Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana Reconsidered (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)

Cited and quoted Becker, and therefore incorporated that work’s inaccuracies.

Primary published sources utilized:

MTA House Hearings

E.H. Cary, “Report of the Committee on Legislative Activities,” J.A.M.A., 108 (1937), 2214.

Archival sources utilized:

none

A former Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Grinspoon served as senior psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston for four decades. He became an advocate for removing restrictions on marijuana research after surveying the paucity of scientific studies concerning its effects. Grinspoon also witnessed the ameliorative qualities of marijuana consumption firsthand in the final years before his teenage son succumbed to leukemia.

In this book Grinspoon highlighted a potential loss to medical research: only a few years after imposition of the MTA, cannabidiol was isolated and identified. Using counterfactual argumentation, he posited that many potential medicinal applications of cannabis could have been explored beginning in the 1940s. This is a plausible alternative timeline, although it assumes that preexisting concerns that marijuana merited strict control had not already reached a tipping point. All the other OMTAH discussed on this site implicitly disagreed to a greater or lesser extent with that proposition: they argued that either (1) a groundswell of popular revulsion against marijuana forced the federal government to act, or, (2) the FBN fomented widespread prejudice against the weed by associating it with out-groups. As noted elsewhere on this site, many authors attempt to incorporate both the “push” and “pull” arguments into an unstable amalgam. The essence of the historiography indicates that marijuana control was an overdetermined outcome—so many factors mitigated in favor of regulation that sooner or later a restrictive law became inevitable. Grinspoon, like the other OMTAH however, provided no explanation as to what motivations caused the law to be proposed and passed, especially its very specific configuration that enabled continued industrial production at the particular moment of mid-1937.

-Grinspoon (p.11) stated dubiously that the MTA caused a “dramatic end to America’s unsupervised romance with Indian hemp and its products. (p.11) Evidence publicly available at the time (see, for example, numerous publications concerning the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act) indicate that significant local and state regulation of marijuana was already in place before 1937. Grinspoon actually made this precise point himself subsequently on page 16.

- Grinspoon stated that the MTA “effectively circumscribed the ‘legitimate’ industrial uses of the plant.” (p. 11) This is essentially correct as long as the reader does not interpret “circumscribed” as tantamount to “prohibited.” In fact, federal officials repeatedly stated they did not wish to impose undue burdens on the domestic hemp industry, and in practice they did not do so. See Grinspoon’s statements on page 12, discussed directly below.

- Grinspoon correctly noted the increasing use of abaca (“Philippine Island hemp”) as naval cordage in the later 19^th century, but then stated incorrectly that the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II cut off supplies of sisal. (p. 12) By the mid-1930s most sisal imported into the U.S. came from Central or South America; the supply of abaca constituted the principal cordage loss from the Philippines, especially since no other locale produced appreciable quantities of this important fiber. Grinspoon did not cite a source for these statements, although it is reasonable to surmise he drew this information from A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky (Hopkins), which he cited earlier on the same page.

- Grinspoon correctly wrote--although vastly understating the scale of the operation--that the U.S. government “briefly encouraged domestic hemp cultivation during the 1940s” (pp. 12-13). Again, he cited no source, here, but probably drew from Hopkins. However, Grinspoon did not connect federal support for hemp production with the MTA, the enabling law that regulated all aspects of the massive increase in cannabis acreage under cultivation between 1942 and 1945.

- Grinspoon correctly noted a general lack of scientific knowledge about marijuana’s effects as a key lacuna exploited by those who viewed it as a dangerous substance. (p. 16) He then stated that inaccurate articles about marijuana’s effects were “rife,” but supplied no documentation to support this claim except references to a few published pieces and Becker’s underwhelming total of 17 articles published after the MTA was promulgated. (pp. 17-19)

- To support his position, Grinspoon identified four works published during the 1930s that indicated the relatively benign effects of marijuana. (pp. 18-20) This accounting certainly indicates a general paucity of research, but also does not suggest a great interest in the scientific community for pursuing the topic. Grinspoon therefore suggests that additional scientific research would have occurred absent federal legislation, but he does not account for the many state and local marijuana control laws already in place that would have deterred such efforts. Moreover, Grinspoon cited the groundbreaking 1940 CBD research of Adams, Hunt, and Clark, in which those authors acknowledged the collaboration of the Treasury Department Narcotics Laboratory. (p. 43)

- Grinspoon relied on Becker (p. 20) for his assessment of the FBN’s role in fomenting the MTA. See critique of Becker on a previous sub-page of this section.

- In discussing the MTA Congressional hearings, Grinspoon stressed the lack of empirical data utilized by government officials to support the case for legislation. As I noted in the article that this website complements, the FBN amassed probably the largest collection of research publications about cannabis that could have been compiled in the 1930s. Federal government officials tried to find out as much as it could, and then made a judgment about how to proceed.

- Grinspoon’s treatment of the MTA’s provisions as reflected in the Congressional hearings was essentially correct, although he did not pick up on the important distinction the law makes between which parts of the plant are, and are not, considered “marihuana.” (pp. 20-26) He presented Dr. Woodward of the AMA as the hero because he stood up for physicians’ privilege to prescribe as they see fit, notwithstanding that very few still used cannabis for medicinal purposes and no appreciable research program existed to find out more about its effects. In fact, reading the text of Woodward’s congressional testimony indicates that his main objection was to the principle of U.S. government interference in the prerogatives of doctors—he expressed no significant interest in cannabis as a therapeutic agent among American physicians.

- Grinspoon’s interpretation stresses a counterfactual: the MTA’s restrictions represented a lost opportunity to research/develop cannabis-based medicines. However, that contention belies the thrust of the pharmacological research and development by the late 1930s. The relative value of pursuing marijuana research paled in comparison to the many other pharmacological opportunities available. It seems unlikely that pharmacological R&D programs would have passed up opportunities to work on more prominent, potentially useful, potentially quite profitable substances (such as central nervous system stimulants and depressants) to concentrate on a very minor item in the pharmacopeia like cannabis.