The worlds of marijuana, pro wrestling, and politics have had their overlaps at times, but rarely have they all converged in one place for prolonged periods. That is until you meet Mark Adam Haggerty.
“I love to smoke and I love to watch wrestling. They were always two [constants]. They were two things that I never thought I would be able to make a living at doing, which is really interesting,” he explained.
The California-raised, New Jersey-living, mustachioed, stylish, and suited 32-year-old is the ring announcer and occasional performer for a growing number of independent wrestling promotions across the country. To date, he’s worked with 60 different promotions in 18 states and three different countries.
Before entering the ring, Haggerty was part of California’s medical marijuana community. As a young adult in the early 2010s, Haggerty was living with a girlfriend and making ends meet with fresh-out-of-college type jobs. His girlfriend connected Mark with a job at a collective in Long Beach, the town Haggerty grew up in. The collective was the Organic Market Garden on Wardlow Avenue. A one day gig became regular work at OMG, where he’d eventually become manager.
He remembers the array of patients he got to meet. “The ones that I always talk about specifically are these 60, 70-year-old ladies who were losing their hair from chemo. They come in and they’ve never partaken in cannabis or anything in their lives. They grew up like thinking like, ‘Oh, it’s a drug’ and now their doctor, their actual doctor, not some guy in like a parking lot, their actual doctor is saying this can help you.”
Haggerty considers those interactions personally fulfilling and was felt as he detailed his passion for helping such patients. The balance between their needs for the plant and his …
Read More
Author: Andrew Ward / High Times
