His first stop was the grim fortress-like Pudu Prison where he examined the young man and found him, not surprisingly, terrified, depressed, and subject to muscle spasms in his arm and shoulder. Over the next several days, Grinspoon worked with the defendant’s Malaysian attorney, giving him an education in the medical necessity defense.  After walking the man through the three-thousand-year history of cannabis, recounting its widespread medical use from the beginning of the written word up through 1937, the lawyer was open-mouthed.  He immediately began making phone calls to influential Malaysian doctors and lawyers and arranged for them to hear the same lecture the next night.  They too were amazed when Grinspoon told them that a ground-breaking study of the medicinal uses of cannabis was based on observations right there in Malaysia in 1839.^[22]

But when the legal team reached the court house next morning, they were almost blown out of the water before Grinspoon could open his mouth. The lawyer introduced his American expert, and the judge exploded. “Why have you brought this man halfway around the globe to testify when it has been established that the defendant possessed 265.7 grams of cannabis and the punishment is prescribed?”

Reluctantly, since Grinspoon had already made the trip, the judge agreed to let him speak even though it was obviously pointless. But as with the audience of the night before, the judge’s skepticism melted, he became intrigued, and finally brushed the lawyer aside and began questioning the witness himself. Grinspoon told him the defendant was one of thousands of people who claim that marijuana is the best thing they can find for controlling the kind of painful spasms associated with quadriplegia, multiple sclerosis, and traumatic nerve injury.

After lunch, it was the prosecutor’s turn. Grinspoon had been warned that the state was anxious to swing this young American from the yard-arm and they did not look kindly on this intevention. In his opening volley, the prosecutor threatened to have Grinspoon himself arrested and thrown in prison for not