Dr. Lester Grinspoon may very well be the most influential marijuana activist of all time. If there were an award for achievement in changing the way people think about smoking marijuana Dr. Grinspoon would win hands down. During his more than 4 decades of honest intellectual contributions and recommendation for re-thinking the use of cannabis and the laws related to marijuana Dr. Grinspoon founded the Harvard Mental Health Letter, and was its editor for fifteen years, which among other qualifications, put him in a better position than any contemporary American physician to tell the truth about drugs.

Dr. Grinspoon is Associate Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author or co-author of over 160 journal articles, including his 1995 commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled “Marihuana as Medicine: A Plea for Reconsideration.” His first book, Marihuana Reconsidered, originally published in 1971 by Harvard University Press, was recently republished as a classic. His latest book, Marihuana, the Forbidden Medicine, co-authored with James B. Bakalar, was published by Yale University Press in 1993 (revised and expanded edition, 1997) and has now been translated into ten languages. Dr. Grinspoon was also a reviewer of the 1999 Institute of Medicine report, “Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base.”