We’re a little late with this – Dr. Peter Grinspoon’s New Year’s substack message to his thousands of followers. Peter is the Harvard Medical School doctor who is widely considered one of the world’s leading experts on the medical benefits of cannabis.
Thanks to you my readers, 2024 has been an incredibly successful and meaningful year for my blog “Grinspoon on Drugs”. My writings are unique in that they are scientifically referenced, hand-written, and informed by my 25 years as a general doctor, who has always been, in one way or another, multidimensionally immersed in drug culture.
This blog is about all drugs – those with great potential for human advancement, to advance our health, to evolve our consciousness and give us better ways of connecting with each other – or those drugs with potential for abject misuse. We discuss what goes wrong when drug use starts out as helpful or enjoyable and descends into addiction.
There is still tons of work to do, starting with dismantling our nightmarish War on Drugs which needlessly ruins so many lives. My family, starting with my father, the legendary Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Lester Grinspoon, has been working on this for more than half a century. We need to stop arresting people for nonviolent drug charges, such as simple possession of cannabis, and we need to get all nonviolent drug offenders out of prison. We need to expunge records, so that people can start to rebuild their lives again. This context provides the background many of the blogs I write.
In Grinspoon on Drugs, we discuss prescribed drugs, street drugs, pharmaceutical drugs, over the counter drugs, gray market drugs, experimental drugs, ancient potions, the different psychedelics, and, of course, my first love, cannabis. I will discuss any drug you can utilize with benefit, along, of course, with any resultant harms and traumatic experiences. I will discuss any drug which has been misunderstood, which has potential benefit, or which has been wrongly stigmatized during the War on Drugs.
I examine the drugs which has been hypocritically accepted within our society, such as caffeine and alcohol, despite having many of the same potential levels of harms as the other drugs. For example, few people realize that the most dangerous drug of all is lurking within our homes! It is alcohol – implicated in 172,000 deaths last year (accidents, cancer, liver damage, heart disease, etc.), which is significantly more than opioids. But, sigh…alcohol is socially acceptable, so there is less of a spotlight on it, with a hyper-focus on various purported harms of cannabis, which does have harms, but not in the same ballpark as alcohol.
Finally, Grinspoon on Drugs is also about addiction, as I am 17 years in recovery from a vicious addiction to prescription opioids. It is about real recovery, allowing people to find their own pathways back to themselves, about being “Cali sober”, incorporating methadone, Suboxone and other lifesaving medications, and utilizing cannabis and psychedelics in recovery, not simply the abstinence-only AA and NA cult-like nonsense that we’ve been subject to for almost a century.
I am interested in the therapeutic benefits, and the appeal, of these “forbidden” substances, not just the harms.
Click HERE to read more from Peter Grinspoon on Substack.