A Good Life Interrupted

When Samuel Girod began selling Chickweed Healing Salve out of his kitchen with herbs grown in his garden and the surrounding fields, little did he know that the business he so loved, which he had literally built from the ground up, would catch the eye of the federal regulators who wanted him out of the way.

What happened throughout the next years as the drama of being criminalized, and eventually incarcerated, unfolded, Sam and his family watched helplessly as their peaceable and beneficial livelihood was dismantled, and their former unity replaced by separation, heartache, and hard times. Here is the true story of Sam Girod, told in his own words as he navigates the “places where nature does not exist, to the huge concrete and barbed wire systems of man that repress the very hope of a soul.”