Robert Randall

Robert C. Randall (1948–2001) was an American medical cannabis advocate with severe glaucoma. Arrested in 1975 after police discovered the cannabis he was growing for his condition, he argued that protecting his sight justified his otherwise unlawful possession. He became the first American in the modern prohibition era to receive federally authorised cannabis for medical treatment.

The November 1976 photograph preserved by Alice O’Leary Randall shows him smiling beside his first legal supply. The containers and cigarettes are part of the historical evidence: a patient who had been prosecuted now possessed cannabis supplied under federal authority.

Necessity in D.C. Superior Court

On 24 November 1976, Judge James A. Washington of the District of Columbia Superior Court accepted Randall’s defence of medical necessity in United States v. Randall. The court found him not guilty and dismissed the charges.

The defence concerned avoiding a greater harm. Randall’s circumstances and medical evidence supported his claim that cannabis was necessary to protect his vision. The ruling decided his criminal case; it did not establish a general right for every American patient to obtain cannabis.

Alice’s recollection places a visit to ophthalmologist John Merritt on the morning the decision arrived. Merritt was already conducting tests with recently received federal cannabis. Initial authorised supply and the later civil settlement therefore belong to different stages of the case.

Keeping the federal supply

In early 1978, difficulties transferring his treatment to another physician threatened that access. Randall sued federal agencies, and a separate settlement in 1978 restored supply under a new Investigational New Drug arrangement.

Legal historian Lewis Grossman describes this settlement as the basis for the Compassionate IND process used by other patients. Government research cannabis grown at the University of Mississippi could reach a small number of people through physician-supervised federal authorisation. This continuing pathway followed the settlement, rather than being created in full by the 1976 acquittal.

Year	Event
1975	Arrested after police discover his home-grown cannabis
1976	Initial authorised supply and medical-necessity acquittal
1978	Civil settlement secures continued federal access
1980	Establishes the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics with Alice O’Leary
1988	A DEA judge recommends rescheduling cannabis
1992	Compassionate programme closes to new patients
2001	Dies on 2 June

Other patients

With his wife, Alice O’Leary, Randall spent the following years helping other patients through the same process. They established the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics in 1980, helping patients seek access and joining the campaign to move cannabis out of the strictest federal schedule. In 1988 the DEA’s own administrative law judge, Francis Young, recommended exactly that, calling cannabis one of the safest therapeutically active substances known. The DEA administrator rejected the recommendation.

In the early 1990s Randall set up the Marijuana AIDS Research Service to help people with AIDS apply to the federal programme. In 1992 the government closed it to new patients. Forty-three people had been approved; at most fifteen were ever supplied at one time, and four were still receiving government cannabis in 2011.

Afterwards

The closure turned campaigners away from federal agencies and towards state ballot initiatives. Randall wrote about his case and the campaign, with O’Leary, in Marijuana Rx: The Patients’ Fight for Medical Pot. He died in 2001.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]}