MICHAEL BALDERSTONE, the original activist
Photography ANTONELLA MORELLI
Words MICHEAL BALDERSTONE
Interview BEE MOHAMED
Michael Balderstone was formerly a stockbroker, currently the President of the Hemp Embassy, Legalise Cannabis Australia party and the unofficial Mayor of Nimbin, a small but significant town to the cannabis movement. For the last 30 years, Michael has been the public face of the Northern Rivers Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP) movement. He is a self-proclaimed hippie and the original advocate for all things cannabis in Australia.
Interview with Bee Mohamed, 25 May 2024
Bee Mohamed: From a spiritual perspective, how has cannabis helped you find truth in your life?
Michael Balderstone: I think I am fortunate in many ways as I did not discover cannabis until I was 25 and that day had a profound effect on me. It was in Kandahar and a local Afghani invited me to smoke with him. I was smoking tabac, so inhaling was easy. I was in an orange groove and everything became liquid.
Different brightly coloured energies flowed up and down the tree trunks from the earth like each had its own multi lane highway. It was a mind blowing experience. Everything was connected, and awesomely beautiful.
That was my first wake up to there is a lot more to life than meets the eye! In a way, this was the ‘start’ of everything and I wanted more. I loved how the smoke emptied my mind and opened up intuitive doorways to the Truth.
A few months prior I had left my job in London with a stockbroker in a search for “whether there was a God or was it a dog eat dog world”. I’d been helping the rich get richer in my job but on the way to London from Australia, I’d stop over in Bangkok and had a glimpse of what we call third world living. Inequality amongst people is clearly the cause of so much angst and I needed to know if it was by chance or not.
BM: How did cannabis change your life?
MB: That smoke in Kandahar remains a turning point. I did not know it then but I had what we now diagnose as ‘PTSD.’ I had not shed a tear since I was ten years old and sent to boarding school.
It is very hard to put into words the relief I had from smoking cannabis. My mind was freed somehow, and with it my body relaxed. I used to get debilitating migraines, vomiting and hiding in the dark searching for silence. Virtually never again and that’s fifty years ago now, except a few times when I had stopped taking cannabis.
From then on cannabis was my friend on the spiritual journey. Now people call it medicine but I understand why temples were built for the plant in the past and in Jesus’s day it was called Gods gift. If something takes your pain away and makes you feel good is it medical or spiritual? Remembering the words good and god come from the same root gad, same as gather and together!
Somehow, in emptying my mind, cannabis sweeps an invisible veil aside and the Truth becomes obvious. I can also liken it to looking into a muddy stirred up pool, but after the smoke the mud settles and I can see clearly to the bottom.
Easy to understand why the CIA used cannabis as a truth drug back in the sixties, but also easy to see why they stopped after people got the giggles and munchies. Does it set free the child inside us?!
“Somehow, in emptying my mind, cannabis sweeps an invisible veil aside and the Truth becomes obvious. I can also liken it to looking into a muddy stirred up pool, but after the smoke the mud settles and I can see clearly to the bottom.”
- Michael Balderstone
BM: Do you believe that cannabis can help people question the narrative by which we are supposed to live our lives?
MB: Cannabis is manure for our imagination. I’ve read in old Indian texts the advice to solve any problem is to get some ganja and go into the forest on your own, smoke it and think. It made me question everything.
Once I had a glimpse of the truth all my programming was in trouble! Excellent. How else can we change the direction humanity is going in, we must question everything and critically the consequences of our actions.
The hippie revolution which questioned everything was inspired by pot and LSD which laid bare the disasters we were headed for unless we change our ways.
BM: Nimbin is the heart of Australia’s cannabis culture and in a way, laid the bricks for the current industry. What truthful opinions do you have of where the industry is?
MB: Nimbin is the original heart of the alternative back to the Earth movement and cannabis is the sacred herb of that culture for many. The plant has shown us the Truth of how we are living and how we could live.
To live in harmony with each other and the Earth is the dream.
However, capitalism and the competition over who can make the most money is still ruling most people’s lives as I see it. We all need money in this system but it’s become equated with success. Like who dies with the most wins, right?! Wrong.
Who finds happiness is the real winner, I think.
