Pictures worth a thousand words

At Project 50 I have been busy sorting and scanning my way through 40+ years of news clippings and newsletters. Among the newsletters was NORML’s The Leaflet from early 1977. It highlighted the December 1976 annual conference that was held in Washington, DC, not too far from our Capital Hill home where we had been arrested for marijuana possession just sixteen months before.

The conference was held in early December 1976, less than month after Robert received his legal marijuana from the federal government. He was, quite literally, the only individual in the country who could legally smoke marijuana. The marijuana prohibition was still in place, but Robert Randall had significantly cracked the veneer. Needless to say, he was a star of the conference.

In this picture you see him speaking to the conference goers. He is joined on the dais by some medical heavyweights of the time. Dr. David Smith was founder of the famous Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco, Dr. Norman Zinberg was a Harvard professor and addiction scholar. It was Zinberg who defined the theory of set and setting with respect to drug use. And on the far right is Dr. Andy Weil who conducted some of the first cannabis research in the country and would go on to pioneer the new field of integrative medicine.

NORML Conference, December 1976. Left to right: David Smith, Robert Randall, Norman Zinberg, and Andy Weil.

You can see more images from the conference and NORML on my Google Drive. And stay tuned, there will be more images uploaded in the coming weeks. If you have photographs pertaining to the medical cannabis movement that you would like to add to these archives please let me know. ❧