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Jim Belushi is on a very personal quest to destigmatize medical marijuana. In a new interview with Fox News, the actor, star of new Discovery series Growing Belushi, said that medicinal weed could have saved the life of his brother John Belushi, who died in 1982 from a drug overdose. Belushi explained that John had brain damage after years of football, and he likely turned to drugs as a means of self-medicating. “The medicine could have really helped him with that CTE, that suffering,” Belushi said of his medicinal marijuana products. “That’s one of my purposes.”
Belushi has long been an advocate of cannabis, but for the first time, he’s pulling back the curtain on his 93-acre Oregon farm in new reality series Growing Belushi. “I just thought that this was something that nobody’s ever seen,” he told Fox News of the show. “There are people that are very frightened about cannabis and its attributes and I thought, ‘You know what? If everybody just sees how it’s grown, sees the people that are involved, that really care… the testing that’s involved, the safety involved, they may feel a little more relaxed about trying cannabis.'”
The actor-turned-farmer added that his interest in medicinal marijuana stems from the death of his brother, Saturday Night Live star John Belushi. “My brother, I think, suffered from CTE,” said Belushi. “He was a middle linebacker, captain of the team, all-state and all-conference. And he banged his head for four years. He got the most tackles in our high school and he got his bell rung a lot. There [were] a lot of concussions.”
“Senior year he seizured in our home, and we didn’t know what it was,” he continued. In the years that followed, John discovered weed, and “cannabis [became] medicine for him,” but at the time, it was considered illegal. “It was all considered one drug,” Belushi said of the medicinal vs. recreational marijuana.
Before long, the SNL star turned to other drugs, including cocaine. “I believe what Dan Aykroyd says: ‘If John was a pothead he’d be alive today,'” said Belushi.
Check out Jim Belushi’s new series, Growing Belushi, tonight at 10/9c on Discovery Channel.
