Photo Credit: Marty Sterling
Alice O’Leary Randall began fighting for patient access to medical cannabis in the 1970s, when she and her husband Robert were arrested in California for growing the one medicine he found could make a difference in treating his glaucoma. After winning a landmark case against the federal government, Robert became the first person in the US to legally receive medical cannabis.
The couple continued the fight for patient access through the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics, which they founded in 1980. When Robert passed away in 2001, O’Leary Randall became a nurse, a grief counselor and then, following her retirement, returned to cannabis activism, with a focus on patient education.
Today, O’Leary Randall is Editor-in-Chief of Mary’s Cannabis Primers Collection and Mary’s Prime Time blog, published by Colorado-based Mary’s Brands. Among other topics, the blog covers new medical findings presented at cannabis science conferences.
And it was at one of those conferences – the recent meeting of the International Association for Cannabinoid Medicines in Berlin, where I finally met O’Leary Randall, and had a chance to record some insights from this witness to, and maker of, cannabis history.
Abbie Rosner (AR): You’ve really seen the cannabis space unfold. From your perspective here in Berlin, where do you see that progress has really been made?
Alice O’Leary Randall: (AO’LR): Well, I couldn’t even begin to quantify the progress, because it is off the chart in my perspective. I came from a time when there was one cannabis meeting a year by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and even that was sparsely attended. And it was like that all through the late 70s and 80s, and even up until the 90s and aughts. Now, suddenly, in the last five years, there’s been this explosion, and that is very exciting.
AR: And what still frustrates you?
AO’LR: There are several million people worldwide who are legally using cannabis medically, and there are still so many more who can’t, because of the bureaucratic hoops and hurdles they face. And it occurs to me that every time one of these laws gets passed, you get a whole new set of bureaucrats into the situation, who have to learn the entire business. And sometimes they don’t want to. They just aren’t interested.
There’s a wonderful Brazilian documentary about mothers who are trying to get cannabis for their children with epilepsy. The main character gets off the phone with one bureaucrat, and she says ‘ah, my enemy has no face.’ And that’s what I think is true of the cannabis movement at this point. The enemy has no face, but it’s still there.
AR: How did your involvement with cannabis begin?
AO’LR: The old fashioned way. We got busted. My husband and I got arrested in August 1975. He had glaucoma and discovered quite accidentally that marijuana seemed to help. When he told me, I laughed. This was the early 70s. There was no medical marijuana then. But he convinced me and we thought we were the only ones in the world who could possibly know this, so we kept very quiet. We ended up growing our own marijuana, and for that we got arrested.
Not long after our arrest, we discovered that the National Institute on Drug Abuse had been doing research and discovered that cannabis actually lowers intraocular pressure in glaucoma. That this information was known but not made known made my husband very angry.
AR: And what happened then?
AO’LR: We decided to fight the charges against us, and we won, on the grounds of medical necessity. And at the same time we had petitioned the federal government for the right to use their medical marijuana.
They never expected a lone individual with glaucoma, who was nearly blind, to knock on the door and say ‘I need what you have.’ It was a different time. Bureaucrats were more compassionate. The drug war was not so stringent, and so the petition was eventually granted. In November, 1976, the judicial and federal decisions to give Robert medical marijuana came down, which made him a big celebrity. And literally, a movement was born. People began to contact us right away, people like us who thought, ‘I must be the only person that knows this.’
AR: Has that created a community that you’re still a part of?
AO’LR: To a certain extent. Sadly, many of them are deceased. But I’m certainly still part of the medical cannabis community. After Bob died in 2001, I went back to school to become a nurse, and went into hospice nursing. When I retired from that, I got back into the medical cannabis. I’ve been involved with the American Cannabis Nurses Association, and that’s sort of my community at this point.
AR: Did you see cannabis use in hospice?
AO’LR: Yes. It wasn’t legal but we saw it and we allowed it. Many times.
AR: And do you think it has a place in hospice?
AO’LR: There’s no doubt that it has value. Patients who had cannabis were calmer, they needed less opioids, and they didn’t need anti-anxiety medications. For the most part, they needed less of those stupefying drugs that frustrate the family and the patient.
AR: Tell me about your work with Mary’s Medicinals
AO’LR: In 2014, my friend Mary Lou Mathre, who founded the American Cannabis Nurses Association, asked if I would speak at a conference in Oregon. I live in Florida, and this gave me a chance to do one of my bucket list things, which was to drive cross-country. I called it a fact-finding trip. I stopped in various states that had cannabis laws to learn about what was going on, and ended up in Denver. While I was there, I met Nicole Smith and Lynn Honderd, who founded Mary’s Medicinals. And we just hit it off. They asked me if I could do some educational writing for them. And that has evolved into the Primer series.
Then, a couple of years ago, all these meetings were popping up everywhere, with such exciting research. And of course in the US, they keep saying that there’s no research. But I thought, somebody needs to be talking about all this. So I suggested, ‘how about if we start a newsletter about these meetings?’ And Mary’s agreed. So now we have the Mary’s Prime Time blog, where I get to write about the science presented at these meetings, that doesn’t seem to make it to the mainstream press, or even to the cannabis magazines.
AR: And now?
AO’LR: When I look at where we are today, I know that Bob and I made history. We believed that all this would eventually happen. And yet, to live to see this day is just amazing.