Top 8 Quotes & Sayings by Lester Grinspoon

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American doctor Lester Grinspoon.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Lester Grinspoon

Lester Grinspoon was an American psychiatrist and long-standing associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School best known for his groundbreaking works on the science and social policy of cannabis, psychedelics and other drugs, and for his commitment to changing harmful drug policies. He concurrently served as a senior psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston, Massachusetts for 40 years. Grinspoon was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychiatric Association. He was founding editor of The American Psychiatric Association Annual Review and Harvard Mental Health Letter. Grinspoon was editor of Harvard Mental Health Letter for fifteen years.

We in this country have to make up our minds -- -- we can not have it both ways: we cannot be both drug-free and free.
I began to study marijuana in 1967... I had not yet learned that there is something very special about illicit drugs. If they don't always make the drug user behave irrationally, they certainly cause many non-users to behave that way.
I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, un-available to us without such drugs.
Cannabis is remarkably safe. Although not harmless, it is surely less toxic than most of the conventional medicines it could replace if it were legally available. Despite its use by millions of people over thousands of years, cannabis has never caused an overdose death.
I've been smoking marijuana for 44 years now, and ... I think it's a tremendous blessing.
Marijuana is effective at relieving nausea and vomiting, spasticity, appetite loss, certain types of pain, and other debilitating symptoms. And it is extraordinarily safe - safer than most medicines prescribed every day. If marijuana were a new discovery rather than a well-known substance carrying cultural and political baggage, it would be hailed as a wonder drug.
I have come to doubt whether the FDA rules should apply to cannabis. There is no question about its safety. It is one of humanity's oldest medicines, used for thousands of years by millions of people with very little evidence of significant toxic effects. More is known about its adverse effects than about those of most prescription drugs.
Marijuana is one of the least toxic substances in the whole pharmacopoeia — © Lester Grinspoon
Marijuana is one of the least toxic substances in the whole pharmacopoeia
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