Jamie Wood grew up as part of the Rolling Stones clan. Now, he is doing drugs with a difference. Here he tells Richard Davies why CBD therapy is the new rock ’n’ roll...
Naughtiness, for most 11-year-olds, means giving a bit of a lip to the teacher or refusing to help out at home. For Jamie Wood – adopted son of legendary guitarist Ronnie – it meant stealing joints from ashtrays at Rolling Stones parties, while “band discipinarian” Keith Richards cast a sternly disapproving eye.
An unconventional baptism, perhaps. Yet this early exposure to the ways of the weed was to bear unexpected fruit. For today Jamie is the founder and driving force behind Woodies, an online business selling products largely based on CBD – an active ingredient within cannabis that is neither psychoactive nor addictive and is believed to have great benefits for health.
“I was brought up in a rock ‘n’ roll family, so I had to party,” laughs the Claygate-based businessman, who was only a small child when his mum, Jo – a glamorous 70s fashion model – met her Rolling Stone.
As a teenager, Jamie moved from school to school, expelled from one for “selling weed to a royal cousin” – a story that duly hit the front pages. His entrepreneurial flair thus exposed, it was a natural step to become his dad’s business manager, staging art shows of Ronnie’s highly acclaimed paintings and making decent money from selling the prints.
By then, however, Ronnie’s notorious drug and alcohol abuse had become impossible to live with, and his much-publicised fling with a teenage Russian cocktail waitress proved the final straw.
Ronnie and Jo divorced; inevitably “sides were taken”. Jamie drifted for a while, dabbling in the events business and investing in a burger chain, before a blocked artery brought his tottering world crashing down.
“The heart attack forced me to stop,” he admits. “I lost my businesses, my house; I couldn’t work, couldn’t make money. Sitting at home for six months was tough.”
Yet this brush with death enabled Jamie to work out what he wanted from life. And his prescription for serenity turned out to be a curious mix of the domestic and the chemically inspired.
“It had all been full on – money, work, greed. I was a product of modern society. Now I had a chance to reflect. Listen, I’m 43 and I nearly died. Life is fragile and short. You have to forget about money and focus on the things that mean something. For me, that was my family and cannabis.”
The family part of that formula is readily apparent, in the shape of Jodie, Jamie’s wife and mother of his four children. One of his sons, Leo, is a boxer who has recently been selected for the GB squad.
“I’m dedicated to making sure that the kids can achieve,” says Jamie. “My parents didn’t really prepare me for the world. You’re sheltered for so long in this Rolling Stones bubble, until suddenly you have to make your own way.”
And then there’s the cannabis.
“I used to get back from work and retreat to it in the evening – that was my happy place. But after the heart attack, my doc said ‘no more combustion,’ so that was that.”
But if smoking cannabis was out, perhaps he could vape it instead? Yes, advised the doctor, but only if it didn’t contain THC – tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychedelic chemical in cannabis that gets one high and disrupts the rhythms of the heart.
And so it was that Jamie turned to the other active ingredient, cannabidiol – CBD. Some studies suggest that this can reduce epileptic seizures, while many believe it can help with anxiety, insomnia and inflammatory pain.
“It’s like a vitamin that nourishes your body’s early warning system,” Jamie reflects.
But when he came to try out the CBD vapes then available on the market, he found that he disliked all the synthetic flavourings. What he wanted was a CBD vape that actually tasted like cannabis based on “mother nature’s formula, not fake ones”.
Unable to find such a thing, he set about learning the chemistry of cannabis and how to manufacture CBD products for himself.
Despite his limited schooling, he threw himself into the study of biology and herbalism. At the Lab Society, an extraction facility in Colorado, he learned to steam distil essential oils from cannabis to extract ‘terpenes’: the chemical compounds that affect how plants smell and give cannabis its distinctive aroma.
With at least 400 different terpenes in the cannabis plant alone, researching their potential benefits and usage is becoming a global industry. Jamie, for one, is convinced of their therapeutic potential for relieving anxiety and symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Through Woodies Jamie sells a wide range of CBD and terpene products, including vapes, edibles and skincare/cosmetic products, as well as AVD (advanced vapour device) hardware. The CBD and terpene products are manufactured in his Claygate lab using distillate CBD (containing absolutely no THC), which he imports in solid form from the States.
Quality, insists Jamie, is key.
“In the UK, the CBD industry remains largely unregulated and there are many disreputable companies selling substandard products. It’s hard to know that what you are buying is even legal.”
In fact, the Centre for Medical Cannabis (CMC) recently commissioned the testing of 30 CBD products sold in the UK and found some worrying variations. Of those tested, 11 contained less than 50% of the advertised amount of cannabidiol. Amazingly, one high street pharmacy product retailing at £90 actually contained none at all.
Almost half of the tested products had levels of THC above the legal limit, one carried enough ethanol to be classed as an alcoholic drink and eight contained various contaminants.
By contrast, each batch of Woodies products is quality controlled and certified to ensure that whatever you buy – whether a CBD vape pen, juices or oil – it will contain the exact amount of pure, broad spectrum cannabinoid distillate stated on the label.
Woodies also sells a range of mushroom-based products, combining legal mushrooms – such as Lion’s Mane, Reishi and Turkey Tail – with CBD and terpenes. Jamie shows me the machine he uses to manufacture 800 mushroom capsules in 15 minutes, all of which are packaged using the ‘Woodies’ branding by members of his family.
Nor is it solely about the products themselves: customer contact plays a big part.
“Working with CBD was liberating in a way that I didn’t expect. It’s wonderful to read the things people say online about how it’s changed their life. A lot of CBD companies are just in it to make money, but I will sit and work with you. You’ve got to have the right instructions or you won’t get the experience you expect.”
Touring the lab, Jamie shows me his beautiful coffee table book on cannabis, a range of mushroom-inspired jewellery and a self-penned comic book about a Uruguayan adventurer called Feno.
Much of the credit for his work ethic, he says, belongs to mum Jo, who has a range of organic beauty products, Longevity Wellness, that uses produce from the herb farm that she and Jamie own in Northampton.
But it’s also about following the dream.
“Once you find your passion, it doesn’t really matter about the money. Yes, you’ve got to make it, but it’s the passion that gets you through.”
