From prison to paradise

After decades of struggles and eventual success in New Jersey, Ed “NJWeedman” Forchion is hoping to make his Miami joint a marijuana destination.

• By Jason Nark
• Published

MIAMI, Fla. — One night, last winter, longtime marijuana activist Ed “NJWeedman” Forchion drank a few beers, and smoked a fat joint, of course, before chasing it down with a handful of psychedelic mushrooms and letting the South Florida vibes soak his senses.

Tropical breezes blew the bitter memories of legal battles and money troubles from his mind for a while, and he walked along the Miami River, taking in the bikinis and $1 million boats blasting reggaeton, each one like a floating nightclub. This wasn’t February along the Delaware in Trenton, N.J.

Forchion, 57, wound up in Wynwood, Miami’s arts district, where nearly every building is splashed with mind-bending murals and graffiti. He saw fashionable crowds waiting for tables and Ferraris inching down the streets. Construction cranes rose above it all, silhouetted against the night’s pink clouds. Forchion finally found the empty, lifeless warehouse he’d flown down to see and through the haze of his sweet, familiar smoke, he envisioned a future for himself and his family in Miami.

The mushrooms helped.

“Ladies! Ladies! Come to The Joint of Miami. It’s my club!”

A year later, Forchion was back on the Miami River, piloting his own boat on a sunny, Saturday afternoon. He was yelling out to a group of women lounging on the bow of another vessel heading out to Biscayne Bay. His boat’s called The Joint, named after that Wynwood warehouse he turned into a popular, marijuana-friendly nightspot in about six months.

“I didn’t want to leave Florida after that first night, but I flew home and I vowed to come back and make something happen,” he recalled while smoking a blunt on the boat last month.

Forchion’s not quite a familiar face yet in South Florida, but he thinks that will change. In New Jersey, people stop him wherever he goes. They call him a patriot and a legend. The mural alongside the NJWeedman’s Joint, his eatery and dispensary on State Street in Trenton, depicts him as a folk hero — a walking, unwavering middle finger to the state’s marijuana laws — surrounded by prosecutors he’s felled in court.

“I love you, man,” one starstruck customer gushed on a recent weekday in Trenton.

Forchion has antagonized elected officials and police officers, blowing marijuana smoke in their face and running campaigns against them, for decades. He had a playful rapport with former Gov. Chris Christie, who declined to comment for this story, despite their differing stances on marijuana.

“I like you, though.” Forchion said to Christie in a 2015 video.

“I like you, too,” Christie replied.

When New Jersey first passed limited medical marijuana use in 2010, Forchion wanted more. When the calls for decriminalization came, he said it wasn’t enough. Now with New Jersey on the precipice of having legal, recreational marijuana sales, Forchion said the notion of “corporate weed” doesn’t sit well with him. Still, he’s turned in his application to go legit at his profitable Trenton location, where he already sells marijuana and psychedelics with little static from law enforcement in recent years.

“I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t, right?” he said. “I paid a heavy price for that fight. I think I should be granted the first license.”

Others on the front lines of marijuana reform in New Jersey said Forchion’s legacy is cemented in New Jersey and beyond.

“I don’t agree with everything that he’s done, but I totally respect his role in a movement to change opinions on what cannabis entrepreneurs are and how they can be part of the community,” said Bill Caruso, a board member of New Jersey United for Marijuana Reform. “He’s a brilliant guy. He’s an entrepreneur and this is literally the American dream.”

On a recent weekday afternoon in Trenton, the sun was out and the temperatures edged close to 50 degrees. A steady stream of customers was being buzzed into the dispensary, as if it were a Wawa for weed. Inside, Forchion’s “budtenders” waxed about the two dozen strains of marijuana for sale while a muscle-bound security guard looked on. Forchion’s daughters, Chanel, Ajanea, and Daeja were all working.

Forchion sat on the outdoor “pot patio,” helping city officials plan a 420 event for next month. One of them was running for council, Forchion said, and seeking his endorsement.

“Can you imagine, 20 years ago, someone seeking my endorsement for office?”

Forchion, a father of five, grew up in South Jersey and said he first smoked marijuana at 15. He graduated from Winslow Township High School, then called Edgewood, in 1982 and attended Claflin University in South Carolina before joining the U.S. Army. From there Forchion became a long-haul trucker, like his father, and in 1997, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, his lifelong affinity for marijuana morphed into a cause. He was arrested that day, along with his brother, for shipping 45 pounds of marijuana to New Jersey from Arizona. After 17 months in prison, he began actively protesting in Trenton, often smoking on the steps of the statehouse, and running, unsuccessfully, for various states offices with one objective: to legalize marijuana.

“There are a lot of marijuana users out there who would love to see the drug legalized,” he told The Inquirer in 1998.

When The Inquirer and Daily News spent time with Forchion in 2015, just before his 50th birthday, he was back home with his mother in Winslow and borrowing money to fuel up his beloved, beat-up 1986 Ford van he dubbed the “Weedmobile.” His Rastafarian temple in California had been raided by the DEA and shuttered, and his Trenton restaurant and dispensary was just a dream. While he’d won some memorable court cases in New Jersey by convincing juries they didn’t have to support the law he was breaking, his bowl was empty.

“I’ve got fame,” he said at the time, “but I’m broke.”

Forchion is coy about his profits today but said he’s no longer “broke Weedman.” He offered some clues, though. His Trenton location, across the street from city hall, for instance, sees about 300 customers per day. He said he’s making “McDonald’s money” there, without elaborating. Trenton’s success made Miami possible, he said, and he has no plans to scale back in New Jersey.

Forchion said he’s not selling weed in Miami. Instead, he’s making money on cover charges and liquor sales from the thousands of patrons coming through his club, on most weekends. Other clues of his success were evident. He didn’t flinch at the boat’s $1,200 gas bill at the marina.

Forchion is rounding the bend on 60, and making more money than any other point in his life.

“A lot more,” he added.

The Joint, is expanding too, into an empty warehouse space next door that would double the venue’s size. He’s just waiting on Miami to grant him permits. Forchion wants bigger musical acts on his stages and VIPs up in the balcony, but on that Saturday afternoon, on that bustling highway of a river, he was focused on getting a bigger boat, a full-fledged yacht he can fill up with bachelorette parties, sorority sisters, or maybe a few Miami Dolphins players and their wives. There’s a real market for that in Miami, and Forchion’s got his eyes on a 100-footer and the cash to pay for it.

“I get obsessed with things, obviously, and right now I’m obsessed with boats. They’re going to be called cannabis cruises,” he said. ‘I’m going to call the yacht ‘The Blunt.’ ”

Forchion’s son, King, his niece, Essence Self, and cousin, Michael Worthington, were on the boat, too. Worthington is the “boat guy,” the calming presence when Forchion is trying to dock the 37-foot boat in heavy traffic. Family members and employees from his Trenton location are constantly flying back and forth to visit and work. All told, he employs about 50 people, including four daughters in Trenton, and he’ll likely have to employ a few dozen more people when The Joint expands and The Blunt hits the water. He said there’s a reality series in the works called “Miami’s High Life with NJWeedman.”

“They’re calling us the ‘Kardashians of Kush’, ” he said.

King Forchion, 23, lives in Miami full-time and is CEO of The Joint of Miami. When he climbed to the pilot deck, his dad slid over let him take the helm. King, tattooed and shirtless, worked the boat’s throttles a bit faster than his dad while trying to avoid rogue jet skiers and the distraction of $50 million waterfront mansions. The scene was a fitting image for Forchion’s master plan. Boating advice he doled out to King — take it slow, watch behind you, and study boating regulations — could double as life lessons.

“Yeah, I’m interested in building generational wealth for my kids,” Forchion said. “It was hard to do that when you’re getting arrested all the time.”

Forchion admits that being the “Weedman” had negative consequences for his family. He could have ended his fight after his 1997 arrest and prison sentence and made a decent living being a truck driver. He’s served over three years in prison, total, and he’s twice-divorced.

“It was hard to be ‘dad’ and ‘Weedman,’ and I’m trying to put them in a situation now where I can at least make up for some of it,” he said.

King is quieter than his dad, preferring to work behind the scenes, in the back offices of The Joint. It wasn’t always easy or exciting being the kid of the “Weedman,” he said, when every cop and teacher, classmates and their parents seemed to know the name “Forchion.”

“It seemed like he was more into fighting more than he was into family for a time,” King said. “But I also caught a few breaks because of him.”

Friday night was reggae night at The Joint, and the crowd ballooned into the hundreds after 11 p.m., Bob Marley’s grandson, Yohan Marley, among them. Hundreds more would show up for hip-hop night on Saturday and a Grateful Dead cover band Sunday afternoon. The club felt like a living, breathing black-light poster, its facade still dripping in vibrant murals Forchion paid artists about $25,000 to paint. A portrait of Forchion, at one of his many trials, adorned a wall in the club’s outdoor area, where a caterer served jerk chicken. Forchion pulled up out front in his Corvette around 10 p.m., after taking a shower at his house in North Miami, then realized he’d made a rare mistake.

“I forgot my damn weed,” he said.

Forchion had only forgotten a specific bag of weed, though. He had more, in the trunk, but was still kicking himself —”I can’t believe it” — an hour later. He likes to brings rolled joints to the club, handing them out like some subversive Santa and contributing to the overall haze that hangs there. Though recreational marijuana isn’t legal in Florida, Forchion says law enforcement is relaxed. That’s also what makes The Joint different from the rest of Miami’s famed nightlife scene. Forchion might employ an armed security staff that resembles a Navy SEAL team, but they’re not going to give customers a hard time about marijuana.

Forchion spends half the week in New Jersey, the other half in Miami, but sees himself spending more time in Florida, in a sun-soaked state of semiretirement. He doesn’t plan to bring his activism to Florida. He’s more interested in actively idling in his boat on Biscayne Bay by the waterfront Ferris wheel.

“Miami is not like the rest of Florida,” he said. ‘It’s more like the Caribbean than the South. Everyone’s selling weed. You smell it everywhere and the cops don’t bother you. But I don’t want to become that guy down here, fighting marijuana laws like I did in New Jersey. I did my time. Legal weed is coming here and it doesn’t need my help. I don’t need to be the ‘Florida Weedman.’ ”

But that doesn’t mean he’s laying low. Forchion wants The Joint to become a worldwide destination for marijuana enthusiasts, the cannabis cruises to be on every tourist’s Miami checklist, and the reality show to get picked up and take off. It’s more than he imagined, even on that night, last year, when he was tripping on mushrooms.

“If you would have told me I’d have a 10,000-square-foot club in Miami, a couple boats, a ton of money, and nobody’s bothering you? That wouldn’t even have been a bong dream,” he said.

“You know, you hit a bong and sit back and dream this or that. This would have been far-fetched. But here we are.”