​Aurora Rae​

Scott Korth sat in the passenger’s seat of a rental car as his mom, Amy Korth, pulled into the driveway of his family’s home on June 12, 2016.

 

As he rolled up to the Breckenridge residence – originally owned by his grandparents – he “hoped this would be the time” he got clean. And it was.

 

Returning home was “so surreal,” Scott said. “I was really, really hazy.”

 

Born and raised in Wichita, Kans., Scott started using drugs at a young age after a skateboarding accident at 15-years old left with him a broken leg and a 5-milligram oxycodone prescription. His addiction to pills as a teenager started from there, and by the time he was in his 20s, he was using opioids.

 

Living with his mom, the addiction became so intense that it began to drain her of her money. She said she loaned him cash every day and even pawned her instruments and antiques.

 

Amy decided enough was enough in 2013.

 

“I was going to die if I stayed there because all I was doing was trying to survive,” she said. “My friend Danny bought me a plane ticket and said, “Get out of there, you gotta do the tough love thing or you’re both going to die.” So, that’s what saved our lives.”

 

Amy gave up her “beautiful” Wichita home and returned to the one they now live in, in Michigan. Scott did not join his mom in moving up north because it meant leaving his dog/best friend, Alex, behind.

 

“I got her when she was a baby, I wasn’t just going to leave her at the age of 12,” he said. “I couldn’t do that.”

 

Scott and Alex stayed in the empty house with nowhere else to go.

 

“No furniture, no electricity, no power,” he said. “I slept on a floor with my dog because that was the home, I grew up in… there was no life there anymore and I was still staying there and it was so weird. It wasn’t our house so I technically could have been arrested for trespassing.”

 

It was not long until a new owner notified him of renovations that were soon to begin, meaning they had to vacate.

 

“That’s when the homelessness became very real,” he said.

 

He and Alex stuck by each other’s side as they battled life on the streets for three years until she passed away in 2016. Her death left Scott with no reason, other than destructive habits, to stay in Wichita.

 

“I was dying,” he said. “My hepatitis C was so bad. I didn’t know I had it while I was in the city, I was still using… I couldn’t stand up for periods of time and stuff when I was living in this lady’s basement… It was a really rough winter.”

 

Without Alex in his life, Scott was ready to reunite with his family, and a cleaner lifestyle, in Michigan.

 

“He called me and said he was ready,” Amy said. “So, we rented a car.”

 

With three days’ notice, Scott’s dad and sister picked him up in Wichita and drove north towards Michigan. Amy and her mom, Paula Brown, met them in the middle-brought Scott back to the comfort of their central Michigan home.

 

“I knew it was going to be a long road,” Amy said. “And I’d already been down that road with him… Having mom in the mix and trying to protect her and make sure they got along okay was nerve-wracking.”

 

Despite his family’s efforts to get him sober, Scott “didn’t know what I was expecting” and stocked his pockets with heroin and crack prior to leaving Kansas.

 

With enough supply to last him a few weeks, he was “trying to keep myself from getting sick until I was able to meet somebody here.”

 

He was unexpectedly greeted by an overwhelming amount of love that he had not felt in decades.

 

“It’s crazy, being loved and being taken care of and all that for the first time,” he said. “It was just nuts, like the first time since I was 12 or so when my parents got divorced.”

 

The compassion his family showed him was enough to set him on a better path and work towards a future he never thought he would be alive to see.

 

He started going to a methadone clinic, in Mount Pleasant, every day.

 

“Going up there introduced me to a whole bunch of different growers and smokers in general,” he said.

 

After about six months, a lady he met at the clinic offered him marijuana and he obliged for the first time since he was a teenager.

 

“She gave me just a couple buds one day – and I hadn’t smoked in years – came home, smoked it, and felt more normal than I had… since I had my last shot of heroin.”

 

He said cannabis changed him in nearly every way.

 

“The mood lifting alone from it made me actually able to stay positive enough to get through the medication and Hep C and the withdraw at all the same time,” he said.

 

Scott and his mom began making weekly trips to dispensaries an hour or more away, which became very pricy on Amy’s expense.

 

“She would give me like $200 a week and we’d drive to Lansing to get weed,” he said. “It became just insane throughout the first year of buying weed. Without telling my grandma, I just started growing some plants up here.”

 

But Amy was hesitant for Scott to do so.

 

“My mom is one tough little lady,” she said. “Getting her to get on board with this whole idea was very difficult. It was very stressful for me when there was any strife between Scott and mom because I was kind of like the peacekeeper.”

 

Scott eventually told his grandma, Paula Brown, that he was going to get his medical card, but she was against his decision. It was not until they were on a 3-hour road trip to his aunt’s house when he became “irritable and scared on the road because it was snowy”, that Brown recommended he smoke.

 

“She saw the radical, drastic difference in my mood and just in my overall happiness,” he said. “I hadn't smoked at all that day, then I take one hit or smoke one bowl and come back five minutes later and I'm a whole different person.”

 

Scott said Brown “could no longer deny the medicinal benefits” of marijuana but the two continued to buttheads as she did not appreciate the presence or smell in her home.

 

“I would get super defensive,” he said. “I had blowouts with my grandma, and I can’t believe that happened. I was such a different person.”

 

Scott said it took about a year of him “smoking in the house every day, her not liking it and giving me the face” for her to become comfortable with his lifestyle.

 

“Now, her and her 80-year-old farmer husband keep bringing articles over about growing hemp and they’re really thinking about it,” Amy said. “That’s crazy.”

 

Amy continued to buy Scott marijuana and even started buying CBD products, too, as he noticed major improvements in his overall wellbeing. But it got to the point that she simply could not afford it anymore.

 

“The amount of money that we were dropping on weed alone not mentioning the CBD was more than I was making,” Amy said.

 

She started to research marijuana, specifically CBD and learned the chemistry behind its absorption in the body.

 

“I came across water soluble CBD, and I wanted him on it,” she said. “It was going to be 10-times more effective.”

 

In 2019, she purchased a bulk order of CBD “with her mother’s credit card” to make her very first batch of tinctures in “little red bottles.”

 

Scott was not the only one who benefited from it, though. Amy and other family members and friends tried it.

 

“I started taking it and seeing a huge difference in my hands because they were so bad from playing so much guitar,” Amy said. “And then my mom started taking it and her knees got better and then we just started talking about it to our Sweet Adeline (Acapella) friends.”

 

More and more people showed a strong liking of their products. They decided it was time to officially put a name on the products they were creating. After a few days of brainstorming, Scott said the perfect one came to him in his sleep.

 

He had an experience that he’d only ever felt twice in his life. The first time he was “being spoken to from above” and was told to “get ready.” He said he shortly after became an IV drug user.

 

The second time, however, he had a better outcome. He walked away with the name of his company: God’s Green Earth.

 

Amy said she has received several complements on the name, and some customers have told her they have chosen them because of it.

 

Scott hand-grows and hand-trims all the flower, and makes extracts himself, too. Amy makes the companies CBD tinctures, balms, mists, capsules, oils, gummies, and other products in their home along with help from her boyfriend, Dan Cochran. She also operates the marketing side of the business as Scott prefers to stay in the comfort of their home.

Amy said they make up to $1000 in sales each day with the online store, and she frequents farmer’s markets and other events in the summertime.

 

Scott emphasizes being a “small-family company that produces only small batch stuff and…. will not mess up.” He thinks small businesses in the cannabis industry will be “the only way that we really benefit as a whole state.”

 

He said there are a few reasons why the high-quality marijuana produced by a small-scale grow is not possible to make in corporate dispensaries.

 

“The things we do here in the house are much, much more precise than the corporate places would be doing in huge batches,” he said. “And they can’t give love to every single plant.”

 

Scott believes the relationship – and love – between the plant and grower is equally as important as anything else to help it flourish.

 

“There’s nothing special about the energy of (dispensary) plants anymore because the person didn’t put love into it,” he said. “Plants feel vibrations just as much as we do… from us touching them, us giving them attention every day. With thousands of plants and hundreds of different growers under one head grower, there’s no one person that loves that one plant specifically.”

 

Scott said he believes the difference is even present in how bud smokes.

 

“I believe that the energy that you get when you smoke (a corporate grown) plant is not as up to par as a plant who’s grown with love,” he said.

 

Scott plans to grow his plants with love for as long as he can. He wants to start working with whole plants instead of isolated cannabinoid compounds because it is “so much more effective in the body.”

 

“It would have THC, CBN, CBG, all of the cannabinoids come in the plant,” he said. “Instead of somebody growing the plant, extracting each cannabinoid individually, selling them, and then we put them back together, why would we go through all that when we could just extract it from a whole plant in the first place?”

 

He said he really wants to get more THC into consumers bodies because “people that are getting effects of just CBD alone don’t even understand how much more it would help if there was just 1% THC in there.”

 

Scott and Amy have also started growing, and studying, mushrooms. The first, and only, mushroom they have grown so far is called Pink Oyster.

 

“We feel like they were pretty successful, but we know some things we did wrong as well,” Amy said.

 

They both have their own plans for mushroom-based products they want to make in the future. Amy wants to develop a CBD-mushroom tincture and Scott wants to make psilocybin mushroom micro-dose tinctures – dependent upon decriminalization – “for people just to take tiny, tiny, tiny amounts to really help rewire the brain.”

 

Scott said he someday wants to expand his side of the business by adding more plants – but that would require relocating because he is currently generating all the electricity possible from their house.

 

“With the tents that I have, I literally can’t run any more power,” he said. “And being completely surrounded by houses in our backyard and the apartments on the far side, I don’t want to grow and have my whole crop get ripped off at the end of the season. That would just break my heart.”

 

Because of that, he wants to buy his own land somewhere in the lower part of Michigan where he can “do a proper full-scale hemp and cannabis grow.”

 

Scott said he ideally wants a pole barn in which he can grow premium plants year-round indoors and lower-grade bud outside.

 

“I also want to have animals,” he said. “I want milk animals, and more chickens, lambs, and goats… I want a cow; I pretty much have to have a horse.”

 

But until that day comes, Scott remains working hard, alongside his mom, in their First Street home, growing, producing, and selling high quality CBD and THC products for all those living on God’s Green Earth.

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Published in MI Green State