Dr Lester Grinspoon is associate professor emeritus of psychiatry
at the Harvard Medical School. He researched the medicinal
legitimacy of the cannabis prohibition 45 years ago and
discovered that an immense chain of lies served as a base for
sending millions of people to jail the last four decades and a
half in the US. Since then he became an advocate for telling the
truth about cannabis. I had an telephone interview with him at
the end of august 2015. The following is a transcript of a Skype
interview between Patrick Dewals and Grinspoon.
Patrick Dewals: Can you tell me how you became
So, I wrote an article about the subject and it was
interested in cannabis?
published in the International Journal of Psychiatry. One
Professor Grinspoon: Well it began in 1966. During
of the few people who read it was the editor of Scientific
American. He asked me to reduce the article so it could
fit in his magazine and he would than publish it as the
lead article in one of the coming issues. When my article
was published in the November, 1969, issue it caused a
huge tsunami so to speak and debouched in the proposal
from three different publishing companies to write a book
about cannabis.
Eventually, I wrote my book Marihuana Reconsidered,
that came out in 1971, with the Harvard University Press.
When I was doing the research for my book I did not only
find out that cannabis was not harmful but I started to
understand why people would use it, what the attraction
was for them, and I decided, at the age of 42, that I
was going to use it as well. It was just too interesting an
experience to let go. But I knew that if the book would
be a success there would be a good chance for me to be
asked to testify before a congressional session or senate
committee. Because I didn't want my own experiences
with cannabis to make my testimony less objective, in the
view of others, I decided that I could only use cannabis,
even being interested as I was, two years after the
publishing of my book. And indeed I ended up testifying
before a senate committee. I remember a big tall senator
who was rather doubtful about all I said, asking me,
'Doctor, did you ever use cannabis?' and I answered
'Senator I would be glad to answer that question if you
could tell me that if I gave you an affirmative answer it
my anti-Vietnam activism I met Carl Sagan and he
and I became very good friends. When I met Carl I
was convinced that cannabis was a very harmful drug.
Going to his house one day I discovered that he smoked
cannabis and so did many of his friends. Now these
were not unsophisticated people and I tried to tell Carl
how harmful cannabis was but he responded in a joyful
manner that it wasn't harmful at all. With this experience
came the idea of writing a paper which would summarise
the medical scientific basis for the cannabis prohibition. At
that time cannabis prohibition was leading to the arrest
of 300 000 people, mainly young people, a year of which
89% for simple possession. For me it became important
that this prohibition was justified. It was in the library of
the Medical School that I found out that I was completely
wrong about the harmfulness effects of cannabis. Not
only was it not harmful, it was remarkably nontoxic and
the drug itself was not causing harm to the user but the
policy of arresting people did. Some went to prison for
having it and others saw their career goals compromised.
MEDICINE
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