Ten joins a day keeps your illness at bay, thanks to a government
stash in Mississippi's highlands by David Saltonstall

Robert Randall did not attend the big symposium in February on the medical
uses of marijuana, hosted by the National Institutes of Health. But if he
had, the 49yearold glaucoma sufferer would surely have thanked Uncle Sam
for providing him with enough free pot to allow him to smoke ten joints
every day for the past 21 years. "It has saved my eyesight," says Randall
of the governmentgrown ganja that the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an
offshoot of the NIH, has been shipping to his local pharmacy since 1976.
Randall receives his provisions under NDAs Marijuana Project, a
littleknown federal program established in the 1960s to grow marijuana for
research purposes. After learning about the government's hidden stash in
1975, Randall sued for access and became its first recipient. Soon after,
he received his first shipment, paving the way for 13 others. Although the
program has been closed to new applicants since 1992, it is still providing
a ready supply of U.S.approved reefer for its eight surviving patients.
That such people exist rnight come as something of a harsh toke to anyone
who has followed the Clinton administration's latest exhalations on medical
marijuana. Last fall, Attorney General Janet Reno announced she may
prosecute doctors in California and Arizona who try to prescribe the drug,
despite approval of propot referenda in both states last November. And the
White House drugpolicy czar, retired army general Barry McCaffrey, calls
medi cal marijuana "a threat to the national drug strategy" that also
sends "a very mixed and confusing message to the young."
Uncle Sam's pot farm is located at the University of Mississippi in
Oxford, behind a 12foothigh fence bounded by four prison like
watchtowers. The feds have been running the sevenacre patch, known to
agency bureaucrats simply as the Farm, since 1968. Over the past ten years,
the Farm has produced about 5,000 pounds of U.S. inspected marijuana~worth
roughly $22 million on the street.
Not surprisingly when asked to reconcile the Marijuana Project's propot
message with recent White House policy, federal officials react as if
they've just been handed a smoldering joint: They decline and nervously
pass it along. "We just do what we're told," says Sheryl Massaro, a NIDA
spokeswoman. "If we are told to provide marijuana to eight people, then
that's what we do." She defers to the Food and Drag Administration, which
granted the "compassionate IND" (investigational new drug) waivers that
have made it possible for a few people to benefit from the program. "It's
really not an FDA question," counters FDA spokesman Don McLeam, who says it
was the parent agency, the U.S. Public health Service, that decided back in
1992 due toa sudden source in applications from AIDS patientsto close
the program to all but the remaining eight participants. When pressed, he
adds that "technically, these [eight] are research subjects," a convenient
feint also picked up by McCaffrey's office. "The general has no objection
to research," says McCaffrey's spokesman Bob Weiner. "Those are people who
are being researched."
If true, then score one for medical marijuana. When Randall was diagnosed
with glaucoma in 1972, at the age of 24, doctors told him that he would be
blind within five years. More than two decades and countless joints later,
Randall, a former college instructor living in Sarasota, Florida, says he
now sees as well as he did on that dark morning in 1972. "Marijuana is
clearly helpful in ways other drugs are not," insists Randall, who receives
approximately $25,000 worth of pot a year. Indeed, research gathered by
scientists such as Dr. Lester Grinspoon at Harvard Medical School suggests
that marijuana can help combat any number of ailments, including epilepsy,
multiple sclerosis, migraine headaches, menstrual cramps, and depression,
in addition to nausea resulting from chemotherapy and AIDS treatments.
"There is a mountain of evidence supporting marijuana's medical benefits,"
says Grinspoon. "It is foolish to ignore it."
Another government toker, Conune C. Millet, a 65yearold grandmother from
Fremont, Nebraska, has been receiving NIDA pot, also for glaucoma, since
October 1989. She still remembers the day she told her seven grown children
that Mom was a pothead. "God love 'em. They said, "Mother, if this will
help you save your sight, you should do it," says Millet, who, though
legally blind, is still able to read a newspaper, a luxury she credits to
her fivejointaday regimen. "They did say, "Please, Mother, don't do it
in public." So I just excuse myself, go into the bedroom, close the door,
and smoke it."
And the Farm shows no signs of going follow. Last spring, government
farmers got the go ahead to plant a fresh crop just as federal agents
raided a San Francisco medical marijuana buyers' club. Last year, NIDA
shelled out $290,000 to keep the place in seeds and pay the salaries of
three fulltime researchers and its parttime director, Mahmond A. ElSohly.
They expect to harvest roughly 1,000 pounds by October, mostly for
research. Besides growing marijuana, the staff uses sophisticated gas
chromatography equipment to analyze the potency of confiscated pot from
around the country.
Though precious few have actually ventured inside the Farm, Ole Miss
representatives will cheerfully provide a videotape that shows row upon row
of bushy 12foot stalks harvested there. One cluster is helpfully marked
Jamaican. "It reflects what is on the street," explains ElSobly, who
confesses he has little problem finding student workers to help during
harvest time. "They are told from the beginning that this is a
highsecurity area and that they will have to be searched as they leave the
garden."
Despite the Clinton administration's ominous smoke signals, U.S. officials
say they have no plans to discontinue growing pot for their eight lucky
beneficiaries (remarkably, after years of daily pot smoking, both Randall
and Millet claim none of the loopy after effects normally associated with
it). Meanwhile, the forbidden bounty rolled into precisely weighed joints
on an old cigarette making machine in RaleighDurham, North Carolina
continues to be packed, about 300 sticks at a time, into tin cans and sent
on its way. And the quality? "Mediocre but effective," Randall reports.
"About what you'd expect from the same government that runs the post office."