Jeffray Lewis didn’t know where to park.
Being concerned about blocking traffic was an odd detail to contemplate as he made plans to commit suicide by jumping off the Aurora Bridge in Seattle, but that moment in 2008 forced Lewis to stop and think about consequences instead of actions.
Despite being married, well off and in his early 40s, it was his first glimpse of clarity since prescription painkillers had consumed his life.
“Opiates took my soul,” Lewis says, looking back on that dark period of his life nearly a decade ago. “I completely disappeared as a human being.”
His parking dilemma may have saved his life in 2008, but it was the discovery of CBD years later that rejuvenated his soul and gave him a different perspective on addiction therapy.
Today, Lewis is the CEO of his own cannabis business, Haystack Caps, and he can personally vouch for the life-changing power of the plant.
Sobriety
Jeffray Lewis, photo by Randel Walton photography.
The year 2008 was rock bottom for Lewis.
Five years earlier a car crash involving a speeding taxi cab started a downward spiral of opiate use. The reckless cab collided with four vehicles, including Lewis, who suffered back injuries that continue to impact him to this day.
At the time of the crash, Lewis had been sober for 10 years. Having battled alcoholism as a younger man, he was all too familiar with the dangers of substance abuse. But then his doctor introduced him to opiates.
“Doctors gave them to me, so I thought, ‘This is legit,’” Lewis says.
Normally gregarious and enthusiastic, Lewis shifts to a curt, straightforward tone as he discusses his addiction. The painkillers caused severe insomnia. He gained 120 pounds and his blood pressure hit an all-time high. It ultimately pushed Lewis to reconsider his approach to sobriety. After confronting his mortality on the Aurora Bridge in 2008, he quit using opiates, preferring to grit his teeth through the pain rather than falling deeper into temptation. He fought the addiction for years before walking into the Oregon Coast Cannabis dispensary in Manzanita, Oregon in 2015.
At the time, Lewis had already begun investing money in the cannabis space, but he hadn’t consumed alcohol in 25 years and had been free from opiates for several years. He half-jokingly asked the sales associate if there was something that would alleviate his back pain. The employee told him to Google the Charlotte’s Web strain.
“I made a conscious decision to give up my clean time, and I started taking CBD,” Lewis says. “I’m kind of a pioneer, because 20 years ago in sobriety, they would have laughed me out of the room. But now it’s different; I know a lot of people who are sober and are getting into CBD.”
Some recovering addicts use CBD “on the down-low,” Lewis says, because many substance-abuse counselors view people using medical cannabis as no longer living the sober life. It remains a divisive topic, even as the number of opioid-related deaths continue to skyrocket throughout North America and as data shows states that allow medical cannabis have lower rates of overdose.
In Lewis’ case, CBD helped him lose 50 pounds and lower his blood pressure by 50 points within the first year.
“There’s no cravings, it’s not all-consuming and I never thought about running out or that I need more of it,” Lewis says. “It changed my world.”
Divisive or not, he found an alternative that works for him. He even started adding a little THC to his diet so he can sleep better at night.
“The next thing you know, I am a whole new man,” he says. “So, I said f— it: I am going to be a pioneer and let anyone say what they want, and once I did that I never looked back.”
Expanding the Definition of Recovery
The High Sobriety treatment center allows cannabis as an aid in drug rehab
By Brian Beckley
It sounds like a contradiction, like an oxymoron or a joke.
But at High Sobriety in Los Angeles, where cannabis is allowed as part of the treatment for drug abuse, the mission to get people off dangerous drugs is dead serious.
“Do you want a dead kid or do you want a pothead?” asks founder Joe Schrank. “All of these people would be better off if they were cannabis users.”
Schrank is a social worker with master’s degree and more than a decade of experience in the recovery business. He’s a veteran of the old-school, 12-step abstinence approach who’s been sober for 20 years now. While abstinence from all substances — a tenet of the 12-step approach — may have worked for him, it does not work for everyone. A large percentage of addicts have not been able to successfully go cold turkey.
“The traditional paradigm of rehab doesn’t really work,” he says. “The definition of ‘recovery’ has got to expand.”
Schrank says the high rate of failure with traditional 12-step programs is something that would not be accepted in other areas of treatment and unlike other diseases, patients in recovery are often blamed if the treatment did not work for them. Schrank compares it to diabetes, which sometimes takes several attempts to find the proper dosage and treatment to help the patient.
“No one says, ‘The treatment didn’t work; it’s your fault,’” he says of diabetes patients.
By adding cannabis into the recovery efforts, Schrank sees an opportunity to provide an “off-ramp” to those locked in the thrall of opioids.
“Yeah, they are getting high — on something that won’t kill them,” he says. “Humans like to alter their state of consciousness. Why are we ignoring the option of doing it as safely as possible?”
Research has shown that overdose deaths from opioid use is 25% lower in states with a legal cannabis option, which is why Schrank believes it should be a “first resort,” not a last one.
The High Sobriety program is based on harm reduction, and Schrank has seen it work, not only for opioids but for alcohol as well, because it creates what he calls a “softer landing” for addicts.
Aside from the cannabis use, Schrank says the recovery treatment offered at High Sobriety is fairly traditional, with group sessions and counseling. The center just adds the option of using cannabis to help ease the transition and deal with the withdrawal symptoms.
High Sobriety opened in January 2017 and Schrank says the center has had about 50 patients so far. While he understands why people would ask how treating drug use with drug use is an improvement, Schrank points back to the dangers of drugs like heroin, meth and the top killer of all, alcohol, before reiterating that there is no known lethal dose of marijuana.
“The only way to die from pot is if the DEA shoots you,” he says.
Haystack Caps
Much like Lewis himself, Haystack Caps has traveled a different path than others in the cannabis industry.
For starters, the Washington-based company is just now moving into a facility to start production.
Although it has yet to release a single product to retail, Haystack Caps has amassed a huge following on social media and Lewis has been approached with several acquisition inquiries from investors and big industry players.
Years before developing the product, Lewis and his wife, Kathy, began planning the company’s branding. Because Lewis previously owned a greeting card company, he felt he had a good handle on the visual identity for his business and brand.
“I knew exactly what I wanted, but I couldn’t put it into words,” he says.
Enlisting the help of his former, and now current, creative team — packaging designer Dave Faville from Pacific Paper and Box and graphic designer Ryan Pederson from Deer Island Studio — the template for Haystack Caps was laid in place.
“They had it nailed from day one,” Lewis says. “They knew what I was looking for and so much of our success goes back to those guys.”
Using just a handful of colors, the packaging prominently features nostalgic drawings of pin-up girls from the ‘50s and ‘60s in swimsuits along the silhouetted coast of Cannon Beach, Oregon — a home away from home for Lewis and his wife. The packaging garnered a respectable amount of attention on its own. But it wasn’t his only resource.
The iconic shoreline of Cannon Beach, Oregon can be found on every box of Haystack Caps. The small coastal city has served as a home away from home for Haystack Caps CEO Jeffray Lewis and his wife, Kathy.
Lewis also started turning heads by featuring young, attractive people wearing the Haystack Caps logo for the company’s social media posts. It was a tactic he learned from making greeting cards: even when proceeds would go to charity, alluring photos and frat-boy humor would sell cards.
“No one cared about the charities — it was just the girls,” Lewis says with a tiny bit of disdain. “You throw a girl in a hat and a T-shirt and people go nuts.”
Lewis admits the approach was juvenile and formulaic, but it worked. Instagram serves as the company’s window into the industry. The company has gathered more than 85,000 followers without the aid of a website or any physical products.
It would be easy to point to Haystack’s hired guns for the company’s success, but Lewis’ gregarious personality — and his insomnia — also played major roles. His early mornings and late nights spent in constant communication with followers and industry alumni “drove my wife nuts,” he says.
But after several investment duds and false starts, Lewis projects Haystack Caps will begin manufacturing THC and CBD capsules in early 2018.
To create the physical line of Haystack Caps, Lewis hired Alec Makris, a chemist who begin testing extraction methods for the company.
The company has much broader plans for the future: Haystack’s Xtrax brand looks to gain the interest of more seasoned consumers; a line of pre-rolled “micro-joints” called Haystack Needles is being developed for the casual users who are looking for a little cannabis, but don’t want to commit to carrying around a roach for the rest of the evening; the Haystack 4 Life nutritional supplement company will produce CBD-infused water and more CBD capsules for conventional retail outlets and grocery stores; and there’s even a Haystack 4 Pets line of CBD-infused treats in the works.
“We wanted to try and get the best of everything,” Lewis says.
The Rocky Trail
Although Haystack Caps has found success through somewhat unusual means, Lewis’ journey is more akin to the Donner Party than Lewis and Clark’s.
His first investment was lost when the farm he backed shut down following two years of litigation between the investors and the licensees when an internal audit showed money was misplaced.
Next, Lewis invested in a company promising to bring rosin-infused joints to Washington consumers, but it proved to be a difficult concoction, as the rosin would block the flow of air inside the joint, rendering it useless.
“They didn’t do enough R&D,” Lewis says. “So, instead of pivoting and figuring it out, they basically kept cashing the checks until the money dried out.”
With two bad investments behind them, Lewis and his wife decided they would need to be personally involved in the next company they decided to back.
Lewis and Kathy, off the coast of Cannon Beach, Oregon.
The couple tried partnering with another license holder, but negotiations dragged on for months, before finally calling it quits.
“He never took me seriously,” Lewis says. “I was like his third choice to the prom or something.”
When Lewis decided to create his own brand, he purchased every domain name he could think of that was even slightly reminiscent of Cannon Beach. He and Kathy briefly entertained the idea of opening a cannabis shop in Cannon Beach. They abandoned the venture when local regulations proved too much of a risk, but they kept the Haystack Caps URL (Haystack Rock is the iconic rock that juts out high above the Pacific Ocean).
Haystack Caps continued to run into obstacles in Washington with landlords, license-holders and land-use regulations derailing several possible manufacturing sites. At the time of writing this article, Lewis says he is “locked” into a Bellingham, Washington facility so the company can begin manufacturing in early 2018.
Despite the rough road he took to achieve his goal, Lewis says his missteps only numbed him and reminded him to be tenacious.
“At first it was so devastating,” he says. “But now I’m like a running back; I just shrug it off and keep going.”