The Marijuana Dispatch

More than 40 years ago, psychiatry professor Lester Grinspoon wrote a groundbreaking book on marijuana that the New York Times dubbed at the time “the best dope on pot.” Like many in the medical marijuana community, Grinspoon started out as a skeptic intent on researching marijuana’s harms. But his perspective shifted after a personal experience: He had a son with leukemia who found relief only after he started using marijuana before his chemotherapy treatments. Once he started researching marijuana, Grinspoon found that existing information about marijuana was based on propaganda rather than rigorous scientific study. “I came to realize that I was the one who was misinformed — that despite my training in science and medicine, I had been brainwashed like just about every other citizen of this country.”

“Medicinally I think that folks are beginning to see if there are things which the medical community can help on and has specific ways that they can then I think the legislature might consider that but to move beyond that I would say is a bridge too far but that bridge has not yet been built.”

I feel, at the age of almost 64 years old, that what I’m doing about medical marijuana in my life is probably, and forgive me I loved raising my four sons… this might be the most important thing I’ve ever been involved in in my life. -Ellen Lenox-Smith, Rhode Island

Ellen is in so much pain she can’t climb the stairs, so she uses a motorized chair to get to the basement where she grows her marijuana. “It’s the only thing I have,” said Smith, “This is it. We wouldn’t be having this conversation. I wouldn’t be alive. I mean, I don’t have anything else to turn to.”