Pubdate: Sat, 04 Jul 2020
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2020 The New York Times Company
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Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Richard Sandomir

LESTER GRINSPOON, INFLUENTIAL MARIJUANA SCHOLAR, DIES AT 92

Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a Harvard psychiatry professor who became a
leading proponent of legalizing marijuana after his research found it
was less toxic or addictive than alcohol or tobacco, died on June 25
at his home in Newton, Mass. He was 92.

His son David confirmed the death.

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 late-1930s
film "Reefer Madness" (originally called "Tell Your Children") and the
federal government's decision to make it illegal in 1937.

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."

Reviewing the book in The New York Times, James L. Goddard, a former
commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, praised Dr.
Grinspoon's research.

"I can only express my admiration for the manner in which Grinspoon
has extracted, analyzed and synthesized the most relevant literature
to present the reader with a coherent, logical case," Mr. Goddard wrote.

The review - its headline read, "The best dope on pot so far" - caught
the attention of President Richard M. Nixon, who had begun to push a
hard line on drugs. President Nixon circled Dr. Grinspoon's name on a
clipping of the review and wrote, "This clown is far on the left."

The book was published a year after the founding of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML. Dr.
Grinspoon, who would serve on the organization's board of directors
and its advisory board, became one of its scientific mentors, his book
an intellectual road map to legalization.

"In the early days, he gave us incredible credibility," Allen St.
Pierre, a former executive director of NORML, said in an interview.
"He showed there was a history to marijuana, that it hadn't just been
discovered by hippies in the 1960s. And by the time I came on the
scene in 1990, Lester had achieved a high status in the marijuana
reform movement; he was the person people respected the most."

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."

Dr. Grinspoon told his story to John Lennon the night before
testifying for him at a United States Immigration and Naturalization
Service deportation hearing in 1972; pivotal to the government's
effort to deport Lennon was his earlier conviction in England for
possessing cannabis resin, or hashish.

When Leon Wildes, Lennon's lawyer, questioned Dr. Grinspoon, Mr.
Wildes sought to prove that hashish was not a narcotic and that
possessing it should not be cause for deportation. During his
questioning, Mr. Wildes asked, "Dr. Grinspoon, is cannabis resin marijuana?"

"No, cannabis resin is not marijuana," Dr. Grinspoon
replied.

"Is cannabis resin a narcotic drug?" Mr. Wildes asked.

"No, cannabis resin is not a narcotic drug," Dr. Grinspoon
responded.

Lennon won the case when a federal appeals court ruled in 1975 that
his British conviction was not enough to deport him.

Lester Grinspoon was born on June 24, 1928, in Newton. His father,
Simon, a Russian immigrant, was a lawyer; his mother, Sally (Rose)
Grinspoon, went to work as Isaac Asimov's secretary at the Boston
University School of Medicine after her husband's death in 1949.

Concerned that his parents could not afford to send him to college,
Lester dropped out of high school and joined the merchant marine.
Then, although he did not have a high school diploma, he graduated
from Tufts University, where he studied chemistry and
biochemistry.

After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1955, he served in the
United States Public Health Service before starting his residency at
the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston. He then joined the
center's staff as a psychiatrist and stayed for 40 years. He also
spent 42 years on the faculty of Harvard Medical School before
retiring in 2000.

Dr. Grinspoon came to believe that Harvard's discomfort with his
marijuana activism led to the university's refusal to promote him from
associate professor of psychiatry to full professor. Although
Harvard's actions hurt him for a while, David Grinspoon said, his
father "got to a point where he didn't care about that."

After finishing "Marihuana Reconsidered," Dr. Grinspoon found a
compelling personal reason to believe in pot's medicinal value. His
son Danny had been treated for acute lymphocytic leukemia for four
years and in 1971 had begun taking a drug that caused severe nausea
and vomiting.

Dr. Grinspoon's wife, Betsy, suggested that Danny try marijuana. Dr.
Grinspoon rejected the idea partly because it was illegal. But Ms.
Grinspoon ignored him. On the day of Danny's next treatment, she drove
him to his high school, where she asked one of his friends in the
schoolyard to get them some marijuana.

After smoking it in the hospital parking lot, Danny was suddenly free
of the anxiety he had previously felt before taking the drug and
experienced none of the prior side effects. His doctor encouraged him
to smoke in his office before being treated with the drug at each
subsequent chemotherapy session.

"From then on, he used marijuana before each treatment, and we were all much 
more comfortable during the remaining year of his life," Dr. Grinspoon wrote 
in "Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine," the follow-up to "Marihuana 
Reconsidered," written with James B. Bakalar and published in 1993.

The sequel "helped propel the serious legislative and legal issues
surrounding the medicinal use of marijuana in California in the
mid-1990s," said Mr. St. Pierre, the former NORML executive.

Today, adult possession of marijuana is legal in 11 states and the
District of Columbia, and 33 states and the District of Columbia let
patients with a doctor's supervision have access to marijuana or its
plant-derived products at retail dispensaries.

Dr. Grinspoon married Evelyn Popky, known as Betsy, in 1954. In
addition to her and their son David, he is survived by two other sons,
Peter, a physician, and Joshua; five grandchildren; and two brothers,
Harold and Kenneth.

After getting that first high while listening to the Beatles, Dr.
Grinspoon continued to smoke marijuana with his wife and his sons (but
only after they became adults). He also earned the distinction of
having Barney's Farm, a marijuana seed developer in the Netherlands,
create a strain of cannabis called Dr. Grinspoon.

On its website, Barney's Farm describes Dr. Grinspoon as offering "an
old school sativa of the highest order, which gives a strong,
long-lasting, energetic and cerebral high."