About the Author

After practicing traditional medicine for several years, I became open to exploring the unconventional approaches to wellness that patients have long sought in their treatment. Although I didn’t start my career on this path, the people, times, and places that shaped my professional experience guided me to it. 

I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, and earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Southern Methodist University. After graduation in 1959, I worked as a mathematician for the US Navy in Corona, California. I spent six months working on a project calculating the number of missiles required to fire at radar installations to destroy them. 

Although computers were still in their infancy, the project reached a point where a computer was required to analyze the data. The Navy offered to send me to computer programming school, but I realized that life as a mathematician without human interaction was not for me.

I resigned and enrolled at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas in the fall of 1960. I had applied there because it was in my hometown, but little did I know that my medical school would become one of the most preeminent and prestigious medical research institutions in the world. It currently boasts a faculty with four Nobel laureates. 

Training as a mathematician and learning the discipline of logical thinking has benefited me throughout my medical career. I learned early on how to use the medical literature to help treat my patients. It was much more difficult back in the days before PubMed and computers because we had to look through the Index Medicus, a print publication that listed all the recent scientific literature. It was tedious, but I learned the importance of finding the latest research to base my medical decisions on. That experience has also proven invaluable throughout my career and even more so after I became a cannabis specialist. 

In November 1963, when I was a fourth-year medical student in the neurosurgery service at Parkland Memorial Hospital, I served as the chief “gofer” for my teachers and professors as senior members of the surgery staff began resuscitation efforts on President John F. Kennedy, who had been brought in with the head wound that would take his life. I retrieved the defibrillator from another trauma room, assisted with the tracheostomy, and participated in many aspects of the resuscitation effort. My experience that day is featured in the Paramount+ documentary "JFK: What the Doctors Saw."

This event has been indelibly imprinted in my memory and has influenced my approach to medicine in a way nothing else could. I had seen people die before, but this was the president, one who was young and full of life. Even he was not immortal, and none of us are. 

After graduating from medical school, I trained in internal medicine at the Dallas VA Hospital before being drafted into the Army for two years. I served as the Chief of Preventive Medicine for the US Forces in the Dominican Republic and Fort Benning, Georgia, and received two Army Commendation medals for my service.

I then spent two years training in internal medicine at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

I returned to Dallas in 1969, where I trained in cardiology and metabolism because I wanted to learn all I could about preventing coronary heart disease. During that time, no safe, effective drugs for lowering cholesterol existed. I thought that learning about diabetes and cholesterol metabolism would be the key to preventing heart disease. I worked in the diabetes clinic and learned how to diagnose and treat diabetes and cardiovascular conditions, which led me to enter the private practice of cardiology. The FACC after my name stands for Fellow of the American College of Cardiology.

In 1975 I became the National Director of Education and Community Programs for the American Heart Association (AHA). I was selected to manage their programs relating to nutrition, CPR, stroke, cardiovascular disease in the young, hypertension, and more. During that time, the “Pritikin Diet,” a plant-based, low-fat regimen, was getting national attention for its reported ability to reverse coronary heart disease. 

Intrigued, I traveled to Santa Barbara, California, to meet Nathan Pritikin, who offered me the opportunity to investigate his files and determine whether this diet was effective. I was convinced and left the AHA to become the medical director of the Pritikin Institute. Inspired by his work, I became a vegetarian, stopped smoking tobacco, and started an aerobic exercise/running program on my 40th birthday, which I continue to this day.

I explored many aspects of medicine over the next 30 years. I delved into integrative medicine, nutrition, herbal medicine, and homeopathy. I also became a major nutritional supplement company's medical director and chief formulator. I added Clinical Lipidology to my Internal Medicine and Cardiology Board certifications along the way. 

I explored the effects of cannabis on expanding consciousness and enhancing the pleasures experienced from food, music, movies, and sex in the 1960s. It also deepened my appreciation for my intuition, which I had previously denied because of my scientific background. I enjoyed it and used it when it was available, but I felt like a criminal because it was illegal.  

That all changed in the early 70s when I read The Natural Mind by Andrew Weil, MD, which explored the foundations of non-ordinary thinking and the value of altered states of consciousness. I no longer considered myself a criminal and had a new respect for my expanding consciousness. I will forever be grateful to Dr. Weil for his insight.

In the early 1980s, I lived at the Esalen Institute, a retreat center and intentional community near Big Sur, California, where "new age" therapies such as meditation, psychedelics, yoga, massage, spirituality, and clean organic diets were explored and practiced. I met many famous minds in the then-emerging field there, including John Lilly, Joseph Campbell, Stanislav Grof, Dick Price, and Timothy Leary.  

In the mid-1980s, I began studying homeopathy and stopped using cannabis and coffee, considered antidotes to the practice.  

In 2010 I retired from my work as a preventive cardiologist and cholesterol specialist at the Princeton Longevity Center in New Jersey. I had nothing to do and became deeply depressed,  but I had no desire to go on pharmaceutical antidepressants. I had not used cannabis in nearly 25 years, and I remembered how happy I had felt while under the influence of the plant. So, I smoked a stimulating cultivar of cannabis, and my depression vanished like steam from a boiling pot of water.  

Cannabis didn’t just alleviate my depression; it gave me a new life and career. Shortly after reintroducing it, I saw a job posting at a Pomona, California, clinic for a physician to provide medical cannabis recommendations. Although I got the job, it only lasted six days because I felt the patients were not genuinely looking for a recommendation for medical purposes but simply a legal way to obtain cannabis. I was out of compliance with the California Medical Board every time I issued a recommendation for a patient who did not have an authentic qualifying medical condition, so I quit. 

In 2013 I took a similar position at a clinic in Oakland, California, but this time it was an ethical and legitimate operation. Almost all the approximately 3,500 patients I saw in the span of a year had previously used cannabis to treat their medical problems, and I spent most of the session asking them how they used it. These patients taught me much of what I know about cannabis use for migraine headaches, Crohn’s disease, seizures, chronic pain, nausea and vomiting, appetite, irritable bowel syndrome, muscle spasms, multiple sclerosis, and many other medical conditions. 

I joined the Society of Cannabis Clinicians to learn more about the use of medical cannabis, and I became a member of the board of directors in 2016. I also co-chair the Library Committee and help compile the latest scientific research for their website and library. Despite this, I felt inadequate and uncomfortable with cancer patients because they still needed further guidance, and I did not know what to tell them.

In 2014 I attended a medical cannabis conference in Denver, Colorado. One of the speakers was Mara Gordon, an advocate who made cannabis oil to help patients fight cancer. In her presentation, Mara showed the brain scans of two patients whose tumors had shrunk while receiving cannabis treatment. When I saw those brain scans, I immediately knew that I wanted to be able to do that. I asked Mara to teach me what she knew. At first, she refused, but I was persistent. I asked her many times over the next couple of months, and eventually, she agreed.

Over the following nine months, I sat in on Mara’s teleconferencing consults with cancer patients from the US and around the world. As a physician, it was awkward to learn from someone who was not a medical professional, but Mara had the information and experience. She taught me what she knew, and I am eternally grateful. 

Since working with Mara, I have guided about 500 cancer patients on my own. This book is based on that experience as well as much of the exciting research from the laboratory of Dr. Dedi Meiri in Israel. I believe his work has significant implications and has paved the way for new insights on how to make cannabis oil more effective as an anticancer medicine. 

In writing this book, I hope to help people successfully overcome their cancer and live a longer, fuller life. 

I am a retired cardiologist, not an oncologist, and I do not know everything there is to know about oncology. I consider myself a medical cannabis expert because I have studied the effects and treated thousands of patients, many with cancer. That said, in reality, there are no real experts when it comes to cannabis and cancer. There won't be real experts until peer-reviewed, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trials show the efficacy of using cannabis to treat humans with cancer. That won't happen until cannabis is no longer a Schedule I drug.

Nobody knows for sure how effective cannabis is as an anticancer agent. The evidence presented in this book is based on my experience combined with the published peer-reviewed preclinical research that shows cannabis kills cancer cells. Preclinical research means the studies were performed on cells and animals, not humans. This research is not definitive and does not prove that cannabis can kill cancer in human beings.

Along with the enormous amount of preclinical research, many people also anecdotally report success with using cannabis to kill their cancer. The failures usually go unreported.

My experience, although extensive, is limited. Using cannabis to treat cancer with the techniques I first began utilizing were not always successful. I have seen many patients shrink their tumors and achieve no evidence of disease (NED), but I have also seen far too many patients who used cannabis and still die, sometimes after a period of well-being and achieving NED. I do believe some of these deaths were significantly delayed because of cannabis. 

The ideas and protocols presented in The Cannabis Cancer Connection are suggestions, not recommendations or prescriptions. There are no guarantees, but the enthusiasm I voice throughout the book is genuine. It expresses my hope and belief that the methods described will benefit cancer patients. I mention products or brands in some places throughout the book; these are not endorsements, and I have no professional relationship with any of these companies, but I have included them to help guide the reader. 

I am not trying to convince anyone to use cannabis to kill their cancer. It is a personal decision only the patient can make – hopefully with the support of a competent physician or oncologist.