This post is a mixture of glee and facts. I hope you’ll find plenty of both. Because, you see, lately I’ve been speaking and blogging a lot about the changing role of patients in clinical trials … and in the spring of 1972, I myself was a subject.

In the US government’s pot smoking experiments.

As you’ll see, the timing was amazing – they told me I was subject #1.  And, as you’ll see, there’s evidence they meant it.:-) To watch, click here or click the image at right.

I’ve been waiting years for the right moment to share this story, because it’s a hoot – and this year the time finally came:

• It had to be the right setting, and Daniel Kraft’s Exponential Medicine conference is just right – it’s wiggy and futuristic but real science and realistic.

• The story also needed to be told in a valid context, and everything lined up:
  • In September fall I spoke in Madrid (blog post) about the role of patients in research
  • At the same time, the Wall Street Journal had a great article about patients being listened to differently by researchers (my post)

So I pitched the idea to “xMed” director Daniel Kraft MD (who’s also a fighter pilot, btw), and he agreed. I guess it worked out, because today on Facebook (see illustration) he posted the video and said:

Brilliant lessons … 1970s experience as a marijuana clinical trial subject at MIT … has implications for the design of today’s clinical trials … one of [the] highest rated (and funny) talks

That sounds like a happy conference organizer.

Enjoy, and please share widely! Who said science can’t be fun??

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Additional resources

Errata

For a number of reasons I only got 90 minutes of sleep the night before, and I made (at least) these mistakes:

• Early in this speech I show some slides from my TED Talk in 2011. The slides have a typo – they say 2009.
• Around 6 minutes I say that Dr Bettina Ryll shared my session at the Madrid conference. Dr Ryll did create the slide I showed, but my session was shared with Mrs Anastassia Negrouk, who’s also in this speech.
• On the very last slide the William Gibson is correct but I misspoke – I said “not easily distributed” when it should be “evenly.”

Related links cited in this speech

• The TED Talk
• The IOM’s 2012 report Best Care at Lower Cost, with the important declaration that the learning healthcare system should be “anchored on patient needs and perspectives”
• The Wall Street Journal article that I cited, on researchers actively engaging patients on how they see the issues
• The FDA announcement that I mentioned at the end, announcing patient participation in medical product discussions