The Epic Story of Dr. Lester Grinspoon - Part 1

Otherwise known as my dad...

The Epic Story of Dr. Lester Grinspoon

My dad grew up with few advantages. His family was dirt poor. Anti-Semitism was rampant. He lost a dad, a brother, and a son - a disabled brother Marty at age 16 and his father Cy at age 18. He decided to quit high school and join the merchant marine, and he then went to Tuft University on scholarship, and then to Harvard Medical on scholarship – all without ever receiving a high school diploma. He met my mom, his partner for the last 66 years of his life, at a blind date at an Adlai Stevenson rally because, ‘it was the only thing I could afford’.

When he passed away, at the age of ninety-two, he had eleven books and one hundred eighty scientific papers under his belt. He’s spent his career as a celebrated, if somewhat persecuted, psychiatrist at Harvard Medical. He was the Founding Editor of the spectacularly popular ‘Harvard Mental Health Letter’. He had achieved international acclaim for his pioneering and always-courageous works on cannabis, psychedelics, other drugs of use/misuse (cocaine, amphetamines), schizophrenia, psychiatry, drug policy, and for his highly impactful participation in the anti-nuclear movement.

I remember watching Saturday Night Live as a kid, and they even made a joke about him on ‘Weekend Update’.

His prescience on the most pressing social issues of the time was legendary. His 1979 book, ‘Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered’ combed through the scientific and cultural literature and concluded by demanding the urgent investigation into the potential psychiatric benefits of psychedelics. At the time, this was a heretical view in the psychiatric community. It was almost four decades before these ideas became in vogue again, and, currently, three-quarters of psychiatrists support psychedelic therapies.

At the time, the newly appointed director of the Psychiatry Department at Harvard announced to him, in front of the entire staff at his hospital, “I’ve read your book on Psychedelics and I don’t like it one bit.”

History has roundly concluded: you were wrong, motherfucker.

There were articles in both ‘The Boston Globe’ and ‘The Harvard Crimson’ detailing how he was denied promotion in retaliation for his outspokenness on progressive social issues. The Harvard Crimson states, "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. In the future, we hope that researchers and members of the Harvard community make every effort to recognize novel contributions irrespective of societal trends."

Ouch. 

And, speaking of my dad’s prescience, let us not fail to mention that in 1971, just as Tricky Dick was ramping up his vicious, racist war on cannabis users, my dad stated, in his masterpiece “Marihuana Reconsidered’:

We must consider the enormous harm, both obvious and subtle, short-range and long-term, inflicted on the people, particularly the young, who constitute or will soon constitute the formative and critical members of our society by the present punitive, repressive approach to the use of marihuana. And we must consider the damage inflicted on legal and other institutions when young people react to what they see as a confirmation of their view that those institutions are hypocritical and inequitable. Indeed, 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. If we are to avoid having this harm reach the proportion of a national disaster within the next decade, we must move to make the social use of marihuana legal.

Amen.

If ‘let's research psychedelics for medical usage’ was heretical in 1979, calling for cannabis legalization in 1971, at a time when only twelve percent of Americans supported this idea, and at a time when the intellectual division between Government Propaganda on Cannabis and Psychiatric Position Papers on Cannabis had entirely vanished – this was potentially suicidal to one’s academic career. My dad knew he was right, so he kept going. It didn't hurt that 'Marihuana Reconsidered' was glowingly reviewed on the front page of 'The New York Times Book Review'.

It is absolutely tragic that we didn’t listen to my dad at the time. We could have avoided twenty million useless, cruel, bigoted cannabis arrests. Our research on the safe therapeutic uses of both cannabis and psychedelics – entire fields of psychiatry and medicine - would be one half-century more advanced. 

His best friend throughout much of my father's adult life, an astronomer named Carl Sagan, shared my dad’s idealism, love of learning, and fearlessness in the face of ignorance and political intransigence. They were arrested together at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, protesting in order to help force our government into negotiating a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, so that we'd be less likely to blow ourselves up. Together they were convinced they could change the world.

They did.

This story is to be continued. In my next newsletter, I explore the astounding tale of when Richard Nixon tried to have John Lennon deported on weed charges - with my dad coming to the rescue…