Hi Stefano, thanks for this conversation; you said that you wouldn’t have revealed your identity in terms of privacy, so I will not enter in details, trying to catch points of view that I find interesting [...]
Stefano L. R. was born on April 23, 1980 in Bellinzona (Switzerland- Italian canton). His father, business executive of a clothes company, leaves home when he still was really young and the child is entrusted to his mother’s care, an Italian teacher in Osogna, not too far from Bellinzona. His parents’ separation has never been a problem for the little boy, because he had the possibility to spend time with his father almost always, accompained by his elder sister Laura and his younger brother Giorgio. He attends excellent schools in Bellinzona, and shows an interest for the scientific subjects too, continuing his studies in this direction. The close proximity to the Alps offers him the possibility to be in contact with the mountain flora; being charmed by the Ticino Canton’s uncontaminated nature, he starts realizing bonsai, at 16 years old. He cultivates a passion for Chemistry and molecular Biology and he enrols at the University of Milan for two years; he gives up his studies in 1999 to devote himself to a project acquired for a long time, i.e. the cells’ micropropagation, realizing clones of Hawaiian Baby Woodrose in test tubes, helped by his sister who was teaching Science in a High school in Lugano.
He begins going to a popular smartshop of Bellinzona at 20 years old, discovering a world that enchantes him but, at the same time, limitates him too because of the Swiss prohibitionism: the cultivation of marijuana plants both indoor and outdoor. He peeps round this world with great surprise, giving assistance to a company that was working freely on all the Swiss territory and that was in possession of all the necessary authorizations issued by the canton and the local government, as regards the infrastructures of production. At federal level, Switzerland allows the cultivation of the hemp without narcotic aims. After the indoor operations, in the Ticino canton is introduced a cantonal law on the cultivation and selling of hemp (“totally useless and hardly enforceable for a grower or a dealer”) that doesn’t allow him to carry out openly his activity. He also starts organized campaigns against the prohibitionism that is, in his opinion, just an economic and political problem, considering the wide variety of products that could be obtained by the hemp (every multinational was acquainted with this, especially the pharmaceutical and oil ones, considering also the biggest interests of the different narcomafias).
He is in favour of the decriminalization of cultivation and the domestic consuption and, if necessary, a imposition of a set of rules for a reduced production and a little trade, avoiding megacultivations and fittings of big amounts of hemp. He is also for the use of cannabis at therapeutic level and, through his studies, he gets ahead with the study of the possible therapeutic applications of hemp as pain-relieving, appetite’s stimulant, antiepilepctic, antidepressant and anti-asthmatic, asserting also the importance of this substance that could help getting over the addiction to opiates and alcohol, “the biggest ailments of modern society”.
A contribution in a manifestation occured in Chiasso, in the border between Italy and Switzerland, excites authorities’ curiosity, and police directly goes to his flat, discovering fifteen plants of Ortega that has been offered by a Canadian grower (a variety of marijuana “indica” at 100%, the best in his opinion), and Stefano is arrested for drug pushing. The trial forces him to be under
house arrest for seven months; he obviously loses his job and comes out in opening a private activity helped by his father. At the monment he is the owner of a nursery in which he works with his American girlfriend Diane.
After the death of his mother in 2007, he falls into a depression and tries different kinds of treatment helped by an Italian psychiatrist in Ascona, close to Lake Maggiore. He nowadays lives in Osogna in the apartment inherited from his mother; he leads now an enviable life and he is still interested to continue the project of micropropagation already mensioned, to spread it online at european level.
