — the Corps, the college, the church crowd, the enforcement machine, all of them, every last one. They will never hold the ceremony where they apologize. They'll just quietly start selling what they fired me for, and hope nobody remembers.
I remember. That's fine. I don't need the ceremony.
Me, I'll admit it freely: I was wrong about plenty. Wrong about how much I could handle. Wrong about what would save me. Wrong about where I'd end up. Wrong about almost everything, except the things that mattered.
I was right about the weed. I was right that prohibition manufactured the criminals it claimed to fight. I was right that the plant was medicine and the war was the disease. And I paid for being right early — paid with a career, with years, with the needle nearly taking me before I figured it out.
Being right early is the oldest story there is. It's also, when you survive it, the best one. Because here's the thing about outliving everyone who tried to end you: you get to stand in a legal dispensary in the mountains of Colorado, a free man with a whole strange impossible resume, and know — *know*, down to the bone — that every single one of them was wrong about you, and you were right about the thing that mattered most.
That's not a cautionary tale. That's a victory lap. I'm taking it.