After years of study, Lester Grinspoon concludes that cannabis, if subjected to rigorous double-blind tests, will prove to treat for many more diseases. He predicts medicine will accept its ability to free manic-depressives from lithium’s creative straightjacket.

 

"Cannabis is going to be recognized as a very important medicine in the treatment of bipolar disorder," Grinspoon promises.

 

When cannabis re-enters the pharmacopoeia, it will be one of the least toxic drugs. "Aspirin kills two thousand people in this country every year," Grinspoon notes. "Cannabis doesn't kill anybody."

 

That lack of toxicity is pot's best hope, he says. Additionally, medical utility will acquaint people with pot in a way that undoes their miseducation, misunderstanding and misperceptions, Grinspoon says.

 

"If it comes in as a medicine, as it clearly is, there's just no denying it," he says. "Only the federal government is denying it. The government is willing to allow a lot of suffering to keep up this bullshit."

 

Why? 

 

"The government is frightened," Grinspoon postulates. "Barry McCaffrey insisted people like me were perpetrating a hoax with medical marijuana because they know that once people see somebody who matters to them, a relative or a friend, who is relieved by cannabis, they appreciate the limited toxicity connected with that. When that happens, people are not going to put up with the prohibition."

 

Retired from Harvard, and free from NORML, he is not done fighting. The Drug Free America Foundation recently asked the Massachusetts medical authorities to investigate Grinspoon’s license to practice medicine because he divulged his pot smoking in the August 2001 High Times (#312).

 

"Dr. Grinspoon's use of an illegal drug puts his patients in danger," wrote DFA director Calvina Fay. As an emeritus, Grinspoon says he is not worried. He now focuses on his family, which will continue to support him. "I think I am going to play tennis, and spend time with my wife," Grinspoon says.

 

As he grows old, he wonders if marijuana eases the aging process. He hopes to add it to the list of enhancements. His website, Marijuana-uses.com contains about 65 affidavits pronouncing pot's usefulness. From Allen Ginsberg's Atlantic Monthly classic, “The Great Marijuana Hoax;” to Paul DeFelice's deposition about cannabis improving skiing and drawing, people volunteer epiphanies about how a good smoke changes their mind and makes life better.

 

The personal introspection cannabis supplies has more value to Grinspoon than psychotherapy. He dreams of smokers who understand that to reap the full rewards of cannabis, they must make an effort. 

 

"It's not just like, 'Oh, this is the best chocolate I've ever had in the world,' That's like neuro-physiological. It's there," he says. "Whereas getting and making use of insight is something that isn't just there. You have to provide the emotional and cognitive setting for that kind of exploration."

 

Pot helps him meditate on his current writing projects or analyze his relationships. "I like to rethink interactions. It's happened that I have then written a note or called and apologized to somebody or corrected something that I said. It's not always hurting people's feelings but just realizing that I was wrong about something," he says.

 

Dr. Lester Grinspoon is not so naïve as to pretend that what he finds useful in cannabis anybody else will find useful. 

 

"What I do defend is the notion that there are things that I can do on cannabis that I was never able to do without it," he says, figuratively passing the joint to the next generation of tokers who seek to further his life's work.

 

Lester Grinspoon Revisited: Part VII

 

Lester and Betsy Grinspoon first witnessed medical marijuana use in their own home. In 1971, doctors diagnosed their oldest son Danny with leukemia.

 

"Danny was torn apart by pain for hours," says Keith Stroup. The vomiting was awful. "Danny got to the point where he was not willing to go through chemotherapy."

 

Having no way to score weed, Lester asked one of Danny's high school friends to buy, Stroup relates.

 

"Danny smoked a couple hits of marijuana before chemo," Stroup says. "Instead of vomiting out the window on the way home, he stopped for a submarine sandwich. That's when  Lester and his wife became sensitized to its importance as medicine."

 

Danny died January 13, 1973. Lester and Betsy spread his ashes at Nauset Inlet in Cape Cod, a place the Grinspoon family once caught a huge striped bass. "He and Betsy go there annually to remember Danny," St. Pierre says.

 

Danny's tragedy armed Grinspoon with the ammunition to spare the life of Kerry Wiley. In December 1989, Wiley, a 35-year-old Californian computer science teacher, faced the death penalty for marijuana possession in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

 

Wiley, who at age 12 was crippled in a 60-foot fall, controlled muscle spasms and beat his addiction to opiates with marijuana.
Malaysian law bans medical marijuana. A 1983 edict commands death by hanging for possession of more than 200 grams of cannabis. Police caught Wiley with 500 grams. This law claimed more than 100 victims, including six British subjects. The prosecutor looked forward to the prestige of executing an American.

 

Wiley's mother contacted Grinspoon. He in turn called capital punishment opponent Ramsey Clark, President Lyndon Baines Johnson's attorney general. Grinspoon and Clark met in 1980 when Clark needed an expert witness to testify for the Ethiopian Zion Coptics, ganja worshippers persecuted by the U.S. government.

 

Clark, one of Grinspoon's heroes, agreed to help Wiley. Clark and Grinspoon flew to Malaysia. As Clark consulted a local attorney to craft a strategy, Grinspoon examined Wiley in the miserable Pudu Prison.

 

For all of Pudu's rats, malnutrition and overcrowding, Wiley found pot there easily. Guards encouraged its use because it prevents violence, Grinspoon says. The day of the trial, Clark called Grinspoon to the stand; he presented a medical necessity defense.

 

The prosecutor promised a three-hour interrogation and began by threatening to charge Grinspoon with practicing medicine in Malaysia without a license.

 

"In a very irritated voice, the prosecutor said 'Look, everything that you have told us comes from books, and from studies. Have you ever seen a patient who used marijuana as a medicine?' I then told the story about my son's use of cannabis," Grinspoon says. "This was a huge, beautiful mahogany courtroom built by the British. As the American Consul who was in the courtroom told me later ‘You could hear a pin drop.'"

 

The American consul escorted Grinspoon to the airport, fearing the prosecutor might arrest him. The judge reduced the sentence to ten strokes with a rattan. Since that might further maim Wiley, Grinspoon scribed a letter to the Malaysian premiere, who also was an MD. The premiere released Wiley. He now lives as a recluse in California.

 

Grinspoon's combination of his congeniality, simple friendliness and his profound knowledge won that case, Clark says.

 

"He is both a highly professional and an extraordinarily gentle, sensitive, humorous person," Clark says of his friend. "He seems to know and practice that humor is one of the best prescriptions we have."

 

That experience, coupled with reading Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine, showed Clark medical marijuana's power.

 

"It taught me that medical science, itself freed from its fears and prejudice, would not only condone, but prescribe, where indicated, marijuana," Clark says.

 

Clark, who also defended the survivors of Waco, supports legalization.

 

"My concerns came up on the criminal law enforcement side of the docket," he says. "I saw it tear up society, injuring young people who had potential to contribute to society and have had no criminal records. It was reinforcing to see that sound medical analysis would support the same conclusions."

 

Lester Grinspoon Revisited: Part VI

 

As a result of the well-researched Reconsidered in 1969, Grinspoon challenged policy before government committees. He remained a non-smoker to boost his appearance of objectivity.

 

By late 1972, Grinspoon understood elected officials sought to undermine his message by quizzing him on his smoking habits. An exchange on the U.S. Senate floor convinced Lester to light up. A hostile Senator inquired if he smoked, he replied:

 

"Senator, I will be glad to answer that question if you will first tell me whether if I answer your question affirmatively, you will consider me a more or less credible witness?" The Senator called Lester impertinent and left.

 

"That was the moment I decided the time had come," Grinspoon says. Within a week, he and Betsy tested a doober at a party. In retrospect, Grinspoon figures that first night he reached an anxiety high.

 

Two tries later, at age 44, he got stoned. He knew because Neopolitan cookies tasted better than ever, and because, he says, he grasped the Beatles' psychedelic masterpiece "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band."

 

"That was the first thing to let me know that I was there," Lester says. "It was an implosion." That, of course, reminds him how later in 1972, he helped John Lennon stay in the U.S.

 

Attorney General John Mitchell, either at Mitchell's wife Martha's behest or because of Lennon's politics, tried to extradite Lennon. Before the trial, Grinspoon dined with John and Yoko.

 

Conversation, of course, drifted to Grinspoon's first cannabis experience with "Sgt. Pepper's." Grinspoon took the stand on Lennon's behalf, and the Beatle was allowed to stay in the country.

 

Around this time, Harvard derailed Grinspoon's bid for professorship. He was nominated and rejected. Seemingly unaffected, Grinspoon used the formula of Marihuana Reconsidered to examine more illegal drugs. In 1975, he published LSD Reconsidered; in 1977, Cocaine Reconsidered.

 

While Harvard balked, Grinspoon's extracurriculars didn't phase his peers in the American Psychiatry Association, so long as the APA profited. In 1980, he struck gold. What if, he wondered, we collected the year's best psychological papers in one book? The APA sold the inaugural Annual Review for $40. It thrives 28 years later.

 

"Harvard hates this," Grinspoon says. "The APA made a lot of money on it. In fact, I got ten percent royalty which I turned over to the department of psychiatry at Harvard because I felt I did so much of this on Harvard time that I really didn't deserve it all."

 

After editing the Annual Review for the American Psychiatry Association four years, Dr. Lester Grinspoon's boycott of drug company perks forced him out of the APA. As chair of the program committee, Grinspoon arranged conferences for 12,000 doctors. He clashed with the APA's medical director over drug industry sponsorship of these conferences.

 

"The drug companies were constantly knocking at the door," Grinspoon says. A drug company that manufactures a drug to treat negative signs of schizophrenia would pay the APA to allow them to run a symposium on treating negative signs of schizophrenia.

 

"Usually, it's not that bald-faced," he says. He suggested that the APA raise dues to maintain its integrity. "That didn't fly," he says.

 

Admitting the brilliance of the Annual Review probably sickened his Harvard superiors. They congratulated him, only to dare him to duplicate the feat for them.

 

"I went home that night and I smoked," Grinspoon says. "I didn't smoke every night, but I did that night and I thought."

 

What about a publication? "See, there was already the Harvard Health letter. I thought 'What about a Harvard Mental Health letter?' It sounded good the next morning," Lester says.

 

Harvard went for it. "The Mental Health Letter has been earning a fair amount of money," Grinspoon says. He edited it for 16 years with James Bakalar, his co-author on 1993's Marihuana: the Forbidden Medicine.

 

Marihuana: the Forbidden Medicine evidences cannabis' medicinal efficacy through hundreds of testimonies written by patients with dozens of ailments. The book, in plain language, provokes intense feelings as the reader learns about people who suffer not only from awful diseases, but a callous government that punishes them for taking the best medicine.

 

"We used a calm tone," Bakalar says. "Several people who have read it said it made them angry. We figured it is better to present it in a not too polemical way, and to state the facts as calmly and objectively as you can."

 

In the partnership, Bakalar says he is the wordsmith and Grinspoon the idea man. The duo has co-written four books since 1973, co-edited another and published numerous articles.

 

"Sometimes we have slight differences of opinion," Bakalar says. "I found that working with him has been very smooth."

 

Bakalar, another non-practicing lawyer (he earned his juris doctor in 1967), never smokes, however, he defends the right of others to.

 

"I have always felt the same way about this issue," he says. "I think the policies are poor and they should be changed."

 

They continue the work of Forbidden Medicine through the website RxMarihuana.org. Structured like the book, patients use the site to describe how pot treats more than 100 illnesses.

 

Lester Grinspoon Revisited: Part V

 

Grinspoon's Marihuana Reconsidered printed a revolutionary essay by Mr. X, a 40-something professor at a leading American university. The author articulated how green bud increases creativity, heightens sensitivity and provides insight in ways unavailable to sobriety.

 

This essay, now featured on Grinspoon's website, marijuana-uses.com, laid the foundation for the concept of cannabis as an enhancement.

 

For more than two decades, Grinspoon held Mr. X's secret. In 1999, four years after Mr. X succumbed to cancer, Grinspoon courted controversy by outing Mr. X as the brilliant professor Carl Sagan, the astronomer renowned for the book Cosmos.

 

Grinspoon and Sagan became friends after meeting at a Boston dinner party in 1967. Among two dozen Ivy Leaguers, Grinspoon, another friend, and Sagan, then a faculty adviser for Cornell’s Students for a Democratic Society, stood alone in denouncing the Vietnam War.

 

"We were these people, and they're all mostly Harvard professors defending the United States and the Vietnam War," Grinspoon says. "We were backed into this corner." Their mutual commitment to pacifism forged a bond that lasted until before Sagan's death.

 

As NORML board chairman, Grinspoon recruited Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, to the NORML board of directors in 1994. Although they're not great friends now, Druyan acknowledges that Grinspoon "has worked long and hard to change public policy on marijuana."

 

NORML founder Keith Stroup invited Grinspoon as the keynote speaker for NORML's inaugural gathering in 1972. Called the First Annual People’s Pot Conference, Stroup herded about 50 potheads into an old church in one of Washington, D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods.

 

"They were very hip people," Grinspoon recalls. "I was still a marijuana virgin. Here I am in my suit, a Harvard professor with a tie and I'm addressing these guys and I thought to myself, 'This is ridiculous. These people know a hell of a lot more about marijuana than I do and I'm giving them a talk on marijuana.'"

 

When Grinspoon boldly predicted pot's legalization within 10 years, Stroup was so impressed he asked Grinspoon to join NORML's board of directors.

 

NORML built a credible public image and power base around Grinspoon. He was looking like a prophet for legalization until the NORML schism of 1978 stopped everything. At a NORML Christmas party, one of President Jimmy Carter's aides got high with Stroup. After Stroup outed the aide, Carter changed his legalization stance and Stroup resigned under pressure.

 

Grinspoon left the board, but his byline consistently appeared in NORML publications until he rejoined as the chairman of NORML's board of directors in 1994.

 

Then-executive director Cowan sought Grinspoon's assistance during the second great NORML schism when NORML was broke, being sued by outgoing board members and in debt to the IRS. Grinspoon immediately faced personal attacks by people who allegedly shared the goal of legal grass.

 

"It took a great deal of nerve going on board in 1994 and dealing with the irresponsible lawsuit," Cowan says.

 

NORML seemed headed for destruction. Grinspoon sought Stroup's help to lead NORML again, and Grinspoon handpicked the next crop of board members. Together, this team guided NORML to stability. Grinspoon resigned in January 2001 with NORML ready to mount an offensive.

 

"It is hard to think of NORML without thinking of Lester," Stroup says. "Was there anyone who has had a more profound effect on marijuana policy in the 30 years NORML has been around? I don't know."

 

Lester Grinspoon Revisited: Part IV

 

Simon and Sally Grinspoon's first son, Lester, was born June 24, 1928. The choleric Lester giggled once the doctor changed his formula. Lester laughed so much his family dubbed him Chuckles.

 

Lester and his brothers Martin, Kenny and Harold shared a small room in a house on Perry Avenue in Boston. The boys played football together, and learned about hard work and neighborly love from their parents.

 

When a neighbor called Simon a dirty Jew, he poured the anti-Semite a long concrete walk still used today. Another neighbor wished Hitler on the family. Simon enlisted Lester's help to build that neighbor a garage.

 

"My father was a real Gandhi," Lester says.

 

"My father was a humanist and a believer in justice," says Harold. "We were just kids when he died. Chuck [Lester] was 21. I was 19. My father was a hard working, very moral, honest type of guy. My mother was hard working. Lester picked up those habits."

 

Even in grade school, Lester tried to do right, Harold says. "He was well respected in schools," Harold says. "In junior high school, Lester was head of the student patrol that helped children cross the streets. He was friendly and warm. He was a tough act to follow."

 

Harold pulled it together, though. He runs Aspen Square Management, which owns and operates rental housing units in 22 states.  Like a brother, Harold says Lester can be "a little biased" on some issues. Yet Harold applauds Lester's quest to understand marijuana. "I think it's great," he says.

 

The first draft of Marihuana Reconsidered questioned the widespread belief of marijuana's toxicity. The now-defunct Journal of Psychiatry published it whole. A shorter version in Scientific American generated considerable response.

 

As the magazines reached newsstands, the Harvard University Press asked Grinspoon to write a book on how cannabis evolved from a valuable medicine to a mythical Mephistophelean agent of personal destruction.

 

To the chemical descriptions of THC, and its psychological effects, Grinspoon added an exhaustive deconstruction of the marihuana bibliography, especially the French literature from "Le Club des Haschischins" of the 1840s.

The footnote-laden analysis, which became Marihuana Reconsidered in 1971, cracks the lens of the French hashish eaters and the subsequent century of prohibition.

 

Poets like Theophile Gautiere libeled ganja with lurid descriptions, hyperbolic hallucinations and hellish highs. They were "largely products of effusive imagination under the influence of copious amounts of hashish," Grinspoon claims. The "teachings" of Harry Anslinger, our first drug czar, echo the French writings.

 

In laboring through the utterly dense Reconsidered, Allen St. Pierre, the current executive director of the NORML Foundation, consulted many reference books for context.

 

"We go through cycles throughout humanity," St. Pierre postulates. "It looks like one of the things Grinspoon's pointing out is that intellectuals of the day skewed to a large degree the future understanding of marihuana. If we advance the clock 100 years, we are still in the same mess.

 

"I describe myself as Grinspoonian as to how I came to arrive at my particular views and opinions," St. Pierre testifies. "Lester is an out-of-the-box thinker."

 

Lester Grinspoon Revisited: Part III

 

Dr. Lester Grinspoon started his journey by dropping out of high school his senior year in 1947. His younger brother Martin had just died. Lester lasted 14 months in the quasi-military Merchant Marine before attending college.

 

Tufts University bestowed Grinspoon with magna cum laude honors upon his 1951 graduation. After finishing medical school in 1955 with more Latin honors, he labored in futility for two years in Los Angeles looking to cure a type of cancer.

 

His return home in 1958 to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center established his legacy. Grinspoon prescribed lithium carbonate for bipolar disorder for the first time in America. European and Australian doctors used lithium for years before, Grinspoon says. Why?

 

"Lithium is a metal. It's in the periodic table. No patent, no money," he says, with a tangible disgust of the pharmaceutical industry's greed.

 

Upon learning of lithium's effectiveness, Grinspoon had the Kenmore Pharmacy package lithium carbonate in 400 mg pills. "I gave it to a patient with bipolar disorder and it was remarkable," he says. Years later, he won an Orphan Drug Award, which allowed Smith Klein and French to produce it exclusively at a profit.

 

Throughout the early 1960s, Grinspoon championed the rights of the mentally ill. Former Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis knew Grinspoon and Betsy from her days at Swarthmore College.

 

Grinspoon loves to talk about how he once saw Dukakis, dressed to the nines, walking to work by the banks of the Charles River and picking up litter.

 

Dukakis - who says he is re-examining his views of the drug war after watching Steven Soderbergh's Traffic - remembers Grinspoon from public television's "The Advocate Show" in the early 1970s. Dukakis took note of Grinspoon's fight to keep mental hospitals open.

 

"Lester has been one of the great leaders in mental health in the state, particularly in children's services," the three-term Bay state governor says. "It distinguishes him in my mind."

 

Grinspoon's overriding concern for youth led him to marijuana. In 1967, he stumbled upon two months while waiting for his co-authors to finish a book on schizophrenia. Grinspoon seized the time to research hemp's hazards.

 

"I thought maybe some of those foolish young kids would listen to an objective assessment of what was known about this," Grinspoon says, "and stop using this terrible, dangerous drug. Can you imagine what I experienced as I read this stuff and then when I started to work for three years on Marihuana Reconsidered and began to appreciate how brainwashed I had been mainly by the U.S. government?"

 

As a physician, Grinspoon realized he unwittingly spread disinformation. "That was an extraordinary experience for me," he says. Confronted by this reality, Grinspoon let his conscience - shaped by his father - dictate his actions.

 

"My father was a lawyer who hated the chicanery of law," Grinspoon says. "He felt that you couldn't be an honest man at least in the way that he could practice law in Boston."

 

So Grinspoon's father took an honest job - police officer.

 

Lester Grinspoon Revisited: Part II

Editor's Note: This story took me almost a year to complete, from reading Grinspoon’s books, to dozens of interviews and hundreds of phone calls. It was first published in High Times in March, 2002. It has not been published since then, but is going online now.

 

I am reprinting it in dead tree media from May through July 2009, in serial form, for a few reasons. First, if G.B. Trudeau can recycle his Doonesbury cartoon to take a needed break, so can I.

 

Second, the state of Connecticut seems to want to legalize, but a few high-powered Republican women keep us from moving: State Senator Toni Boucher of Wilton and Gov. M. Jodi Rell.

 

Boucher recently broke into tears on the Senate floor exhorting the dangers of marijuana.  Rell, with her threats to veto the death penalty repeal and her staunch opposition to medical marijuana, shows how far behind the electorate she is.

 

Yet paradoxically, people love her.  It is my sincere hope that both Sen. Boucher and reads Gov. Rell read this story. Thus, I dedicate this article about the legendary Dr. Lester Grinspoon to them.

 

Dr. Lester Grinspoon usually waits until evening to inhale. He prefers a vaporizer because it uses less grass and lowers the harmful tars of smoking weed, but if it's plentiful, he gladly rolls a joint.

 

Sparking up in the afternoon reduces his ability to work, even in retirement. More than his mind wandering, Lester admits that he talks too much when he's high.

 

His adventures, collected during his 72 years, tell of a man who pursued risk, made sacrifices and reaped rewards. They reveal a person who challenged himself and showed the courage to change.

 

Grinspoon's accomplishments are many. He gave credibility to the pot movement with the publication of Marijuana Reconsidered and ushered in the age of medical marijuana with Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine.

 

He prevented John Lennon's deportation and helped save a American charged with marijuana possession in Malaysia from a death sentence; traveled the world as a reasonable ambassador for the sacred herb and chaired NORML's Board of Directors

 

He's introduced a lexicon that frames marijuana as an enhancement tool for sex, music, food, sports, spirituality and anything else you can think of that is improved by smoking pot.

 

Oh yeah, he was an accomplished academic researcher and physician. He was the first person to prescribe lithium for manic depression in North America, and he made the American Psychiatry Association and Harvard University millions from publishing ideas like the Annual Review and the Harvard Mental Health Letter.

 

Thing is, when baked, Lester, like most stoners, tends to branch off on tangents. He'll start the story about how Harvard University withheld full professorship for his heretical views on drugs.

 

Soon enough, some phrase reminds him of how, in 1993, Harvard awarded then-drug czar Barry McCaffrey the prestigious Zinberg Award for drug scholarship.

 

"It's like giving the Elie Wiesel Award to a Nazi," says Dick Cowan, former head of NORML - the National Organization for the Reformation of Marihuana Laws - and now in charge of the Media Awareness Project. "They placed prohibitionist ideology above intellectual standards."

 

In protest, Lester resigned from the faculty of Harvard's Zinberg Center for Addictions, one of his many posts in Cambridge. Halfway through the Zinberg incident, he refers to 1989's highlight, when he and former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark flew to Malaysia to save an American man facing death for marijuana possession.

 

"But I'll get to that later," Grinspoon says, leaning back in his black lawyer's chair, seated at his desk of his basement home office in posh Wellesley, Mass. His words soothe like a jazz solo."

 

"Where were we?" His hazel eyes, aided by thick glasses, scan the wood-paneled wall for answers, passing photos of his wife Betsy and his three children.

 

Yes, he says, the dean threatened him that if he wrote about illegal drugs instead of schizophrenia, he would suffer consequences. Despite prolific writing for 35 years in the Ivy League's publish-or-perish climate, Grinspoon stayed at associate professor.

 

"How many people would pass up promotions at Harvard for their personal values and beliefs?" asks ecstasy expert Rick Doblin, who, inspired by Grinspoon's success, earned his Ph.D. at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

 

"Lester gained more than he lost in fighting the system in that way," Doblin says. "He is honored by his enemies."

 

Over at Columbia University, the prohibitionist Center for Addictions and Substance Abuse, led by Reaganite Joe Califano, had no comment on "Dr. Witherspoon."

 

Ironically, Grinspoon's affiliations with the leading American academics furnished international credibility for the burgeoning drug policy reform movement.

 

"Lester is a magnificent dancer," says Ram Dass. Dass, a.k.a. Richard Alpert, knows waltzing. Harvard excommunicated Alpert and Timothy Leary in 1963 for promoting LSD. "I mean dancing in social situations, dances with Harvard, dances with drugs, dances with all of us in the psychedelic family."

 

Alpert and Grinspoon attended Newtown (MA) High School. "He was a spoiled little bastard, an awful person," Grinspoon says of the teenaged Alpert. "I didn't like him. His father owned the New Haven Railroad. They were very wealthy. He wouldn't speak to his father."

 

At Harvard, Alpert and Grinspoon worked at the Joslin Diabetic Camp. Dass was a counselor, Grinspoon headed the laboratory. Once Alpert left for India and transformed into Ram Dass, "Servant of God," he and Grinspoon lost contact.

 

I'm a psychiatrist who has treated a lot of people," Grinspoon says. "I've never seen personal growth like this man, Dick Alpert to Ram Dass, has made. To me, he is a model of what people can do."

 

Only since Dass suffered a stroke two years ago have they reacquainted. Grinspoon steered Dass to medicinal marijuana. They are now two souls, Dass says. "I respect the way he is playing the game," Dass says. "I respect the wisdom that he is using. His heart is in the right place. We are in harmony."

 

Lester Grinspoon Revisited: Part I