“I experienced peace I’d never felt before”: The African encounter which inspired a CBD empire

Suffering with a severe fever while in Kenya as a teenager, Paul Shrive was given a cannabis-based brew by a local. He not only recovered from the illness, but experienced mental clarity for the first time in his life, he tells Cannabis Health.

Paul Shrive, founder of Leafline CBD, had a challenging childhood. He would frequently get in trouble with his schoolteachers and was bullied by his classmates for being “different than everybody else”.

“It was a very, very difficult and traumatic time for me at school,” Paul recalls, speaking to Cannabis Health.

“Teachers used to look at me as a problem child, because when somebody was screaming at me, I just couldn’t take it; it was like I was being attacked.”

Although he has never been formally diagnosed, Paul has been told unofficially that he is on the autism spectrum, which has meant he experiences his senses differently to most people.

“Everything just goes a zillion miles per hour,” he explains.

“Something wasn’t right, but I spent my life thinking it was just me, that it was just who I was. But there was actually something out there that could make it better, I just didn’t realise it at the time.”

In 1986, when Paul was fourteen years old, his father was offered an opportunity to come out of retirement and travel to Africa to carry out work on a food manufacturing plant that he had helped set up a decade previously.

Paul was given the choice of either going to Africa or staying in school in the UK. Given the difficulties he was experiencing with his teachers and fellow pupils, Paul jumped at the opportunity and boarded the plane to Nairobi with his Dad.

Over the next nine months, Paul came to discover cannabis, which he says was part of everyday life in Kenya despite its illegality.

Paul remembered walking around the outskirts of Nairobi and seeing small children picking a mysterious plant.

“I started noticing these little kids in fields picking plants and filling up these clear bags,” Paul says.

“I wondered what they were doing.

“I got back into Nairobi centre and around the markets I saw the same boys, around eight or ten years old. My Dad told me they were shoeshine boys.

“I noticed that they had dozens of these bags around the waist – I know now that they were bags of cannabis; pure hemp growing everywhere in the fields.

“Businessmen would have their shoes polished and buy these bags and take them to their wives, because they use them for cooking, they use it as herbal remedies – it’s part of their everyday life.”

Not long after arriving in Africa, Paul became ill, catching a serious bug causing an intense fever that continued to rise despite being seen by a number of doctors. He was hooked up to a drip in his hotel room while doctors attempted to cure him through various treatments.

A British chef working at the hotel heard about Paul’s situation and approached his Dad. He believed, as the boy was suffering from an African illness, it would require African medicine to treat.

“I was delirious,” Paul says. “I was all over the place. I really wasn’t well.”

“They had a chat with one of the major tribes in the area and asked if they could help me.

“I don’t know exactly what happened, but I know that I was visited by a ‘witch doctor’ or ‘shaman’ of some kind.

“The next thing that I remember is my father waking me up. He had a clay vial in his hand containing a black and gloopy kind of liquid. It had had alcohol and pure hemp in there.

“I was out for the count completely for more than a day, but while I was knocked out, my temperature started to drop, and drop, and it allowed me to heal.”

Many people, including his father, believed his recovery was purely coincidental, but Paul says it didn’t matter whether it was or wasn’t. What struck him when he regained consciousness was how clear his head was.

“When I came around, for the first time ever, I experienced peace that I’d never felt before,” he says.

“I felt normal. There was nothing that agitated me, I could sit there without fidgeting, I could sit there without having to worry, or feel as though I had to put my hands over my ears.

“When you’ve had a whole life of what you feel is torture, it was a revelation to find that kind of peace and tranquillity.”

For the remainder of his time in Nairobi, Paul was provided with a less potent form of the concoction without the addition of alcohol. He consumed a small amount twice a day. As it contained THC, Paul remembers feeling a rush from the medicine, but it was manageable.

“I could think and I could hold a full conversation. I could look at people in the eye and totally hear what they were saying,” he adds.

On his return to the UK, Paul says he had a “short, sharp shock” when he discovered that the plant was illegal. As a young teenager, he was unaware that people were using cannabis for recreational purposes. With no access to the plant, Paul says he suffered for a number of years.

When CBD began to see an increase in popularity several years ago, Paul was quick to launch his own business, Leafline CBD with his wife Sonia, who has her own journey with the supplement. Suffering with PMDD (post-menstrual dysphoric disorder), a severe form of PMS, Sonia’s doctor prescribed her a low dose of anti-depressants.

Paul suggested to his wife that she try CBD to manage the symptoms instead, so she started taking an oil every morning and night and over time, her symptoms subsided.

“The last thing I wanted, was a pharmaceutical drug to treat it,” says Sonia.

“PMDD isn’t a mental problem, it is a hormonal problem.

“For PMDD sufferers, it last for between 6 days and 3 weeks every month which is no fun at all. I still have symptoms, don’t get me wrong, but they are for a smaller amount of time and symptoms are not as intense since taking CBD.  ”

Like the rest of the UK’s CBD sector, Leafline are preparing for the Food Standard Agency’s Novel Food Applications which close on the 31^st March.

But as a firm believer in the power of whole-plant extract since his experiences in Nairobi, Paul is fearful that full-spectrum products will no longer be permitted following the deadline.

“Isolate-based [CBD] does have a purpose, it does have a mode of action, but the true goal is whole-plant and I’m really scared because I think it’s going to be taken away from us,” he says.

“Unfortunately, by doing that, it that will create a black market. I’ve had somebody that has been on whole-plant for a long time and then when we gave them an isolate tincture, it didn’t work.”

Paul adds: “You can’t mess with nature. Leave nature alone and nature will do its job.”