“He was gracious, and loving, and passionate, and a fierce advocate without making you dislike him.”
There’s been a lot of sadness over news that legendary plant patient crusader Bill Downing passed away last weekend. And throughout his closeknit cannabis cadre, there’s also been a shock which continues to echo. As his fiancé Ellen Moore relayed in a call on Monday, after being active in pot politics around these parts for decades, Bill still had a “fire in his belly” in the wake of his retirement from the board of the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition. Things seemed normal from the outside; he even recently showed up to testify on Beacon Hill and at the Cannabis Control Commission in Worcester.
I added the emphasis above because it is remarkable that following spending his adult life advocating for patients, Bill still energetically continued as a vocal activist in an era where many consumers take green freedoms for granted. It was only natural for him, kind of like smoking a joint after smoking a joint, which was also something he was down for. Bill “was an old-time smoker,” Ellen shared. “The last thing that he smoked was old-school hash.”
I asked Ellen about Bill’s weed work of late, but also about his origin story. Like, What was he doing before he ever walked through Boston Common dressed as MassCann “Pig Patrol” to prevent cops from turning peaceful Freedom Rallygoers into perps?
Raised in Newtown, Connecticut, Bill studied management at Babson College, which accounts for some of the entrepreneurial muscle he would later flex as a vanguard CBD seller. Prior to his worlds of business and patient advocacy intersecting, though, he worked for the health tech company Philips, mainly selling dictation equipment to medical centers and hospitals in Greater Boston. It was with that background that he later launched Care Givers Connection, dba CBD Please, shipping laboratory-tested meds worldwide while deflecting charges in Boston Municipal Court and, in one instance, having a literal armed SWAT team tear apart his house.
Though successful in business and activism, Bill will be remembered by those who knew him best for his love of fun, family, and food. Outside of Philips he made and sold BBQ sauce under the company name Willy’s; Bill’s affection for cooking was a shared joy with his wife Heather, who passed away in 2021. He is survived by two children, Freya and Willy, as well as Ellen and innumerable canna comrades. I spoke with some of them for a glimpse of that theater in his life.
Bill’s friends all agree: he prioritized patients. After all, he was himself in need of meds, smoking to relieve symptoms of gout, and to manage vasculitis in his legs. At the same time, Bill liked to get stoned for sport, and on that common ground developed lifelong friendships with other motivated stoners who built MassCann into a New England force. The triple thrust of their belief in the power of pot as a party favor, medicine, and cousin of free speech made legal quarrels with Bill, Steven Epstein, and John Swomley on the ropes for MassCann against crooked Boston bureaucrats the stuff of legend.
Andy Gaus, a longtime friend and fellow former MassCann board member, recalled Bill’s “unique ability to hold MassCann together during the drive to legalize.” Andy added, “He was the person everybody liked and everybody respected, and he always had a common-sense notion of what would and wouldn’t work. For many years he was pretty much a one-person organizer for the Freedom Rally, securing permits, contacting vendors, and showing up at rally time to mark the spaces for the vendor tents.”
Andy also noted how Bill and others would bail out weed offenders, and recalled the criminal campaigns that law enforcement carried out against his home and business. John Swomley, a Boston lawyer and tireless legal linesman for the movement whose runnings with Bill and MassCann sound like the proceedings of Oscar Acosta, shared some vignettes. Including one about the BPD being so outraged with Bill’s birddogging that cops attempted to plant drugs on Downing. Like countless other close calls, that buzzer decision went to MassCann.
“What we always knew back then was the city was going to find another reason to turn us down [for a permit] and jerk us around,” John said. “It was one thing or another.” And it took a fun and mild-mannered guy like Bill, smart and serious but high and smiley under the curved brim of his ballcap which held back his long hair, to persevere through that kind of aggressive prohibition.
“He was a driving force that didn’t rub people too hard the wrong way, and there were a lot of activists in MassCann who I couldn’t say that about,” John added. “He was gracious, and loving, and passionate, and a fierce advocate without making you dislike him. … He had a sense of humor. He appreciated humor and was funny. We were fighting for free speech and the right to smoke weed—what more fun and noble causes could there be?”
Upon his passing, Mike Clinton, the current president of MassCann, wrote, “As president of the very organization he helped build, I feel the weight of his legacy and the honor of continuing what he started. Bill laid the foundation. It’s up to all of us to build the future but we should never take it for granted that we stand on the shoulders of rebels, outlaws, and visionaries—people who refused to accept what was morally unjust.”
Bill touched a lot of hearts along the way, racking up impressive superlatives. He was the first customer at MCR Labs; “He provided the sample,” Ellen said. His company Yankee Care Givers, which the state shuttered in 2014, was the first largescale gray market pot biz to emerge after Mass voters pulled for medical two years prior. A brilliant martyr who often fought via businesses, he always had a foot in the medical struggle directly as well. Lately, Bill was particularly pleased with the leadership of Jeremiah MacKinnon of the Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance—so much so that despite hating Facebook like any sensible person, Bill had only ever liked one photo on the platform, a pic of him posing with the MPAA pres.
Ellen understands how confused some people who saw Bill not long ago may be about his sudden passing. Very few knew he was sick, and he hadn’t been visibly ill for long. Bill went to the hospital on Memorial Day weekend, and that’s when doctors found metastasis in his liver. A biopsy showed that it was cancer but the family was told it was treatable, not life ending. Bill “walked out of the hospital that time,” but in subsequent weeks he just got sicker and sicker. Last week, doctors told him that it was aggressive pancreatic cancer; it could not be treated, but they still believed that he had weeks or months to live. Then on Saturday, it was arranged for him to be transported from Lahey Hospital in Burlington to his home in Reading at noon, but he passed at 8:30 that morning. Bill had just turned 67 on June 10.
Finally, I feel personally honored to have known Bill and had conversations about all of the above with him over the course of many years. We taught together along with a roster of critical cannabis community contributors at the Northeastern Institute of Cannabis in Natick, and of course he was a thorough source for me and countless other journos covering this beat. Bill’s knowledge of everything from legislation to the benevolent outlaw CBD realm and everything MassCann to boot made him invaluable. And to double down with due respect on what so many others have spoken out loud or at least inferred since his passing, unlike many of his MassCann peers, Bill wasn’t an asshole.
While I interviewed him on the record many times for matters mostly related to the annual MassCann war with Boston City Hall over the rally, I appreciated that Bill didn’t treat me like a commercial reporter. For them, he had no mercy, along with the same amount of respect that hacks typically showed for the movement. Here’s CBS Boston covering him in 2014: “Bill Downing isn’t sure if the medical cannabis products he sells at his Allston store are legal. He also said he doesn’t care whether or not they are.”
Pure gold, a classic. In his turn, Bill told the network: “I know I’m doing the right thing and I’m doing it for the right reasons. I’m doing it for the patients here in the state and I really don’t care about the bureaucracies trying to stop me because they’re immoral. And because the public does not support them.”
Amen to that. And RIP to a cannabis icon by all measures. If you ever burned one with Bill, then you should feel blessed. I know I do.
Plans are in the works for Bill’s garden, as well as for an upcoming celebration of his life.
