‘Grinspoon, Reconsidered’
‘The Shared Legacy of President Richard Nixon and Harvard Medical School (HMS).’
The Epic Story of Dr. Lester Grinspoon
Final installment: ‘Grinspoon, Reconsidered’
‘The Shared Legacy of President Richard Nixon and Harvard Medical School (HMS).’
One consequence of being ahead of one’s time on social issues is institutional rebuke and retribution. Many of us continue to fight against our deadly and corrupt War on Drugs, which is so needlessly ruining the lives of millions of drug users and is harming many who are simply addicted and solely need humane and accessible treatment. It is critical to remember the ways in which different institutions, sadly, including Harvard Medical School (HMS), have worked to stifle free and open discussion of ideas that are contrary to the established norms.
Psychedelics
My father, Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a venerated staff psychiatrist at Harvard Medical for half of a century, was preternaturally ahead of his time on a wide variety of social issues, most poignantly, on cannabis and psychedelics. His 1979 book, ‘Psychedelics Drugs Reconsidered’, was a meticulously researched intellectual masterpiece that, in polite, academic terms, yelled from the rooftops, “We need to study and utilize psychedelics in psychiatry”. It was favorably reviewed by many, including arguably the most brilliant person alive on Earth at the time, Astronomer Carl Sagan, who wrote the following blurb,
A broad-spectrum antibiotic for Western society’s timidity about psychedelic drugs. An exceptionally well-balanced scientific discussion of every aspect – from mysticism to pharmacology to social implications…It is a courageous book that simultaneously succeeds for both popular and scientific audiences.
Harvard begged to differ. At the time, my dad’s boss, Dr. Joseph Coyle, the Chair of the Consolidated Department of Psychiatry, announced in front of a large, combined staff meeting of the Harvard Psychiatry Department, when he met my dad for the first time, “I have seen your book on psychedelics and don’t like it one bit.” He, and several others, actively interfered with and successfully undermined, my dad’s promotion process at HMS.
Four decades later, as societal winds have changed direction, and now that this is a safe and acceptable position to take, three-quarters of our brave psychiatrists across the country currently support psychedelic therapy and my home institution at Harvard Medical hosts a renowned center for the study of psychedelic medicine.
Cannabis
Much has been written about how ahead of his time my dad was on cannabis. His boss Dr. Coyle, and many others in the Harvard Establishment, were determined to shut him down. My dad worked in the same office, at the fabled Massachusetts Mental Health Center, for five decades – from this office, he produced eleven books and one hundred eighty scientific papers. The same Dr. Coyle who gave such a helpful literary critique of my dad’s book on psychedelics, wrote the following letter, which would be reasonable fare for Ron DeSantis’s Florida or, maybe, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, but at Harvard Medical School?
They instructed my dad not to talk about marijuana from his office! Luckily, for all of us, Lester flat-out ignored him, but imagine the social pressure this placed on him.
Further, note the date – 1997. This was one year after California had legalized medical marijuana, and any sensible doctor would be helping further the cause of legal access to medicinal marijuana (which, currently, 94% of Americans support), not trying to bully and intimidate one of the movement’s leaders into silence.
As I discussed in my recent book, ‘Seeing Through the Smoke: A Cannabis Expert Untangles the Truth About Marijuana’, in a chapter called, ‘Doobie No Harm’, the great majority of our nation’s doctors, particularly the psychiatrists, placed themselves on the wrong side of the war on drugs, and helped taint, stigmatize, mislead and incarcerate millions of Americans. These ‘experts’ on ‘drugs of abuse’ as my dad said, were both victims of, and perpetrators of, U.S. Governmental misinformation about cannabis, and other drugs, for decades. (Some are still at it – this is for another day).
Needless to say, HMS, which currently is accepting millions in funding for cannabis research, has never acknowledged either my dad’s contributions or apologized for their efforts to thwart them. No one at HMS is suggesting post-humous promotion, a public apology, or airbrushing back into photos. In their arrogance, they are merely hoping that we all forget.
They were roundly criticized in their own student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, in 2018, for passing over my dad for promotion to full professor, despite those eleven books and 180 scientific papers, due to bias. A piece titled, ‘Grinspoon, Reconsidered’ stated:
Given the circumstances surrounding his promotion, we believe these biases may well have had a significant effect on Grinspoon’s attempt to become a full professor….The immense good Grinspoon’s novel research has done for not only his discipline but for societal issues and law reform is difficult to dismiss and warrants recognition. It has been used to fight for the decriminalization of marijuana possession, which has disproportionately affected communities of color. Grinspoon’s research has also been indispensable in the budding legalization of marijuana in nine states, including Massachusetts.
The historical stigma associated with marijuana is yet another example of the academic consensus on a topic changing over time. Unfortunately, when it is incorrect or based on biases, this consensus has the ability to impede the scientific community from recognizing empirical, scientific research like Grinspoon’s. The only way to rectify these cultural influences on research is to openly acknowledge past mistakes and to update our understanding of what is and isn’t of scientific value.
In the future, we hope that researchers and members of the Harvard community make every effort to recognize novel contributions irrespective of societal trends.
Agree, though five years later, cannabis is now fully legal in twenty-three states, not nine.
Other detractors
My dad wasn’t just being targeted from within the academy. This letter, shown below, was fairly typical of the ones he received, particularly after writing ‘Marihuana Reconsidered’ which called for the legalization of cannabis (with regulation) in 1971. It reads, “You dirty Harvard jew! How much did they pay you for advertising legalization of marihuana?” He also had received death threats.
This pleasant note goes on to read, “We know what you are after. You want to destroy Christian youth and make lots of money at the same time. But believe me, you won’t fool Richard Nixon.”
There are several ironies here. My dad was well-known for turning down compensation for his advocacy work (or this humble author would have been able to afford to quit his exploitative day job as a beaten-down primary care doctor years ago, instead of watching the slow-motion collapse of my profession, from the front rows…).
My dad was offered hundreds of thousands of stock shares in dozens of very early companies, which he never accepted, wishing to preserve his independence. I can’t tell you how much I admire this decision!
There is further irony in the ire at “Harvard” in “you dirty Harvard Jew”. If this poor, deluded White Supremacist had understood that Harvard was on his side about cannabis, and the other drugs – in fact, at that point, the psychiatrists of HMS (with a few notable exceptions), were on board with the entire War on Drugs, then, surely, they wouldn’t have impugned their reputation along with my dad’s.
Richard Nixon
That was one thing this literary Nazi was correct about: Richard Nixon was not fooled by my dad. Nixon knew exactly who he was and what a threat he posed to his incipient War on Drugs, due to my dad’s stature, as well as the cogent, reality-based counter-narrative he was presenting to the public. Thanks to the astute work of star cannabis reporter Daniel Adams, we have Nixon’s presidential briefing from May 26th, 1971. According to Adams,
“Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish,” Richard Nixon fumed in a May 26, 1971, anti-Semitic tirade captured by the Oval Office recording system. “I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists.”
That morning, Nixon had read a review of “Marihuana Reconsidered” in his daily news briefing. A copy of the page provided to the Globe in 2018 by the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum shows Nixon circled Dr. Grinspoon’s name in black ink and scrawled a note to his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman.
“H[aldeman] - I’m sure I recall - this clown is far on the left,” Nixon wrote, underlining the word “far” for emphasis.
This is a copy of the actual briefing:
According to an interview with Dan Adams with my dad, a few years before he passed in 2020, “Dr. Grinspoon laughed joyously when first shown the briefing. “Imagine that,” he said. “I got the attention of one of the world’s biggest [jerks]. It’s a red badge of courage.”
Grinspoon, Reconsidered
Certainly, being passed over for a promotion at HMS isn’t the biggest cost that one can pay in today’s world. My dad isn’t a martyr as much as a role model, for all of us, on how to resist the suppression of academic speech and open exchange of free ideas, and on how to think for oneself on complex societal issues - independent of personal consequence. He is a case study in academic integrity. He is also a case study on how to ignore the ‘nattering nabobs of negativity’ when it comes to social change, and on how to continue - day after day, decade after decade – to believe in your ability to effect change, and on how to put this conviction into practice.
One my favorite quotes from my dad runs as follows, “I had not yet learned that there is something very special about illicit drugs. If they don’t always make the drug user behave irrationally, they certainly cause many non-users to behave that way.”
To me, this statement epitomizes our society’s attitudes and treatment of drug users for the last half-century. One can understand someone like Richard Nixon adopting these policies – he had an important agenda: starting a racist War on Drugs for social control and in order to harm large sections of society that he hated. But why did the medical establishment, as well as so many of our ‘venerated’ institutions go along with this cruel nonsense, only to find themselves on the wrong side of history?
Many of these same institutions, such as my home institution HMS, are currently, a mere dozen or two years later, accepting tens to hundreds of millions in funding to undertake research into these exact same areas that they reprimanded and undermined my dad for pursuing, without apology or correction.
Perhaps some of this money should go toward recognizing and helping the tens to hundreds of millions of (mostly black and brown) lives that have been harmed by our War on Drugs and by this institutional complicity.
In my opinion, if we want to survive as a species, in the face of the gravest threats we have ever faced, such as the nuclear threat (which my dad also wrote and spoke out on during his entire career), the climate threat, the threats to democracy coming from within our country (since when do we ban books?) the threats to democracy around the world, we need to pay attention to the cautionary tale of Dr. Lester Grinspoon, who was attacked from all sides for attempting to tell the truth as revealed by science. Luckily for all of us, in the face of my dad’s determination and integrity, they were unable to stop him.
Working together, we can, and must channel my dad’s spirit and continue his work, so that the world we pass onto our kids is a safe and just one, in which they can flourish.
Fascinating