Dr. Grinspoon's first book, published in 1971, was a groundbreaking work.

Dr. Lester Grinspoon is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and editor of the Harvard Mental Health Letter. A practicing psychiatrist, he served for thirty years as Senior Psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston. Dr. Grinspoon is a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychiatric Association, and he was the founding editor of the Annual Review of Psychiatry and the Harvard Mental Health Letter.

Dr. Grinspoon has authored or co-authored over 160 journal articles or chapters and 12 books; a major area of interest being "illicit" drugs. In 1990 he won the Alfred R. Lindesmith Award from the Drug Policy Foundation for "achievement in the field of drug scholarship." His first book, Marihuana Reconsidered, originally published in 1971 by Harvard University Press, was recently republished as a classic. His latest book, Marihuana, the Forbidden Medicine, co-authored with James B. Bakalar, was published by Yale University Press in 1993 (revised and expanded edition, 1997) and has now been translated into nine languages.