Thanks to a series of law changes and a perspective shift in how many Americans view marijuana, cannabis has increasingly gone mainstream over the past several years. That’s led to more than a handful of celebrities investing in grow operations and dispensaries. Chief among those big name pot farmers is Jim Belushi. The According To Jim star has 93 green acres in Oregon. He recently opened up about what drew him to the weed business, and it apparently all traces back to his brother John.
Comedy legend John Belushi overdosed on heroin and cocaine in 1982. He was just 33 years old and was among the biggest movie stars in the world. He left behind millions of fans and a devoted group of family and friends who wished he never experimented with opioids. To this day, Jim wishes his brother would have stuck with marijuana and not progressed to the harder stuff. Here’s what he had to say in a recent social media post…
To all these people finding out I’ve been growing cannabis since 2016 I have this to say: if my brother John was a pothead, he’d be alive today. And that’s why I got into this. To heal my own trauma and help people get off opioids. That’s the “mission from God.
The “Mission From God” is, of course, a reference to an often quoted line from The Blues Brothers, which grossed more than a hundred million dollars just two years prior to Belushi’s tragic passing. The film was just one in a series of big wins for the comedian whose career was white hot in the mid-70s through early 80s. He first rose to fame as an original cast member on Saturday Night Live, which debuted in 1975. He appeared in 79 episodes, which helped to launch a brief but incredibly popular movie career that included Animal House and the aforementioned Blues Brothers, among others. Along the way, he also became known for some erratic behavior and a larger than life persona that seemed to intersect with tons of other celebrities.
Jim Belushi began building steam in his own career right around the time his brother passed. He joined the Saturday Night Live cast in 1983 and later appeared in a series of movies and TV shows before landing his own sitcom, According To Jim, in 2001. It ultimately ran for more than 180 episodes and brought Belushi a new level of fame and assumedly the time and resources to focus on other passions like marijuana, though he still shows up in a few acting projects a year. He also appears in the reality show Growing Belushi which chronicles his efforts in the pot business.
Growing up as the younger brother of John Belushi couldn’t have been easy, especially after the beloved comedian passed. No doubt some people expected him to simply step into his brother’s shadow, and it doesn’t work that way. He’s his own person with his own perspective on what’s funny. It’s nice to see he’s found what seems to be a healthy viewpoint and a mission from God he can carry forward.
