“[I]n the early 1990s when FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] was compelled to expand the nation’s Compassionate IND program for medical marijuana to include HIV+ people and Americans afflicted by neurologic disorders like paralysis, multiple sclerosis, and muscular dystrophy…. federal drug agencies were whipsawed by these accelerating demands for care.
DEA [U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration] steadfastly maintained marijuana has no medical value even as FDA authorized marijuana’s compassionate medical use for the treatment of an expanding number of life- and sense-threatening diseases. By April 1991, this profound contradiction in federal policy brought the medical prohibition into crisis….
In March 1992, War on Drugs hardliners in the bureaucracy won. Bush killed FDA’s Compassionate IND program for medical marijuana. FDA dumped hundreds of Compassionate IND applications into the trash and scores of patients were arbitrarily denied promised access to medical care. Only a handful of patients — those already receiving medical marijuana — were spared.”
1999
Robert C. Randall, a glaucoma patient who, in 1978, became the first individual granted the legal right to regularly use marijuana medically, in 1999 co-wrote with his wife Alice O'Leary the following description of the halting of the Compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) Program for medical marijuana: