Lester Grinspoon, Sgt. Pepper, and marijuana

Photo: Barbara Alper

From an obituary for Dr. Lester Grinspoon, 92, in today's NY Times:

...Dr. Grinspoon was an unlikely crusader for marijuana. At first, he believed that it was a dangerous drug. When the astronomer Carl Sagan, a friend who was also teaching at Harvard, offered him a joint in the late 1960s, Dr. Grinspoon warned him against continuing to smoke it.

“He took another puff and said, ‘Here, Lester, have some,’” he told The Boston Globe in 2018. “‘You’ll love it and it’s harmless.’ I was absolutely astonished.”

Dr. Sagan’s response was, in effect, a challenge. Dr. Grinspoon plunged into a review of existing research, hoping to find studies that agreed with his view of marijuana’s medical risks. 

He found that 19th-century physicians prescribed marijuana for pain and to help people sleep, but he found nothing to back decades of hysteria that marijuana was addictive, the view embodied in the lurid 1936 film “Reefer Madness” and the federal government’s decision to make it illegal a year later.

He concluded that marijuana was a relatively safe intoxicant that should be regulated like alcohol. The real danger, he said, was criminalizing its users.

After previewing his findings in an article in Scientific American in 1969, Dr. Grinspoon wrote “Marihuana Reconsidered.” It was published in 1971.

“The greatest potential for social harm lies in the scarring of so many young people and the reactive, institutional damages that are direct products of present marihuana laws,” Dr. Grinspoon wrote. “If we are to avoid having this harm reach the proportions of a real national disaster within the next decade, we must move to make the social use of marihuana legal"...

...Dr. Grinspoon was a “scholarly, kind of nerdy guy,” his son David said in an interview. “That was part of his power when he got involved in the issue. He was a very professorial person, not a hippie.”

Dr. Grinspoon had not tried marijuana while acquiring his expertise in it. After his book was published, he defensively told some interviewers who were surprised by his restraint that he had also written a book on schizophrenia without having experienced it.

But he did relent. He and his wife, Betsy, tried marijuana twice in 1972, but were chagrined that they were unable to get high.

On their third attempt, however, they listened to the Beatles’ album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” — which Dr. Grinspoon had largely ignored in the past when his sons played rock music in the house — and achieved a thrilling high.

“It was for me a rhythmic explosion, a fascinating new musical experience!” he wrote in an essay on his website. “It was the opening of new musical vistas”...

See also Albert Hoffman takes the first acid trip.