Robert Randall & the Compassionate IND — The Federal Government Grows Him Marijuana

Robert Randall was a Washington, DC, resident with glaucoma — a progressive eye disease that destroys vision by increasing intraocular pressure. By the early 1970s, conventional treatments were failing. His doctors told him he was going blind. Then he discovered, through personal experimentation, that smoking cannabis lowered his intraocular pressure enough to preserve his remaining vision. The federal government classified that cannabis as a Schedule I substance with "no currently accepted medical use." Randall decided to make them prove it.

The first medical-necessity defense

Randall had been arrested for growing cannabis at his home. His defense was straightforward: he needed cannabis to prevent blindness, no legal alternative was adequate, and the harm of losing his vision outweighed the harm of violating the drug law. Judge Washington agreed.

The ruling did not overturn Schedule I. It did not legalize medical cannabis. What it did was establish a legal precedent that was logically incompatible with the scheduling system: a federal court had found that cannabis had a medical use so compelling that its prohibition constituted an unacceptable harm. The government could either accept this finding and reschedule cannabis, or find a way to provide cannabis to Randall without changing the law. It chose the latter.

The Compassionate IND program

The logistics of the arrangement were remarkable. Cannabis was grown at the University of Mississippi under contract with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, processed by the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, and shipped to Randall as pre-rolled joints — approximately 300 per month. The government that classified cannabis as having no medical use was now manufacturing it, rolling it, and mailing it to a patient.

Other patients followed Randall through the Compassionate IND program, each receiving individual permission to use federally supplied cannabis. The program never had many participants — between thirteen and fifteen patients at its peak — but its existence was a standing contradiction of Schedule I.

The program closes

By the early 1990s, AIDS patients had discovered what Randall had demonstrated years earlier: cannabis was medically useful. Applications to the Compassionate IND program surged. The government faced a choice: accept hundreds or thousands of patients into a program that proved cannabis had medical value, or close the program to preserve the legal fiction of Schedule I. It chose the fiction.

The existing patients were grandfathered in. No new patients would be accepted. The government would continue to provide cannabis to the small number of people already enrolled while maintaining, in every other legal and regulatory context, that cannabis had no medical use.

The last patient

Robert Randall died in 2001. But the Compassionate IND program did not die with him. As of 2026, Irvin Rosenfeld — a stockbroker in Fort Lauderdale, Florida — still receives approximately 300 pre-rolled cannabis joints per month from the federal government. He has received more federally supplied cannabis than any person in American history.

Rosenfeld uses cannabis for a rare bone condition. He has consumed tens of thousands of government-produced joints over more than four decades while the government that supplies them continues to classify cannabis as a Schedule I substance with no accepted medical use. He is a living, smoking contradiction of federal drug policy.

What Randall proved

Robert Randall did not change federal law. He did not reschedule cannabis. He did not open a floodgate of medical access. What he did was create an institutional fact that the government could not deny without denying its own actions. The Compassionate IND program — small, quiet, deliberately obscure — was the federal government's admission that Schedule I was wrong. Not wrong in theory, not wrong according to outside researchers, but wrong by the government's own conduct.

Every subsequent argument for medical cannabis — from California's Proposition 215 in 1996 to the state-by-state legalization wave of the 2010s and 2020s — rests, at some level, on the foundation Randall built. He did not win the war. He won the argument. The government simply refused to acknowledge that it had lost.