Jim Belushi is envious of you to see how his career has gone in pot.
The actor, Blues Brother and TV veteran (ABC’s “According to Jim”) stars in “Growing Belushi,” a three-part Discovery series that takes viewers into the legal cannabis business he hails from his southern Oregon spread , Belushi’s Farm, leads. It premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m.
“Once you’ve been dealing with this plant, it kind of leads you where you want to go,” says Belushi, 66, who brought the no-93 acre farm to the Rogue River just as marijuana was growing. legalized in Oregon. “I was like, ‘Wow, new agriculture, let’s do that,'” he says. ‘And it started me on that path.
“It took me to a whole other level.”
Belushi says he is “a boy-on-the-ground man” and regularly reviews dispositions for marijuana. His business philosophy changed, he says, when he encountered a veteran in Iraq war on one of those visits.
He said: ‘I was a medicine and I saw things that happened to the human body that no one would ever have to see. ‘He had PTSD and had taken Oxycontin with cannabis and said’ I could not talk to my children or my wife and I could not sleep but you Black Diamond OG [cannabis] let me do that. He shrugged and hugged me.
“This is a company about healing,” he says. “People suffer from depression, PTSD, Alzheimer’s, anxiety. I always followed my passion and the money came and the business behind it – but this vet changed my goal. ”
And, if you ask yourself, do not sample Belushi’s product too much.
‘I’m a microdoser. If I have a joint, it takes me about 10 days, ”he says. “I take 2.5 milligrams [THC-infused] Bhang Chocolate – it’s an easy sleep and I wake up awesome – and maybe a little hit from [hybrid cannabis] Cherry Pie – which makes me comfortable and charming and cools my anxiety and I get along with my wife.
‘I call it’ The marriage counselor. ”
Most of “Growing Belushi” shows him with the company he started in 2015 and interacting with his employees, including his cousin-to-ex-cousin, Chris – who oversees day-to-day operations – and young growers Ben and Alex, whom he has known since they were children (he is friends with her father). Viewers also get a glimpse into his personal life.
Another featured character is Jack Murtha, alias marijuana celebrity “Captain Jack,” whose rare strain of Afghan weed was known as “The Scent of ‘SNL'” when Belushi’s late brother, John, died on Saturday night. Live ”in the mid-70s.
‘I met Jack when Danny [Aykroyd] and I started doing the Blues Brothers and we’re playing an East Coast show, ”says Belushi. ‘Jack and Danny were friends, and when I started my business, Danny said,’ you can have Captain Jack’s tribe. It is very unique. ‘Where else would those boys be [on ‘SNL’] stay up and be stimulated and come up with ‘The Coneheads?’ ”
Belushi mentions his brother several times – John’s wife, Judy, appears in the series, along with Aykroyd – and says he thinks Belushi’s drug use, and possibly death from an overdose in 1982, was caused in part by a traumatic event. concussion he underwent while playing football in high school.
“I saw my brother seize my house and we did not know what was coming,” he says. ‘It was from clapping his head and ringing his bell. That’s what I believe. If Johnny were a pothead, he would be alive today.
“In the second episode, I go to Colombia and I go up in a helicopter and ride into the ‘Red Zone’, where all the cooks are grown,” he says. ‘I look down on those fields and there’s a moment that really struck me. I went, ‘Wow, these fields are really cemeteries, all those people who died to those cooks.’ I wondered, looking at these fields, when I look at the cooks my brother used.
‘If Colombia can take these fields and convert them to cannabis fields, they can heal people instead of killing them.
“Everyone is crying inside,” he says. “Sometimes we take a Xanax or Ambien as a prescription medicine. [Cannabis] is the safest, most non-violent choice. It helps families recover in trauma – not just losing a sibling like me, but illness in the family, the loss of a job or a home … I have even experienced divorce. It is for the battle in all of us.
“One of the reasons cannabis is so productive is that it finds a peaceful way to stop crying.”
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