Pubdate: Wed, 27 Feb 2008
Source: New York Sun, The (NY)
Section: Obituaries
Contact:  2008 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC.
Website: http://www.nysun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3433
Author: Stephen Miller, Staff Reporter of the Sun

JOHN P. MORGAN, 68, 'PHARMACO-ETHNOMUSICOLOGIST'

John P. Morgan, who died February 15 at 68, was among the most 
outspoken physicians favoring drug legalization, and testified as an 
expert witness for the defense in hundreds of trials.

A self-described "pharmaco-ethnomusicologist," he liked to track down 
drug references in popular music to illustrate the history of drug 
use in America for students at the City University of New York's 
Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education, where Morgan was 
chairman emeritus of the pharmacology department.

"Alcohol songs, like heroin songs, tend to be negative and warning," 
Morgan told the New Yorker in 2003. "Marijuana songs are almost always funny."

It was as an expert on the non-dangers of marijuana that Morgan was 
best known, especially for his 1997 book "Marijuana Myths, Marijuana 
Facts: A Review of the Scientific Evidence," co-authored with a 
Queens College sociologist, Lynn Zimmer. The book concludes that 
warnings about cancer, addiction, and other side effects are 
overblown, although he did have some reservations about the drug.

"I oppose driving, babysitting, or entering into marital contracts 
after smoking," Morgan said in an Internet video produced by the Drug 
Policy Alliance.

But, hammering home his pro-legalization message, Morgan added that 
if marijuana were found to be harmful, such a finding would be an 
additional reason to legalize it, as the government should then regulate it.

"Marijuana Myths" found approval on the left from the American Civil 
Liberties Union, which relied on Morgan's testimony in defending 
people dismissed from their jobs for positive urine tests. It found 
approval on the right from commentator William F. Buckley, who called 
it "a miracle of intelligent concision." And it was rapturously 
received by the gonzo middle, receiving four stars from the Erowid 
Center, an advocacy organization for psychoactive drugs. Morgan sat 
on the board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Morgan also had a professional interest in narcotics. In a 1985 book 
chapter he coined the word "opiophobia" to describe clinicians who 
habitually under-prescribe pain relievers for seriously ill patients 
"based on an irrational and undocumented fear that appropriate use 
will lead patients to become addicts."

As an expert witness, he argued against heightened penalties for 
crack cocaine by pointing out that smokable cocaine was often less 
potent that the powdered form because it was adulterated by baking soda.

"He taught us the underlying science so that it was possible to 
litigate issues based on facts," the former chairman of the ACLU, Ira 
Glasser, said. Adds Mr. Glasser, "He never let his politics color his 
science. And his knowledge of music was amazing."

A fan of old-time blues who at one point taught classes in music 
appreciation, Morgan pursued a long-term research project into an odd 
form of paralysis that stuck poor residents of Oklahoma City in 1930. 
Memorialized in dozens of blues songs with titles like "Jake Walk 
Blues" was a mass poisoning of at least several hundred who drank an 
adulterated patent medicine to get drunk during the prohibition.

"The jake-leg story is almost completely about class," Morgan told 
the New Yorker. "If someone had poisoned the Canadian source of 
bonded Scotch, something would have been done." He published a 
handful of journal articles on the pharmaco-ethnomusicology of the 
"substance-induced epidemic."

Born into a working-class Cincinnati family in 1940, Morgan attended 
city schools and was a star varsity athlete. He graduated from the 
University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and trained in internal 
medicine at Syracuse University and pharmacology at Johns Hopkins 
University. He began teaching at City College in 1977.

In addition to over 100 papers in academic and medical journals, he 
was responsible for several Merck Manual entries, including at least 
one relating to marijuana, according to a Queens College sociology 
professor, Harry Levine. Morgan was a lifelong fan of the Cincinnati 
Reds and made it out to Shea several times each summer to watch his 
often-hapless squad, which he derided with cheerful epithets. Having 
become an emeritus chair at his 2003 retirement, he continued to 
teach and to amass the cultural effluvia of American drug use over 
the decades. He planned to tour Europe this summer in a new Mercedes, 
then ship the car home. But when he checked himself into Lenox Hill 
Hospital with what appeared to be pneumonia, he was instead diagnosed 
with an extremely aggressive form of leukemia. Within hours, he was dead.

Morgan is survived by a daughter, Jennifer, two sons, Zachary and 
Mark, and five grandchildren. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake