Upside Down …

This time of the year, the last week of August, always takes me back for a brief visit to a time long gone. It was August 1975. Robert and I returned to our Washington, DC apartment from a week-long trip to the midwest to visit friends and see America. It had been a wonderful trip and we were feeling the exhilaration of being young (late 20s), in love and looking to the future with great hope.

We opened the front door to a nightmare. Our apartment was ransacked! We had been robbed! Or so we thought until we saw the Search Warrant on the kitchen table. Being robbed would have been preferable to the reality— the police had come and seized our supply of marijuana, including four plants we were growing on our secluded sundeck.

NORML ad from 1970s

Some years later I would see this ad from NORML and thought it perfectly encapsulated the feelings of being arrested for marijuana possession. Robert and I both had the feeling of doom and gloom that accompanies the fact of being branded “criminal”. It could have been far worse. Being busted in abstentia is far preferable to being busted in person. No handcuffs or rides in the squad car to the holding cell and then on to booking. Robert would call it a benign bust. And, sad to say, it was helpful that we were white.

Nevertheless, it was traumatic and there was a sense of our world ending before it even got started. We began looking for help and what we found was astonishing. Within two weeks of our arrest Robert made contact with the the National Institute on Drug Abuse Research (NIDA) and received a booklet entitled “Marihuana Research Findings: 1974”. Buried deep in its pages was a small section “Therapeutic Aspects” and what Robert read there would validate what we had already proven to ourselves—marijuana could be helpful in treating Robert’s glaucoma. This small section in a NIDA publication became our Northern Star and set the course of our lives:

In 1971, Hepler (et al.) reported that normal subjects sustained a drop in intraocular pressure following the smoking of marijuana. … This finding has been confirmed by other investigators. Hepler has started a program for treating patients with ocular hypertension or glaucoma, particularly those whose intraocular pressure is not reduced with conventional medication for this purpose.

Hepler’s discovery was unexpected and came about during routine physiological testing of marijuana at UCLA. Ocular testing was one part of a several-year research project conducted by the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse and later taken over by NIDA. The National Commission had been established by President Nixon to study marijuana and return a recommendation for its scheduling. During Congressional hearings it had been noted that there was barely any research about marijuana and its effects on the human body so how could the proper scheduling be determined? The Nixon Administration convinced Congress to “temporarily” place marijuana in Schedule I and to pass the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 into law. He promised the lawmakers he would abide by the Commission’s recommendations.

He didn’t. The Commission recommended that marijuana be decriminalized entirely but Nixon ignored them and marijuana remains in Schedule I until this day.

Robert and I knew little about any of this. We were living in a narrow world that, in part, revolved around keeping Robert’s supply of marijuana replenished. We were certain we had discovered something that no one else knew about and to tell others would jeopardize everything.

Robert contacted Dr. Hepler and in early December 1975 he would travel to California for ten days of testing at UCLA. Dr. Hepler determined that without marijuana Robert would be blind in just a few years. It was marijuana, added to Robert’s conventional medications, that did the trick in terms of lowering his eye pressure to the safe range. These findings proved to be the lynchpin in our legal case. In November 1976, Robert would be found not guilty of marijuana possession by reason of medical necessity. In that same month the federal government, responding to a petition from Robert, would begin sending marijuana cigarettes to a Washington ophthalmologist who would dispense them to Robert and provide regular reports to NIDA and other agencies on Robert’s glaucoma.

In just fifteen months our upside down world became even more crazy but, as they say, a good crazy. Robert’s medicine was secure (or so we thought…there would be hiccups). Publicity in his case was enormous and we immediately heard from other patients who naturally wanted what Robert had—legal access to marijuana for medical purposes. We organized a small group to petition President Carter. Nothing ever came of that but as time went by our small group became larger. We had founded the medical marijuana movement and together we set out to turn the world right side up again. ❖

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