JOHN P. MORGAN, 68, 'PHARMACO-ETHNOMUSICOLOGIST'

John P. Morgan, who died February 15 at 68, was among the most
outspoken physicians favoring drug legalization, and testified as an
expert witness for the defense in hundreds of trials.

A self-described "pharmaco-ethnomusicologist," he liked to track down
drug references in popular music to illustrate the history of drug
use in America for students at the City University of New York's
Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education, where Morgan was
chairman emeritus of the pharmacology department.

"Alcohol songs, like heroin songs, tend to be negative and warning,"
Morgan told the New Yorker in 2003. "Marijuana songs are almost always funny."

It was as an expert on the non-dangers of marijuana that Morgan was
best known, especially for his 1997 book "Marijuana Myths, Marijuana
Facts: A Review of the Scientific Evidence," co-authored with a
Queens College sociologist, Lynn Zimmer. The book concludes that
warnings about cancer, addiction, and other side effects are
overblown, although he did have some reservations about the drug.

"I oppose driving, babysitting, or entering into marital contracts
after smoking," Morgan said in an Internet video produced by the Drug
Policy Alliance.

But, hammering home his pro-legalization message, Morgan added that
if marijuana were found to be harmful, such a finding would be an
additional reason to legalize it, as the government should then regulate it.

"Marijuana Myths" found approval on the left from the American Civil
Liberties Union, which relied on Morgan's testimony in defending
people dismissed from their jobs for positive urine tests. It found
approval on the right from commentator William F. Buckley, who called
it "a miracle of intelligent concision." And it was rapturously
received by the gonzo middle, receiving four stars from the Erowid
Center, an advocacy organization for psychoactive drugs. Morgan sat
on the board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Morgan also had a professional interest in narcotics. In a 1985 book
chapter he coined the word "opiophobia" to describe clinicians who
habitually under-prescribe pain relievers for seriously ill patients
"based on an irrational and undocumented fear that appropriate use
will lead patients to become addicts."

As an expert witness, he argued against heightened penalties for
crack cocaine by pointing out that smokable cocaine was often less
potent that the powdered form because it was adulterated by baking soda.

"He taught us the underlying science so that it was possible to
litigate issues based on facts," the former chairman of the ACLU, Ira
Glasser, said. Adds Mr. Glasser, "He never let his politics color his
science. And his knowledge of music was amazing."

A fan of old-time blues who at one point taught classes in music
appreciation, Morgan pursued a long-term research project into an odd
form of paralysis that stuck poor residents of Oklahoma City in 1930.
Memorialized in dozens of blues songs with titles like "Jake Walk
Blues" was a mass poisoning of at least several hundred who drank an
adulterated patent medicine to get drunk during the prohibition.

"The jake-leg story is almost completely about class," Morgan told
the New Yorker. "If someone had poisoned the Canadian source of
bonded Scotch, something would have been done." He published a
handful of journal articles on the pharmaco-ethnomusicology of the
"substance-induced epidemic."

Born into a working-class Cincinnati family in 1940, Morgan attended
city schools and was a star varsity athlete. He graduated from the
University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and trained in internal
medicine at Syracuse University and pharmacology at Johns Hopkins
University. He began teaching at City College in 1977.

In addition to over 100 papers in academic and medical journals, he
was responsible for several Merck Manual entries, including at least
one relating to marijuana, according to a Queens College sociology
professor, Harry Levine. Morgan was a lifelong fan of the Cincinnati
Reds and made it out to Shea several times each summer to watch his
often-hapless squad, which he derided with cheerful epithets. Having
become an emeritus chair at his 2003 retirement, he continued to
teach and to amass the cultural effluvia of American drug use over
the decades. He planned to tour Europe this summer in a new Mercedes,
then ship the car home. But when he checked himself into Lenox Hill
Hospital with what appeared to be pneumonia, he was instead diagnosed
with an extremely aggressive form of leukemia. Within hours, he was dead.

Morgan is survived by a daughter, Jennifer, two sons, Zachary and
Mark, and five grandchildren.