The newest professor at Roanoke College is known as “Doc Ray,” which would not be unusual in a campus setting, except for one thing: Doc Ray is not a Ph.D. Doc Ray doesn’t have any kind of college degree, at all, actually.
Doc Ray — more formally, Ray Fowler — earned his name in the marijuana fields of Northern California, where he built a reputation for knowing how to grow cannabis and use it for medicinal applications long before the state legalized weed.
“I’m a caregiver who has been doing it for 40 years,” Fowler says, although, for most of that time, the law would not have bestowed such a benevolent description upon him. The law then would have regarded him as nothing more than a hippie pot grower out in the woods. In an interview several years ago with High Times, Doc Ray called himself “an old school outlaw cultivator” who once was in gunfights with federal agents over his crop. However, those familiar with what is now popularly known as “the Emerald Triangle,” a three-county region on the California coast north of San Francisco that produces most of that state’s marijuana, see him as a cult hero, an icon, a legend.
“He’s been somebody who is really deep into the cannabis culture with creating cannabis for people who needed it for medical reasons,” says Dan Herer, CEO of a California-based cannabis company. “He is the real deal.”
He is also now Scholar in Residence at Roanoke College, the first four-year college in the state to launch a cannabis studies program.
Politicians in Richmond may still be debating cannabis — Virginia resides in a gray area of the law, where personal possession of small amounts of the devil’s lettuce is legal but retail sales of it are expressly forbidden — but the marketplace has moved inexorably on. When Roanoke College announced a year ago that it would be offering not one but two cannabis majors (one in cannabis science, another in cannabis social justice and policy), it was simply responding to market demand. A report last year found that the cannabis industry now employs more than 440,000 people nationally, more than double what it had been five years before. The legal cannabis industry was estimated to have generated $35.2 billion last year, with projections that it could hit $67.5 billion by 2030 and $87 billion by 2035.
Some may still snicker at all this, but the cannabis industry now gets covered by such reputable business publications as Forbes, and the cannabis-related site Leafly says more than 120 colleges across the country now have some sort of cannabis-related program, from certificates up to degrees. Such programs need instructors, but where do you find a qualified instructor when the subject matter has been illegal for all of our lifetimes? If you’re Roanoke College, you turn to Doc Ray.
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Today we have cannabis companies whose stock is traded on Wall Street and whose product is grown in vast greenhouses. Doc Ray — in his late 60s — comes from an earlier time when cannabis was homegrown and those growers learned through trial and error how to develop different strains, all while trying to avoid law enforcement.
“There were no books, no instruction manual,” he says. “We were pecking and hunting. I didn’t know males from females.” However, by the time California legalized recreational cannabis in 2016, Fowler was so skilled as a cultivator that he holds five patents and his own company, Doc Ray Genetics. His most famous strain is known as Blue Skunk and is described by one seed company as “a three-way cross of elite genetics” that produces an “uplifting, cerebral high that feels like a jolt of happiness cascading through the mind. Artistic types often feel a boost of creativity from the effects.”
Fowler’s focus, though, has not been on getting people high — although that might be a nice side benefit for some — but on developing strains of cannabis that can help ease certain medical conditions.
“Cannabis is medicine, and we use it for that,” says Pepper Hernandez, a board-certified holistic health practitioner in California. She’s worked with Fowler for more than a decade. “He is really important in the community, especially as an advocate for wellness.” She praises Fowler for “understanding which particular terpenes and cannabinoids work with certain body systems.” (Terpenes are certain compounds found in cannabis plants.)
Once California legalized cannabis, Fowler was able to come out of the legal shadows and now consults with companies looking to make use of cannabis. One of those is GreenWay Herbal Products of Nashville, Tennessee. “He’s been instrumental in providing us with a knowledge base,” says CEO Jeff Heeren. “A 90-year prohibition has prevented a lot of people from having a knowledge base.” In other words, a company such as GreenWay can’t turn to some college professor who has studied cannabis in the lab, because that’s been illegal. Instead, it’s turned to someone who spent most of his life outside the law.
“I’ve been working with PTSD for 20 years,” Fowler says. “I’ve been working with childhood epilepsy. But they call me a drug dealer.”
Heeren, though, calls Fowler a valuable consultant. “It’s been validating for us to have someone who understands cannabinoids and cannabinoid constituents and what that does for mankind. … We’ve been really honored to be connected with him because of the respect he receives from the industry as a whole.”
Fowler’s recent resume — business owner, patent holder, consultant, now visiting professor — sounds pretty darned respectable, indeed. His story of living life outside the law as a weed cultivator is a lot more colorful and, in some cases, impossible to document.
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Fowler says he was an “Air Force brat” who moved around the country until his mother got divorced, and he settled in California. He smoked his first joint when he was about 12 or 13. He fell in love with the plant. “I was cultivating as a kid,” he says. He grew his first plant when he was 15.
He went to Georgetown University to study art, dropped out, and joined the U.S. Army. He tells stories of secret missions behind the Iron Curtain that the military, not surprisingly, can’t or won’t confirm. He says he had “two near-death experiences in my 20s for Uncle Sam,” once when he tripped a wire on some explosives during a mission in “a country which doesn’t exist” — the former Czechoslovakia. “I wasn’t there,” not officially anyway, he says. “That’s the life I lived.” He says he was injured again near the West German-Austrian border when a van loaded with explosives blew up. “It was good versus evil, East versus West, us versus them,” he says. “We were engaged with the East German Stasi [secret police]. It was a cat-and-mice game. I came around a corner and a van blew up. It was a good thing I was three seconds slower or I wouldn’t be here.”
While those details can’t be confirmed, Roanoke College said Fowler did share military records that showed he was honorably discharged with a 100% disability. Among other things, he has a hard time hearing.
After Fowler left the military in 1983, he wound up in Texas. Here is where accounts diverge. He told me during an interview that he was arrested for selling 21 grams of marijuana. “That’s when I went to prison for this plant,” he says. That’s a story he told High Times magazine, too, which said he was “incarcerated over a miniscule amount of pot.” However, court records in Tarrant County, Texas (Fort Worth), show he was charged in 1986 with selling “less than 28 grams” of cocaine, apparently to an undercover officer. He was released on bond, but that bond was revoked because the “defendant does not check in as required,” according to court records. He was eventually sentenced to five years in prison but released six months later on parole, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Asked about the discrepancy between a cannabis charge and a cocaine charge, Fowler sent word through Roanoke College that he was in a motorcycle accident years ago and his memory is sometimes faulty.
A story published in High Times three years ago described Fowler as “the creator of countless terp-ridden strains — the type of varieties you want to write home about.” High Times added: “He’s also a storyteller, with tales such as gun fights with DEA agents in the hills of Northern California since the ’70s.” If so, that would have been when Fowler was a teenager or in his early 20s. The magazine quoted Fowler as saying: “I’m one of the original Mendocino outlaws — you know, green mountain boys. We were considered guardians of the valley so to speak. The ones in their 40s and 50s know me now. We kept everybody out. You just didn’t roll up in there, or you had to deal with us. We were all ex-Special Forces and are all hard-riding m———–s. That’s just how we were.”
Maybe that was true then, but Fowler seems much more blissful now. He credits cannabis. “After the military, I went through a series of events in my life. I was married and divorced. I got no real psychological help. I was in and out of the penitentiary. I was kind of forced to go underground into cannabis,” which took him back to Northern California.
“I was a beast when I went to prison,” he says. “I’m ex-Special Forces. I can kill you with my bare hands. I wasn’t a nice individual then. I’ve learned grace being around the plant. I used to be a whiskey-drinking, cigar-smoking asshole.” However, “Mother Ganja,” as he calls the plant, brought him “divine grace, which is why I’m sitting in front of you. If it wasn’t for this plant, I wouldn’t be here.” The calming effects of cannabis also prompted his interest in breeding the plant for medicinal uses.
“That’s where the name Doc came from,” he says. “You didn’t use your name. Everybody’s ‘Sticky’ or ‘Big Bud Bob’ or whatever the hell their nickname was.” He had one friend named Sunshine and never did learn her name. “That’s just the way it is,” he says.
You might think that legalizing cannabis would have helped all those illicit cannabis growers. Fowler says it did not. “What the ‘war on drugs’ couldn’t do in half a century, it [legalization] did in eight,” he says. “It broke the back of unregulated craft cannabis.”
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The cannabis debate is typically framed as legalize or don’t legalize. Fowler says that’s not the way to look at things. He says the problem with legalization is that corporations have taken over and they care more about profits than product. He says that cannabis corporations have run out of business all the small-scale cultivators like he used to be. “They’re worse than we ever were,” he says. “We had a code of honor.”
Among his complaints:
“We produced zero carbon footprint,” he says. Now cannabis is being grown in energy-intensive greenhouses.
With his background in growing cannabis for medicinal uses, he’s put off by the way recreational cannabis is marketed. “It’s immoral,” he says. “You’re putting it in single-serving cereal boxes with primary colors. They’re not marketing it to you or me. They’re marketing it to underage kids.” In his view, he was making medicine; recreational cannabis companies are selling a cheap high. “I didn’t see any value in recreational cannabis,” he says.
Fowler is also unhappy that the “heirloom” strains he worked on are being shoved aside in favor of mass-produced marijuana that he contends simply isn’t as good. “Just because we’re a bunch of hippie outlaws, you think it’s simple,” he says. “It’s not simple. We dedicated our lives to this thing. They grow s—ty weed, but they own all the retail.”
Fowler isn’t so blissful when he talks about the current marketplace: “The current industry rushes everything.” He says some companies can get a harvested crop to market in 12 days. “We didn’t do nothing in 12 days. The flower hung three-four weeks before it was ever touched. Then it cured for another month, two months, three months, four months. They move so quickly they leave so much room for mistakes to happen. Instead of letting it dry for weeks, they flash-freeze it. … That’s where regulated weed has screwed up.” Fowler says he was a consultant for one cannabis company he can’t name due to a nondisclosure agreement, but didn’t like its approach. “I was working with some big players in their state, helping them get better, but they don’t want to get better, they want to get cheaper.”
The message he has for Roanoke College students is to focus on the quality of the plant, not the speed with which it can be taken to market — which, of course, runs directly counter to the business demands of a retail market. “There are a lot of jackasses in this space right now,” Fowler says. “We’re coming from a place of honor.” The way he sees it: “I honor Mother Ganja for what she does,” but cannabis companies just want to make a buck. Or maybe lots of bucks.
That’s why he had gotten out of the weed business back in California. “I looked at sailboats,” he said. He figured it was time to retire. Then Roanoke College came calling, connected through a mutual acquaintance. He thought the chance to move East and teach a new generation was appealing. “I never thought I would have an opportunity to teach kids how to cultivate for yourself or ask questions when you walk into a [medical marijuana] dispensary.” Or, as he puts it, to teach “brilliant young minds before they’re tainted by recreational nonsense.”
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Fowler says he loves Roanoke (“the community is what they sold me”), and he sees great things that could happen with Roanoke College’s new cannabis program. “It’s going to be something to see this school reinvent itself as a center for cannabis research,” he says. As he goes around the valley and introduces himself, “As soon as I say I’m the professor for cannabis at Roanoke College, I usually get a laugh and a hug and a handshake.”
Perhaps most surprisingly, some people recognize him. When he first checked in at the Hotel Roanoke and presented his driver’s license, he says the front desk person blurted out: “Holy s—, Doc Ray!”
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