November 24, 1976: Federal Judge James Washington rules that Robert Randall's use of marijuana constitutes a "medical necessity."
November 25, 1992: Benson B. Roe, physician and professor emeritus of surgery at the University of California at San Francisco, states:
"The propaganda that illegal drugs are 'deadly poisons' is a hoax. There is little or no medical evidence of long-term ill effects from moderate consumption of uncontaminated marijuana, cocaine, or heroin. If these substances, which have been consumed in enormous quantities for decades, were responsible for any chronic, progressive or disabling diseases, they certainly would have shown up in clinical practice and/or on the autopsy table. But they simply have not!"
November 28, 1993: Reuters reports that Colombia's prosecutor general Gustavo de Greiff said the war on drugs has failed and Colombia should legalize cocaine and marijuana trafficking because the United States and Europe are decriminalizing consumption.
November 30, 2000: The DEA announces that it intends to prohibit hemp products, including shampoo, soap, and food made from non-psychoactive hemp seeds.
November 27, 2001: Dr. Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona at Tucson begins dosing subjects who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder with psilocybin, the active ingredient in mushrooms. The government-approved research is funded by MAPS and another psychedelic think tank, the Heffter Research Institute. "For a quarter century, [psychedelic] researchers have been locked out of the laboratory, but we're starting to get back in now," Doblin says. "Not in massive ways, but in important, small steps."
November 30, 2001: The Austin Chronicle calls John Walters, the new US drug czar, "the Dr. Strangelove of our country's absurd drug war -- he dismisses anyone who says our nation's prisons are too full, he favors longer jail sentences for marijuana users, he has declared that there's too much 'treatment capacity' in the US, he opposes efforts to address the racial discrepancies in drug enforcement, he wants more militarization of the drug war at home and abroad, he'd like to see an expansion of our government's war in Colombia, and he's been a noisy opponent of state initiatives to allow the medical use of marijuana."
November 26, 2002: The Winston-Salem Journal (NC) reports that more than 30 drug defendants in Davidson County have had charges dismissed or convictions overturned since the officers investigating their cases were charged with distributing drugs and planting evidence.
November 29, 2004: In the US Supreme Court, oral arguments are heard in the Gonzales v. Raich medical marijuana case.
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