A swarm of officers and detectives from the Lakewood Police Department pulled up. They escorted Pedersen outside, down Jack’s wheelchair ramp, and onto the front lawn while they began to search the house. He was left outside for four hours, without a coat or explanation, terrified and unable to grieve.

Just before nine o’clock that night, police barred anyone from reentering the home. They instructed Pedersen to check into a hotel. Confused but left with no other choice, he complied with their demands.

A sign for the Doe Run Company, which operated the lead smelter in Mark Pedersen’s hometown of Herculaneum, Missouri.

When he returned two days later, he found his room completely ransacked. Personal papers and photographs lay scattered across the floor amid trampled clothing; computer and camera equipment was buried beneath the contents of overturned drawers and boxes. Bottles of tincture—a strained mix of food-grade alcohol and cannabis oil—were gone, along with an oil-extraction machine, a digital scale, and silicone molds he used to make suppositories. Gone, too, were a few pounds of moldy cannabis trim that Pedersen had intended to compost. The police had clearly taken what they wanted, the result of a search warrant issued for “evidence related to the crime of Child Abuse resulting in death.”

A month later, the local police, working on behalf of the West Metro Drug Task Force, seized Pedersen’s personal safe on a second search warrant. Inside were old family photographs, his mother’s jewelry, notebooks listing treatments for his patients, and $7,000 from a lawsuit tied to the lead smelter that long poisoned his hometown of Herculaneum, Missouri. The money, authorities claimed, was profit from dealing drugs. The police didn’t stop their search at the house. They also combed through Pedersen’s Facebook, surfacing posts promoting medical marijuana.

It was all cataloged as evidence, setting the stage for the district attorney’s office to pursue the kinds of charges usually reserved for commercial drug operations. In the eyes of the law, Pedersen was running a cartel from his bedroom. No one seemed interested in how cannabis improved Jack’s life, how it relieved his pain. Benevolent intent, however, offered no refuge under Colorado law. Pedersen made his own cannabis oil to treat Jack, and unlicensed commercial activity remained prosecutable. And while possession and personal use were legal for qualifying patients, producing cannabis concentrate without a proper license pushed Pedersen’s work into a legally gray space.

It’s evident that terrible grief has led Pedersen down this path: His posture reflects someone who doesn’t want to take up space, like he’s saddled with a burden known only to him. As such, he emanates humility and profound sadness, but not in a way that invites sympathy. Cannabis, Pedersen believed, was a misunderstood substance. A substance that he lobbied for decades to be considered medicine rather than contraband. A substance that he used to treat dozens of patients across the country, mostly children, a calling he pursued after his family fell apart. A substance that alleviated the health issues visited upon him by his polluted hometown. A substance that gave purpose to his heavy life.

Pedersen had no formal medical training. He worked outside the margins of conventional medicine. Families who came to him were often desperate, having exhausted every standard treatment available—chemotherapy, targeted radiation, invasive surgeries, drug regimens with severe side effects. He offered an alternative for people with nowhere else to turn. A form of hope. And for parents watching helplessly as their children suffered, maybe hope was enough.

A smokestack looms over the abandoned Doe Run smelter.

A few months after Jack’s death, a warrant was requested for Pedersen’s arrest. His only experience with law enforcement was a speeding ticket from years prior. Now he was looking at five felony counts of possession, distribution, and manufacturing of marijuana. His mug shot would soon circulate around the world above headlines calling him a drug dealer. On Facebook posts, commenters blamed him for Jack’s death. Families of patients he’d been working with drifted away or cut off contact. Yet Pedersen harbored no anger or bitterness. Instead, while facing a life sentence in prison, he asked himself a central question: “How many could I have possibly saved?”

Mark Pedersen was the youngest of four brothers born to a Danish immigrant father and American mother in Herculaneum, Missouri. For more than a century, Herculaneum was dominated by a primary lead smelter operated by the Doe Run Company, owned since 1994 by billionaire Ira Rennert’s Renco Group. Within the smelter, raw ore was heated at extreme temperatures to extract lead. As a by-product, the plant emitted hazardous substances, including lead, arsenic, and cadmium, into the air, soil, and adjacent Mississippi River. The towering 550-foot smokestack still stands as a symbol of the town’s industrial identity. Lead was in the townspeople’s DNA—in Pedersen’s case, since birth.

At just three weeks old, Pedersen was rushed to the Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital with life-threatening pyloric stenosis, which narrows the stomach passage and prevents food from passing through the body. He had already lost half his body weight. Doctors performed emergency surgery and urged his mother to keep him hospitalized, but she refused. If he was going to die, it would be at home. She called her mother, who advised scorching flour in a cast-iron skillet and feeding it to the baby. “It worked,” Pedersen says of the home remedy.

Abandoned machinery on the plant grounds.

Nowadays, Herculaneum has the chilling atmosphere of a postindustrial ghost town. Its roughly five thousand locals seem to keep watch, accustomed to the occasional lookie-loo. Curtains are pulled aside and eyes follow from passing cars when strangers arrive, strangers who are drawn not only to Herculaneum’s industrial past, a relic of a bygone era, but also to the headlines and lawsuits that followed decades of lead contamination. Still, there is no shortage of pride in “Herky,” a company town that employed many families for generations. The mines in Missouri, the heart of America’s lead belt, are rumored to have supplied the bullets Napoleon used to conquer Europe, though this is more legend than fact, a story the townspeople tell out of pride. The towers in Herculaneum did, however, produce lead shot for the War of 1812.

Pedersen entered Herculaneum High in 1971, a year after President Richard Nixon signed the modern Clean Air Act. After nearly a century of unchecked emissions in Herculaneum, the law had begun to take effect. Large machines intended to monitor the smelter’s environmental impact soon appeared alongside the school. Students wondered whether the mysterious instruments were just for show. Pedersen, a varsity athlete, couldn’t even see his classmates across the track when jogging laps; the fog was too thick. The sulfuric rotten-egg cloud would mix with the saliva in his throat, turning acidic. He’d never forget the taste—or the frequent sore throats.

Pedersen’s first experience with cannabis occurred in 1977, two years out of high school. Though it was a time when the U. S. was reckoning with toxic substances, pollutants, in the air and water, marijuana, which had been federally outlawed since 1970, was just beginning to undergo a societal reevaluation. Pedersen became captivated when he discovered it had healing properties. One of his friends was battling testicular cancer, and Pedersen had heard the drug could ease the appetite loss and nausea caused by chemotherapy, so he scored him some weed. Though Pedersen wouldn’t start his practice for another three decades, he’d later consider the gesture as the first time he helped a patient.

In 1975, Pedersen met Lori Brewer at a wedding where he was a groomsman and she a bridesmaid. Like Pedersen, Lori was born and raised in Herky, where her earliest memories were also marked by the smelter and its ash.

As a child, Lori would climb onto her grandfather’s lap when he came home for lunch from the Doe Run plant, less than a mile away. He ate his sandwiches with hands still dusted in black ash, his thumbprints sinking into and staining the pillowy-soft white bread.

In the late 1980s, Lori’s grandmother died of bladder cancer. Seven years later, her grandfather died of the same disease. Lori’s mother had spent years disabled by a mysterious, debilitating condition that doctors had labeled fibromyalgia. Two of her cousins, a brother and sister across the street, were both born with spina bifida—a birth defect affecting the spinal cord—and used wheelchairs at an early age. Their father, Lori’s uncle, died of lung cancer.

When he and Lori married in 1978, Pedersen was a junior at Columbia College; she was a freshman at Mizzou. He had hopes of teaching college-level art. He spent hours drawing in black and white, obsessively copying the works of Dutch artist M. C. Escher. But within a year, he lost his financial aid and realized he couldn’t finish his B.F.A.—or get a master’s. He had to drop out, two elective hours short.

Pedersen worked various low-paying jobs just to get by, including a brief stint as a McDonald’s manager. His marriage grew rocky, strained by his relationship with Lori’s father. The man was an artist himself who had abandoned his passion for a blue-collar job to support his family. Perhaps he saw too much of himself in his son-in-law, whom he labeled a deadbeat. Despite the tension, the Pedersens welcomed their first child in 1981.

“I would’ve done anything to see our new family succeed,” Pedersen says. “But our Rachel came into this world troubled.”

Mark Pedersen was at work when Rachel stopped breathing. She was just a few weeks old. Lori performed CPR in the backseat as her mother sped them to the emergency room.

A pediatric cardiologist later sketched a heart on a blackboard, then erased the center with his hand. This, he told the Pedersens flatly, was how their daughter’s looked. Rachel had less than a 50 percent chance of surviving to her first birthday—though she would—but no one knew her exact diagnosis. “It was like taking a five-hundred-piece puzzle and randomly removing one piece here and there,” Pedersen says.

Mark Pedersen and his daugter, Rachel, in 1999.

Along with congenital heart defects, Rachel had dental and vision problems, a mild intellectual disability, delays in both fine and gross motor skills, hyperactivity, asthma, and scoliosis. At three years old, when most children her age were running across playgrounds and sliding down slides, she underwent open-heart surgery.

By the time his son, Nathanael, was born in 1984, Pedersen had landed an entry-level job at the Ameren power plant. Within a few years, he’d climbed the ranks from nighttime janitor to apprentice repairman to certified welder, a trade that made him good money. Five years later, the Pedersens welcomed their third and final child, a daughter named Emily.

In between work and family time, the Pedersens served in ministry. They participated in youth outreach that often filled their small basement apartment with local kids. They founded a church-based food pantry, which became so popular that Pedersen needed to keep records on a computer. As he became more proficient, he founded a small computing consultancy that served local clients, though in addition to his day job, it sacrificed a lot of family time. All the while, Pedersen had his own health issues: flu-like symptoms, body aches, migraines, chest congestion, bronchitis, chronic fatigue. By his fortieth birthday, he was spending days bedridden.

During one episode, a migraine struck with paralyzing intensity. It was early in the afternoon. No one was home. The pain hit, and he tried to scream for help, but no sound came out. He writhed, grasping for something on which to steady himself. He stumbled across the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom, knocking over objects in the process. Back then, there was no speed dial or voice assistant. The only way to reach someone was to punch numbers into a landline phone. His central vision disappeared. So did his balance. He couldn’t see his own hands, let alone reach the phone. Alone and confused, he wondered whether the black hole obstructing his view was going to be permanent.

Such incidents caused Pedersen to call in sick frequently, prompting plant management to reassign him to light duty. He was effectively put on track for termination. He applied for disability and was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

Pedersen began using marijuana to soothe his symptoms—especially the migraines. He would spend long, lonely stretches after dark in his Mustang, parked just off the drive near the front of the house, smoking joints. The habit bred suspicion in Lori, who confided to a friend from church that she believed he was having an affair. Though it wasn’t true, the sneaking around compounded the preexisting stress of his sickness, unemployment, and tense relationship with Lori’s father. Pedersen moved into the home office, where he slept on a futon until he and Lori divorced.

On the morning of November 11, 2001, Rachel Pedersen was getting dressed. She was planning to attend Sunday service with her mother and boyfriend, whom they were going to pick up along the way. As Rachel turned toward the laundry room to grab a pair of jeans, she collapsed on her mother’s living-room floor. Nathanael found her, colorless and still, as if she had lain down and gone to sleep. He administered CPR until the paramedics arrived, but she was already gone. She was just twenty years old.

Pedersen, seated, with, left to right, his children Rachel, Nathanael, and Emily, during Christmastime in 1998.

Pathologists told the Pedersens there was nothing they could have done. What happened with Rachel happened in utero. The lead was already in their DNA before it reached their daughter during conception. A year after she died, a lead test found that the lead level in the Pedersens’ kitchen was two hundred times the Environmental Protection Agency’s acceptable limit. The autopsy revealed much of the same. Her death was caused by a combination of heart defects and pulmonary thromboembolism: a blood clot that had traveled to her lungs.

More than a thousand people showed up to Rachel’s funeral. She had served as the boys’ and girls’ basketball manager throughout high school. She was voted Prom Princess, the first in the school’s history, after classmates overwhelmingly wrote in her name. She received the school-spirit award, too, later made permanent with a plaque that still stands in the trophy hall. Every recipient since is listed beneath her name.

Six years before Rachel’s death, in 1995, the Pedersens were contacted by a personal-injury attorney representing several families whose children, raised in Herculaneum, had serious health problems. Rachel was named as one of the plaintiffs when the lawsuit was filed. “She died, the lawyers dropped her from the suit,” Pedersen says.

In 2002, as part of a voluntary program overseen by the EPA, Doe Run agreed to buy more than 150 homes to address the contamination. Over the following years, they’d replace the soil, too. State and federal agencies approved the removal of lead-contamination warning signs that once dotted the road, despite an EPA official noting that “there is still an awful lot of work to be done.”

Ira Rennert and the Renco Group accumulated numerous lawsuits over the ensuing decade. In 2012, the Pedersens were among hundreds of families named in a class action against Doe Run for property-related damages. Pedersen and his ex-wife each received several thousand dollars, paid out in four installments. And though their other children survived to adulthood, that didn’t mean they weren’t affected. Emily Pedersen blames Doe Run for her inability to have kids of her own. In 2013, after years of falling lead prices and mounting regulatory pressure, the Herculaneum smelter—the last of its kind in the U. S.—shut down for good.

However, after the first complaint was filed in 1995, the company purchased the La Oroya lead-smelter complex in Peru in 1997 through its subsidiary, Doe Run Peru. The company effectively moved operations offshore to take advantage of looser environmental policies. The site would become one of the most polluted cities on earth.

In the years following Rachel’s death, Pedersen began his cannabis caregiving practice. He gravitated toward helping kids and their parents, because he knew exactly what it felt like to have and lose a child whose life was marred by chronic pain. But marijuana was illegal in Missouri, so Pedersen engaged in political activism to change state legislation.

For one of his first efforts, Pedersen took part in Journey for Justice 7 in 2006, a monthslong cross-country bike ride that raised national awareness on the efficacy of medical marijuana. Afterward, Denver-area caregivers who were connected to the event urged him to move to Colorado to assist with the emerging medical-marijuana movement. He tried, but the altitude exacerbated his fibromyalgia; his lungs ached and breathing was difficult. He returned to Missouri, this time to the town of Kirkwood, where he would live for another seven years.

From his modest apartment, he made cannabis oil, wrote legislation, documented patient success stories, and traveled for advocacy with money he earned through sponsorships. In 2012, he authored a ballot initiative called Show-Me Cannabis—a referendum that would prevent arrests for growing and consuming cannabis—but the measure didn’t receive enough signatures to advance to the ballot. He was also pressured by his landlord to shut down his cannabis garden. Pedersen would have to up and move to Colorado—this time, he intended, for good.

As he became involved in Colorado’s tight-knit medical-marijuana community, Pedersen met Stacey Linn through mutual friends. The single mother of two worked multiple jobs to pay for the care of her oldest, Jack. The boy was on life support, relying on a feeding tube and twenty-four-hour care. If his trachea wasn’t suctioned on a strict schedule, he could drown in his own fluids. Though mostly nonverbal, he was able to communicate through a digital device. And he was prescribed very potent medications, including benzodiazepines and barbiturates, to control muscle spasms so severe he sometimes bit down on his own tongue. But cannabis, Linn says, was the only thing that really helped.

Pedersen specialized in THC-rich cannabis oil, which Linn thought could help Jack better than CBD oil. Although they are the two main active compounds in cannabis, THC has psychoactive effects, so it’s not normally recommended for children. Linn, however, believed the THC better soothed Jack’s dystonia. The debate mattered little at Jack’s school, where staff would confiscate his medical cannabis either way. Linn fought for her son’s access by doing “some serious legislative footwork, spending a lot of time at the capitol every day for several years,” she says.

At a dinner with local cannabis activists, Linn mentioned to Pedersen that she had two extra bedrooms in the basement of her house, which she rented out for extra income. She suggested he could take one. Pedersen was already a state-registered caregiver with a valid medical-marijuana card. He regularly made cannabis oil from scratch, intended for oral capsules or suppositories. He agreed to move in and soon after began caring for Jack, refusing to charge for his services.

Pedersen first treated Jack in 2015. The boy’s arm was painfully contorted as a result of his dystonia. He twisted violently and compressed his diaphragm into a life-threatening position. Pedersen dipped a toothpick in THC-dominant cannabis oil, which was applied directly under the teenager’s tongue. About fifteen minutes later, Jack slowly unwound, coming to rest on the arm of his wheelchair. Pedersen and Linn turned to each other in disbelief, amazed at how immediate the effects were. From then on, Pedersen learned to read the world through the boy’s eyes. In those shining blue orbs, Jack’s thoughts, feelings, and spirit quietly came to life.

Pedersen settled into a routine. He would receive donated cannabis flowers from local growers—some operating legally, others not—trim and dry them, then lightly grind the cured buds and return them to a mason jar. Then he submerged the cannabis in food-grade alcohol, sealed the lid, and agitated the jars over a twelve-hour period before storing them in a subzero freezer. After several rounds of straining, he boiled the mixture in an oil-extraction machine to evaporate the alcohol, then passed it through a condenser to recapture it. Finally, he mixed his concoction with organic coconut oil, poured it into silicone molds, and left it to solidify in the freezer. Jack was given roughly 100 milligrams twice a day.

Jack’s health seemed to improve, and Linn and Pedersen continued their cannabis advocacy. Finally, in June 2016, the Colorado governor signed a bill permitting students with debilitating medical conditions to use non-smokable cannabis at school. The measure became known as Jack’s Law.

Then Jack died, and Pedersen wondered day and night, most insistently just before he drifted off to sleep, whether he’d be charged. But why? Why would he be charged when he believed he had acted within the law, openly and legitimately treating the ill? How could the police department act with such callousness?

Mark Pedersen gazes upon the grave of his daughter Rachel, who died at just twenty years old from health complications.

On the afternoon of Monday, March 27, 2017, the day came. Three Lakewood police officers stood outside Pedersen’s home with a warrant for his arrest on five felony counts of marijuana manufacture, distribution, and possession.

With visible trepidation and a stream of verbal assurances, the arresting officer reached for one of Pedersen’s spindly arms, then the other, fastening his delicate wrists together with handcuffs. The officer apologized no fewer than four times, saying it felt like he was arresting his own father. The other two officers stood silently, hands clasped behind their backs, their heads hung low, eyes fixed on the ground. Pedersen was guided into the back of the patrol car. There was no seat belt, no restraint; with his wrists cuffed behind him, he rolled along the hard, slick plastic seat, slamming from one side to the other.

At the Jefferson County jail, a sheriff’s deputy stood watch as Pedersen completed the cavity search, straightened up, and changed into an orange jumpsuit to join the other inmates. They tagged and cataloged his belongings, took his fingerprints, and photographed his face.

The dozen or so other inmates in the holding area were much younger than Pedersen, who had never set foot in a jail before. The others paid little attention to him, far more absorbed by the back-to-back episodes of Breaking Bad blaring at an unbearable volume from the television mounted on the wall. One inmate, however, acknowledged him for a brief moment. “You’re now the property of the state of Colorado,” he blurted before turning back around.

Pedersen was handed a sack lunch: a gluey chicken salad, a bread roll hard as a rock, a cookie, and a carton of orange-colored drink. He threw most of it in the trash. Hours passed before he was processed again, this time into another holding area. There he was issued clean sheets and some toiletries and then marched into a room he later described as no larger than a walk-in closet—cellmate included.

Pedersen lay down on the plastic shelf that served as his bed and stared up at the narrow window above him. Through the slit, he caught sight of the Colorado Rockies, a brief reprieve from what he would later reflect on as one of the worst days of his life. It’d be several months before his trial was set to begin. If convicted, Pedersen faced sixty-four years in prison.

Several hours had passed since his last dose of cannabis. Without it, he risked a severe migraine or even a seizure, especially under untold amounts of stress, partially caused by his financial situation. He couldn’t afford bail; police had kept the $7,000 they found in his safe—the last remnant of the lead-poisoning settlement—through civil-asset forfeiture. He would never see that money again.

After dinner, Pedersen was making his bed in his cell when a guard approached him and told him his bond had been paid. Jack Quinn, a patient and friend of Pedersen’s who credits him with saving his life, covered the $2,500 bond to secure his release.

Quinn had basal- and squamous-cell carcinoma. Pedersen had provided him capsules and topical cannabis oil for several years before the arrest. “We have all but stopped the progression of his cancer,” Pedersen wrote in the patient notebook focused on Quinn’s case. “We’ll persevere until we do.” (While there’s research that shows cannabinoids may help with symptoms in certain cancer patients, there are no human clinical trials to support Pedersen’s more extreme claims, like that cannabis oil can shrink tumors.)

By September 2017, news of Pedersen’s arrest had spread from national outlets to international tabloids and, inevitably, onto Facebook. Internet strangers routinely dragged him in the comments; others struck an uneasy note of nuance—“his heart is in the right place”—while still admonishing him for what they saw as illegal conduct. One thing was certain: A headline linking cannabis to a child’s death was guaranteed to draw ire from the online masses.

“No one cares that the minor died, they are only crying that the adult gets off free because he illegally gave the minor weed. Make an example out of him.”

Though plenty of naysayers accused Pedersen of murdering a child or dealing drugs, a handful of supporters rose to his defense.

“Mark is the most gentle, caring person I know,” Quinn wrote. “He is the person who is responsible for keeping my chronic skin cancer at bay. What has happened is not right.”

“He provided more relief than the pharmaceutical companies could ever imagine. It’s time to have a heart,” added another commenter.

“Where are all of the patients that have been counseled through battling cancer and other horrible diseases while Mark suffers terribly himself?” asked yet another.

Fifteen years ago, Gaige Kirbey could no longer attend first grade. He suffered from a rare form of childhood epilepsy that caused frequent, debilitating seizures. None of the medications helped. Instead, they triggered pancreatitis and sepsis, and Gaige struggled to wean off the opiates prescribed to control the seizures. At one point, he was on life support. Eventually, doctors told his parents they planned to send him home on a hospital bed. Desperate for another option, they began asking about medical marijuana—a search that led them to Mark Pedersen.

Mark Pedersen sits with his service dog, a seven-year-old boxer named Tigger, at one of the Doe Run Company’s former administrative buildings in Herculaneum, Missouri.

“It was a life changer,” Gaige, now twenty-one, says. His father put it more bluntly: “We owe Mark the world.” Pedersen provided Gaige with cannabis oil—free of charge—throughout his treatment. Gaige was eventually able to phase out his other medications.

Bill and Karinda Brooks credit Pedersen with saving their son, too. In 2020, a few years after they moved with their three children to a twenty-three-acre farm in Omaha, Arkansas, calamity struck. Their pigs died suddenly, their dog developed tumors and died, and their youngest, rambunctious two-year-old Willie, was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

“The energy company sprayed Roundup [herbicide] all along the power lines that line our property,” says Karinda. “It’s a long, narrow slope all the way down to our house, and all the water runs straight into our well.”

The Brookses reached out to Pedersen, whom they met at a cannabis event more than a decade prior. The day after Willie’s tumor was removed, his parents noticed that he couldn’t hold his head up during post-surgery physical therapy. They began to administer Pedersen’s oil. Gradually, his condition improved.

In 2025, Willie began to lose his coordination again. He could no longer write his own name, so his parents brought him in for a scan. The tumor had returned in the same spot as five years earlier. In October, he underwent surgery to remove it once more. An MRI revealed remnants of the tumor still in his brain—and a new growth on his spine.

Pedersen returned with the oil.

The sun began to set behind the foothills framing the outdoor chapel at the Denver Botanic Gardens as hundreds gathered on the manicured lawn to commemorate the life of Jack Splitt. It was September 2016. As the light faded, Pedersen delivered the final eulogy.

The crowd was an unlikely mosaic: Denver Broncos jerseys and Spider-Man costumes alongside lawyers, journalists, state officials, and Jack’s elementary school teacher, who called him “a special-education teacher’s dream come true.” Linn was in the front row. She had asked Pedersen to deliver the eulogy on behalf of her son. Nearby, the state representative who sponsored the bill that became Jack’s Law held a light aloft as Pedersen read his typed-up speech.

“As it was for my special-needs child, my Rachel,” Pedersen began, “I have often noted the uncommon spirit that our disabled individuals naturally possess, and Jack possessed that in a most remarkable way….Though he had his weak moments, as all heroes do, he embraced his challenges.” By caring for Jack, he explained, he learned that even those most burdened by disability deserve a life free from relentless pain.

“Jack reaffirmed my belief that modern medicine often makes little provision for our chronically and terminally ill, in the event that they should survive,” he said. “It is our duty to ensure that even our weakest, our most vulnerable, should have the chance to thrive.”

In April 2018, thirteen months after his arrest, on the advice of his pro bono lawyer, he pleaded guilty to the manufacturing charge, and the other charges were dropped. “If I didn’t win at trial and I had just one of those felonies, that would be a lifetime sentence for me,” says Pedersen, who remains a convicted felon. “And I wouldn’t survive prison.”

This article appears in one of our exclusive digital issues, only available to Esquire Premium subscribers
Read Here

Gaige Kirbey’s father believes the prosecution was wrong. His wife wasn’t even allowed to testify on Pedersen’s behalf. “To me,” he says, “it felt like the state was just trying to put the blame on him.”

Pedersen served just over a year of a three-year probation sentence. He could petition to have his records expunged, but he doesn’t see the need. “I don’t feel like I need forgiveness,” he says.

Pedersen has since moved back to Missouri. He lives about twenty minutes north of Herculaneum. Today, the area immediately surrounding the Doe Run plant feels eerily abandoned, reduced to piles of rubble across empty fields from buildings and homes that the company was ordered to purchase and demolish due to lead contamination.

Less than a mile away, it’s a remarkably different scene: The district’s three schools still hum with life, their lots teeming with rows of yellow buses. A Black church founded in 1908 remains active, a reminder of the town’s history of racial segregation and the vestiges of slavery in the Missouri area.

Elsewhere, new houses are being built, while old ones are sold and repurchased. “Seeing children move into our old house broke my heart,” Pedersen says. “I can’t help but wonder if the real estate agent ever warned them about the lead.”

The yellow home was built in the 1930s on Reservoir Lane, the main thoroughfare for trucks hauling lead from the Doe Run plant to the state highway. “I remember my Rachel playing right there in the dirt,” says Pedersen. “Thinking about that makes me feel so…” he stops himself. “But we just had no idea.”

In Pedersen’s new home, he lives with his daughter Emily, her husband, and an eight-year-old boxer named Tigger that accompanies him everywhere he goes. “Sometimes she helps me fetch things off the floor or keeps me steady on the stairs,” he says, adding with a wry smile, “but mostly she just stares at me when I’m depressed.”

As he’s moved from place to place, Pedersen has kept a tattered bankers box stuffed with court documents from the Jack Splitt case. Amid the stack of files, there’s a single manila folder that contains the nine-page affidavit, written and signed by a Lakewood police detective, detailing the cause of Jack’s death.

Jack’s condition worsened over the last few months of his life. He experienced constant, painful muscle spasms. Linn believes that he was ready to die. One early morning in April 2016, around two o’clock, she couldn’t sleep and went into her son’s room. Usually, any sound would trigger a dystonic storm, but that night he lay calmly. As she stood over him, he gently opened his eyes. She told him she didn’t want him to suffer anymore and that she would miss him. It was as if God smiled back at her.

On August 24, 2016, the day he died, Jack woke extremely agitated. The nurse kept him home from school. By 9:00 a.m., he had developed a high fever. The nurse treated him with over-the-counter pain meds, followed by several milligrams of phenobarbital fed through his tube. Jack had never taken that particular barbiturate before. The nurse, who had been on the job for three months, was required to log medications but failed to do so amid the chaos.

At 11:00 a.m., Jack fell asleep. Two hours later, the nurse called his mother, saying Jack “did not look good.” Linn, familiar with these episodes, instructed him to call 911 if it was critical. Half an hour later, the nurse called her again, and she said she was on her way home. But it was too late. At 3:30 p.m., Jack’s younger brother called Linn with the bad news. The phenobarbital, intended as a last-ditch resort, had been administered improperly. The nurse was never charged. The drug killed him, his death ruled accidental.

“For you, Jack, I will not give up,” Pedersen read to conclude his eulogy. “I pledge to do the work I am called to do—to heal as many as I can.”

When the ceremony ended, mourners released butterflies—Jack’s favorite—into the sky.

Pedersen has five patients across the country. He focuses on counseling now, teaching families how to properly use cannabis oil, not administering it himself. When he travels, the TSA frequently stops him to test his fingers for gunpowder. But he doesn’t mind.

At his recent fifty-year high school reunion, he noticed that many of the men he grew up with—now nearing their seventies—were retired, financially secure, and traveling to Europe with their wives. He’s disappointed that he never had the chance to live that kind of comfortable life, but he’s satisfied with his legacy.

Over the past twenty years, Pedersen has worked to change cannabis laws in Missouri. He authored one House bill, which was backed by nine Democratic sponsors but never advanced past committee. Conversely, he wrote several recent ballot initiatives that were accepted by the Missouri secretary of state, all calling for full legalization and the removal of cannabis from the state’s controlled-substances list. Though they never made it on the ballot, Pedersen has gained greater insight into state law for future initiatives. Nationally, President Donald Trump took steps to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III drug, which would mean stricter FDA regulation and a market effect that could influence affordability. Yet under federal regulation, it remains a Schedule I drug with high abuse potential and no accepted medical use. The law, Pedersen suggests, is only beginning to catch up to what patients and caregivers have long understood. That cannabis isn’t about politics or counterculture. It’s about freedom. Specifically, the freedom to survive.

In October 2025, Pedersen received an early-morning call from a woman in Florida. She asked if he could take on another case. At first, he declined, saying that it would be too difficult.

Then she told him the patient’s age: three years old.

“That’s all they have to say to me.”