READ UP ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

Editor:

[Re: "The Missoula Study," June 20, reference to
Randall Robinson]

The reference should be to the late Robert Randall, not to Randall
Robinson, who is, I believe, an African-American political activist
who was instrumental in bringing about American divestiture in South
Africa during apartheid.

The late Robert Randall, with his partner Alice O'Leary, is largely
responsible for launching the movement for medical cannabis; without
him, the IND program would have been terminated long before it was,
there would have been no wave of state legislation in the 1980s, and
none of the survivors in the "Missoula Study" would have received
their cannabis.

It's a shame that so few people now know the stories of so many people
that Bob and Alice supported through the original Alliance for
Cannabis Therapeutics, operated from their Washington, D.C., home.

I cannot highly enough recommend Randall and O'Leary's
Marijuana Rx: The Patients Fight for Medicinal Pot
(New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1998). It's right up
there with Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On in
exposing the ignorant, hateful underbelly of drug
policy in America.

There won't be a TV movie -- the drug czar would object, and the
advertisers would hear all about it -- so anyone who cares to put even
a moment's thought to medical cannabis in America needs to read this
to have any idea what it has been like for people who, like Bob, awoke
one day on the other side of the looking glass.

Regards,

R.D. WINTHROP

[Michael King replies: Mr. Winthrop is of course correct about Robert
Randall, and I can only plead that brain lock at deadline must have
led me to type the name "Randall Robinson." His letter allows me to
add a correction provided by George McMahon, the subject of "A Quarter
Ounce a Day." Concerning the Missoula Study's conclusion that all the
study patients needed to occasionally supplement their supplies of
government-issue marijuana by other means, McMahon writes: "I have had
periods of slow delivery, but have not supplemented my government
marijuana ever. Though I told the Missoula Study folks this, they
apparently did not believe me. So all my years of not doing so were
for nothing. I would appreciate your help in stopping this idea. I
really have smoked bad government marijuana and only that, for so
long, only to prove that it works."]