4 Americans Get Pot From US Government | NPR

For the past three decades, Uncle Sam has been providing patients with some of the highest grade marijuana around as part of a little-known program that grew out of a 1976 court settlement and created the country’s first legal pot smoker. The program once provided 14 people government pot. Now, there are four left.

Advocates for legalizing marijuana or treating it as a medicine say the program is a glaring contradiction in the nation’s 40-year war on drugs — maintaining the federal ban on pot while at the same time supplying it.

[…] The four patients remaining in the program estimate they have received a total of 584 pounds from the federal government over the years. On the street, that would be worth more than $500,000.

All of the marijuana comes from the University of Mississippi, where it is grown, harvested and stored. +

“Twenty-one years I’ve been smoking marijuana legally provided by the federal government. And they still don’t want to know how well it works.” — Irvin Rosenfeld from Penn & Teller: The War on Drugs is Bullshit!