himself, and that 80 percent of his references were misleading or distorted.^[21] Nonetheless, his work is still a primary source of scientific justification for the war on marijuana.

On a blustery winter morning in 1990, Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon was in his Cambridge office listening to the windows rattle when he got a call from a desperate woman on the other side of the country. She had read some of Grinspoon’s work—he literally wrote the book on medical marijuana—and she needed help. Her son had been arrested in Malaysia for possession of half a pound of cannabis. She wanted to take a chapter from one of Grinspoon’s works—“Medical Uses of Illicit Drugs”—and rewrite it in the form of an affidavit. When her son was twelve, she said, he had fallen off a 60-foot cliff while hiking. The newspapers called his survival a “Christmas Miracle,” but his left shoulder was permanently deformed and subject to excruciating muscle spasms. The young man later discovered that cannabis controlled the pain better than anything the doctors had given him and it had fewer side-effects.   So when he went to Malaysia on a year-long sabbatical, he had foolishly mailed himself a package of marijuana.

Grinspoon was shaken. He told the woman she needed a hell of a lot more than an affidavit. Malaysian law doesn’t differentiate between marijuana or heroin or cocaine. To them all drugs are encompassed within the catch-all term, “dadah.” The penalty in Kuala Lampur for possession of half a pound of dadah is death by hanging and they aren’t kidding. More than a hundred drug users and traffickers have seen their last sunrise from a Malaysian gallows. Grinspoon put her in touch with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a man who knows something about travelling to the boondocks in defense of human rights, and Clark flew to Kuala Lampur to get the lay of the land. On his return, he and Grinspoon mapped out a medical necessity defense that seemed ironclad. Then Grinspoon assembled his supporting documents and took off for Asia.