MARK ANTHONY SMITH, a glitch and ghost in the machine
Mark Smith grew up in Nelson Bay, New South Wales where the trawlers dried their fishing nets not far from the main harbour and the old wooden wharves. He spent a lot of his time down the coast and spending time sitting with the old Italian and Croatian fishermen listening to their stories, when he was growing up. Mark was a keen, surfer, fisher and diver and spent a lot of time growing up in the bush, until suffering from a debilitating injury in his mid 20s.
Photography ANTONELLA MORELLI
Words BEE MOHAMED
Some thoughts from Mark, shared with Bee Mohamed at the end of 2024
What was my North Star Ursa Minor moment, some say cannabis comes from the Stars the Canis Major to be precise.
Cannabis has been a caring nurse, and a cruel mistress in my life. In 1997, I travelled to Europe and spent some time providing vapes before returning to Australia in 2000 with the hope of helping patients here.
Unfortunately I slipped in a kitchen, hit my head on a small step and crushed a vertebrae in my neck. I suffered a cervical vertebrae injury at the C3 level and this was debilitating.
A horrible injury to deal with and it took me 9yrs to get over with trigger point injections and nerve blocks, the final straw to try and relieve the constant pins and needles. I was prescribed a whole range of pain medications, which eventually forced me to go cold turkey from the Lyrica, Orphenadrine and Endones.
Cannabis helped me through my withdrawals and I started gaining some quality of life. Without this plant, I would have gone to a dark place and I was losing grip of life. After tapering off my pain medications, I was ready to make a return to the workforce.
In 2013, I returned to the cannabis industry. While my injury left me with horrible nerve pain, I wanted to continue to make an impact and make a difference in the lives of patients who could benefit from this plant too.
I decided I was well enough to travel and had managed to re-enter the work force. I was sitting in a cafe near the Stradbroke ferry having breakfast when a little girl came up and looked at me with a glazed eye and pulled my breakfast off the table.
At that moment I judged this little girl and looked at her parents with a fierce look of, control your child, as she proceeded to have an epileptic fit in front of me on the ground. Thousands of thoughts ran through my mind of the judgement I had just given and the hopelessness of not knowing what to do in that instant.
As the parents ran to her, I disappeared into the commotion, feeling horrible for how in my mind I had just judged this little angel.
I am Mark Anthony Smith, the eldest of seven children, a glitch and ghost in the machine. Having been brought up to put myself last and to fight for the betterment of the tribe, I have struggled with life in a big wild world where being selfish is the norm. I’m an idealist and that won’t change.
In 2015, I held the first therapeutic research licence in The Hunter Valley with Rangi Faulder, only to have the Federal Government hinder our efforts. When the Office of Drug Control was created, we lobbied the government to uphold the special access scheme when they tried to take it away from cannabis patients. There still remains little effort by the Federal Government for a compassionate scheme.
In 2017, I worked for an Italian company to create their first CBD cultivation in Castel Vecchio Abruzzo. I planted the first 3000 seeds of cbd in Greece at a farm in Nea Makri only to have the police come and spray them.
In Asia, I worked with the Malaysian Government and managed to get a stay of execution from Mahathir’s government for a cannabis criminal, and had the first import licence for seed until the change of government.
I also worked in Thailand for two years, and was the first western speaker in the Thai parliament. We worked to make it legal, inviting Californians and Canadians to be usurped for the capitalist rewards and not the benefit to people, many of the original activists being betrayed by the Government.
I have seen many of the original people fighting for everyone’s access, defeated to create change. I have seen the destruction to family units because access to cannabis is expensive and difficult. I have witnessed children taken from parents because they wanted to use cannabis as a safe alternative medicine. I have seen parents dying of cancer not being able to continue to afford their oils.
What is my North Star, you ask? It is to focus on the core purpose of what brought me to this industry. We need to find a way to provide medicine for the most vulnerable communities. We need to create a new access pathway so that children and those who need the medicine the most, are able to benefit from the plant. Home grown must be decriminalised.
We need to find a way to be compassionate again. We must do better in this industry and find a way to ensure that the plant is available to children and vulnerable people who need it the most.
