April 18, 2001

From a Press Release by MAPS.
Dr. Grinspoon is a member of the CCLE's Board of Advisors.

Lester Grinspoon, MD, is a remarkable scholar and a remarkable person.
Nearly alone in his chosen profession, he has long stood in opposition to
our government's most irrational, yet ardently held public policy: the
criminal prohibition of marijuana. In an important speech to be delivered
on April 20 to the NORML Convention in Washington, DC, he will spell out
how, at age 44, while in the ascending trajectory of a promising academic
career at one of our leading medical schools, his intellectual honesty
forced him into what has become a lonely, yet rewarding crusade.

In a revealing personal account, Dr Grinspoon credits his discovery of
cannabis as a defining moment in his life, entirely comparable to marriage,
"the gift of children," and his decision to study medicine. In 1967, he
knew little of cannabis except what our government claimed. To his dismay,
he soon learned its policy of marijuana prohibition rested not on science
and medical research but on myth and falsehood. Rather than an article
summarizing its dangers to adolescents, his research produced a more
positive article in Scientific American. This  brought him, along with
unwanted notoriety, a motivation  to write the 1971 book, "Marijuana
Reconsidered," an event which inevitably influenced the rest of his career.

Rather than dwell on the politics of marijuana, Dr. Grinspoon's NORML
address recounts his life as a user. He had never smoked before starting
his research, and held off for quite a while, even after becoming one of
the nation's leading "experts." Eventually, the arguments in favor won out
over any reasons for not smoking and some time in 1972  he took his first
"hit." The balance of his speech analyzes why most of the approximately
eighty million living Americans who defy their government's ban on
marijuana to smoke for social reasons in their youth will eventually give
it up.  More significantly, as a thoughtful older user, he is able to
explain clearly why over ten million seasoned adults at all levels of
society continue to enjoy marijuana for its innocent (and
under-appreciated) enhancement of life's other pleasures - and how many use
it to be more creative and productive.

In light of our increasingly tattered federal dogma, these revelations are,
of course, heresy. The government would have you believe that long-term
marijuana smokers are, at best, poorly motivated "potheads" and losers. Dr.
Grinspoon's speech is an eloquent plea for those of us who know better to
redouble our efforts to bring an end to a policy that, like McCarthyism in
the 1950s, has unjustly damaged many lives and brought disadvantage to many
of America's most creative and thoughtful citizens.