OUR FOUNDERS

Just like our plant-based products, the Medicine Box team possesses an entourage effect of skills, talents and life experiences that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Uniting them all is a deep conviction that nature, wellness and the lifestyle decisions which unify both can nourish and heal both body and soul.

FOUNDER & CHIEF BRAND OFFICER

BRIAN CHAPLIN

Raised in New Hampshire, Brian Chaplin exhibited a love for nature and a penchant for entrepreneurialism during his childhood years.

Later on in life, gripped by life-threatening addictions to drugs and alcohol, he turned to both his twin childhood passions and his mastery of craft cannabis to develop a new solution for himself and others. From this, he constructed the foundation of Medicine Box. 

Moving to North Lake Tahoe after graduating from college in 2002, Brian fell into the medical cannabis trade, graduating from underground indoor cultivation techniques to sustainable, permaculture outdoor designs.

Brian’s professional growth corresponded with a shift towards sobriety, culminating in his enrollment into the worldwide 12-step community in 2012. Recognizing that cannabis needed to shed its outlaw excesses and rediscover its roots as a regionally produced, open-source/fair-trade agricultural tradition, Brian premiered Medicine Box in 2016.

His rustic, homemade creations have earned Chaplin and his company mentions in Rolling Stone, DOPE Magazine, HIGH TIMES, MG Retailer and Green Entrepreneur for their integration of classical herbalism with whole-plant cannabis extraction techniques.

He has participated in the Conscious Company Leadership Forum and served as a featured panelist for Cannabliss Retreats in 2018. When he’s not building out the future foundations of the homegrown, independent cannabis industry, he also skis, sleeps, hikes and meditates by the shores of North Lake Tahoe, CA.

CHIEF SPIRITUAL OFFICER (1945-2018)

MICHAEL HOLLISTER

From the first moment this man texted the company from his refuge amongst the redwoods (or as he called them, “the ancients”) of Trinidad, CA, Michael Hollister has been a healing light upon the soul of Medicine Box, guiding its mission and direction even from beyond the grave.

But if you were to ask him, he’d only say. “I am not a teacher; I am only a student.” Fair enough, but the lessons he taught us about cannabis, plant medicine, and nature are ones Medicine Box will continue to spread as far and wide as we possibly can. 

Born in San Diego on August 18tn, 1945, Michael’s family settled in Chula Vista. Michael excelled in sports and physical activity, taking up surfing and making his skateboards with his older brother Jay.

However, tragedy would hit the family later on in Michael’s adolescence when Jay passed away at 18 from kidney disease. From there, Michael drifted away from his family and towards the burgeoning hippie-smuggler culture, where he took on the nickname “The Mole.”

He also held a series of exotic odd jobs throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s — SCUBA Instructor, woodcutter, Director of Physical Education at a Catholic academy, farrier — before finally gaining training as a psychiatric nurse in Vermont. 

Michael’s role with healing started with himself first and foremost. As an alcoholic in recovery, his pledge to humanity was to aid the suffering, which caused him to turn away from the mental health care system and its over-reliance on pharmaceuticals in 2008. Turning towards CBD and cannabis medicine, he taught himself through trial and error the secrets of cannabis and its ability to heal. In 2016, through several business associates, Medicine Box CEO Brian Chaplin was introduced to Michael, and each month on the new moon, Brian would learn at Michael’s knee about cultivation, the rhizosphere, and how deeply connected our mental health is with the cycles of nature.

This led to a fruitful collaboration with Michael Hollister’s medical cannabis firm Mannawell and Brian’s participation in Michael’s ambitious “gestalt” synthesis of academic and grassroots research into cannabis medicine. However, this collaboration proved short-lived. Afflicted by colon cancer later in life, Michael finally succumbed to it on June 28th, 2018 on the Strawberry Full Moon. Since then, Medicine Box has continued to make beautiful discoveries with him at our side, as promised. Aho.