David R. Ford

At his birth in 1928 in Ross, California, Dave Ford was blessed with extraordinary wit, energy, and initiative. By the time he graduated from high school he had already published his own newspaper, produced elaborate stage shows, created and hosted a popular radio show, and interviewed legendary Hollywood stars.

He was eight when he first heard about "happy grass" – and was immediately confronted by two radically opposite views of cannabis. Ordinary people told him that marijuana eased pain and made them relaxed and peaceful. The government – and his father – told him it turned users into violent lunatics. His mother told him: find out for yourself. He did.

He smoked his first joint at age 17 – and in a single hour wrote the speech that won him a bi-state oratory contest against 12,000 rivals. (Dave is against teenagers using any drug, including marijuana, except when recommended by a physician – but he was always a bit precocious.) In the six decades since, he has used pot to prime his creativity in enterprises ranging from remodeling and building homes, to wildly popular television shows for the CBS affiliate in Hawaii, to a thriving import business, to an innovative advertising agency. His disappointments were more exciting than most people's successes: a floating hotel sunk by established interests before it was launched, a land development in the South Pacific appropriated by an infant government, a lush beach resort eaten by a fire goddess.

Dave has survived four deadly piloting incidents without ever scratching a plane or a passenger, a record-breaking dive to further research being done by the University of Hawaii, chilling encounters in rural Taiwan and urban Indonesia, a tidal wave, a major earthquake, an erupting volcano, cancer, and the tragic death of the love of his life.

He now devotes his energies to the medical-marijuana movement. Dave never forgot his mother's advice, and in a lifetime of research he has amassed an enormous amount of evidence that demolishes the hysterical propaganda of the drug warriors. In his first book, Marijuana: Not Guilty As Charged, he made a compelling case that, far from being a dangerous drug with no medical value, cannabis is for many people the only effective treatment for a wide variety of illnesses – and all but harmless. His latest work cites new evidence of marijuana's benefits – and of the senseless cruelty of the War on Drugs. Uniquely, Good Medicine, Great Sex! uses his own enthralling life story – and stories from the thousands of other pot users he's encountered – to demonstrate that grass is a source of creativity, passion, and prosperity, and of physical, mental, and spiritual pleasure.