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by Fred Gardner, editor of O'Shaughnessy's Journal of the California Cannabis Research Medical Group
Most drug-policy-reform advocates know the name of Judge Francis Young and many can quote a line from his 1988 recommendation that the DEA remove marijuana from Schedule One: "Marijuana is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man."
Few if any activists know the name of Judge James A. Washington. And whereas Judge Young's recommendation was rejected by the DEA, Judge Washington's decision in United States v. Robert Randall had an actual and significant impact.
Randall, who faced blindness from glaucoma in his late 20s, would be the first patient to get marijuana from the federal government under an "investigational new drug" protocol. Some 30 other people with serious illnesses followed Randall into the IND program, which was closed to new patients in 1991. Four surviving patients receive federal cannabis to this day.
US v Randall was tried by Judge Washington in Washington, DC, Superior Court, over the course of two days in July, 1976. The prosecutor was Assistant US Attorney Richard Stolker. Randall's attorney John Karr recalled in a recent interview, "Judge Washington had been dean of the Howard University Law School before his appointment to the bench and I knew him to be extremely intelligent and compassionate. A non-jury trial was fine with me."
Randall relied on a "medical necessity" argument, which Karr summarized as: "faced with a choice of certain blindness or using marijuana to save your sight, a reasonable person would use marijuana."
The key witness was Robert Hepler, MD, a UCLA opthalmologist who had monitored Randall's use of all the pharmaceutical drugs then used to treat glaucoma, and confirmed that only marijuana could stop the progression to blindness.
Here are the facts as recounted by Judge Washington in his decision:
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