After spending 32 years in prison for a nonviolent cannabis offense, Richard DeLisi returned to Colombia with his son Rick to retrace the places, stories, and decisions that shaped their family’s history.
“Did you ever work from here?”
Standing in Cinto Bay, surrounded by crystal-clear Caribbean water and jungle-covered mountains, I finally asked my father a question I’d wondered about for years.
He looked around the cove for a moment and shook his head.
“Nah.”
Then he pointed toward the mountains behind us.
“There was a road back there,” he said. “We’d drive through the desert. At the end there was a salt flat on a cliff over the ocean. That’s where we launched the planes.”
In that moment, standing in Colombia nearly 50 years after many of those flights took place, stories I had heard my entire life suddenly became real places.
Returning to Colombia
The original purpose of the trip was business.
After my father’s release from prison in 2020, we founded DeLisioso, a cannabis brand built around redemption, reform, and second chances. In 2021, what started as rebuilding our family after three decades apart slowly evolved into something much larger.
This trip brought us back to Santa Marta, Colombia, where we were exploring potential partnerships with our friend Carlos Vivas Jr. and his partner Santiago, both heavily involved in Colombia’s medicinal cannabis industry.
For us, the trip was about genetics. Rare expressions. Authentic Colombian cannabis. Landrace varieties and terpene profiles shaped naturally over generations in the mountains and coastal regions of the country.
For my father, Colombia meant something deeper. Back in 1973, before any of the history that would later define his life, he and his brother Teddy were driving around Florida late one night, completely stoned and looking for munchies.
They stopped at a 7 …
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Author: Rick DeLisi / High Times
