Why was the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program shut down in 1992?
To put together the compassionate care protocols was very time-intensive. It could take months, if not years. And so it was very difficult to put this together for a patient. So we might get one patient here, one patient there, with a certain sore. Well, here was AIDS patients, so Robert Randall put together a protocol for AIDS patients that was basically fill-in-the-blank. He then sent these blank protocols to all the major AIDS organizations. They then filled them in with each pre-AIDS patient and bombarded the federal government with these protocols in 1992. George Bush was running for re-election against Clinton, and he didn't want to look soft on drugs. And giving out thousands of patients more marijuana, he was worried what would happen with that. So somehow he arbitrarily was able to shut the program down through the Health & Human Services. I don't know how that happened, because I wasn't in DC. Bob Randall was. I was in Florida and he was in DC, so I was letting him take care of everything. Well, because he was the knowledgeable person, not myself. But the program got shut down. And today -- at the time there were 28 more patients that had been approved by FDA, DEA, and NIDA, the three government agencies, and they never received their cannabis. And so they never did once the program was shut down. The 13 of us that were getting it were grandfathered in so we didn't sue the government. Now today, there are five of us, because the others died, and so the federal government is hoping that we die off too and that will end the program.
