(5 of 7)
A few years later, when Weil had moved on to Harvard Medical School, he attracted public attention again--this time to the other side of the drug divide. Having earned his undergraduate degree in botany and having witnessed the growing frenzy over the popularity of marijuana on campus, Weil began to wonder just how much of a scourge the drug really was. Since one of his course requirements was to conduct an independent research project, he petitioned Harvard administrators to allow him to attempt the first-ever double-blind human experiments on the intoxicating powers of pot. Harvard agreed but reminded Weil that he had an obvious problem. In order to conduct marijuana studies, he had to get hold of marijuana--an easy enough proposition at any college in 1968. But in order to have his studies published, he had to get hold of it legally.
Weil sent repeated letters to health officials in Washington, requesting a small amount of the marijuana the government kept for research of its own. Not surprisingly, he received repeated refusals. Ultimately, Harvard had to intervene, endorsing the study on the strength of the impeccable antidrug credentials Weil had earned as a result of the Leary-Alpert affair. Not long after, federal officials relented. "One day," says Woodward Wickham, Weil's Harvard roommate and now a vice president at the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, "this box of government marijuana just arrived in the mail."
Weil's pot studies, like his Leary-Alpert expose, quickly made national news, owing in no small part to the kindly conclusions he reached about the contraband plant. "Marijuana did appear to raise heart rate," Weil says, "but it didn't seem to affect pupil size or blood sugar. More important, it didn't really impair performance, at least in people who had some experience with it. It seemed to be a rather mild intoxicant."
The marijuana study, combined with his botanical research, led Weil to a pivotal choice--one that would determine the direction of the rest of his life. After medical school, he decided, he would forgo the young doctor's traditional apprenticeship as a hospital intern and resident and instead devote his time to traveling through the forests and villages of South America, studying not the great engine of Western medicine but the gentle power of the curative herb. Weil spent more than three years in the field in Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and elsewhere, and when he returned to the U.S. in the mid-1970s, he decided that he would make his living teaching, writing and otherwise spreading the alternative-medicine word. Today that word has rewarded him well.
In addition to Weil's existing books, three new ones--largely compilations of questions and answers skimmed from his Website--are in the works, and requests for other books, personal appearances and television shows arrive every day. Weil's publishers justifiably expect a fresh explosion of sales sometime next year when 8 Weeks to Optimum Health, which is still on the best-seller lists as a hardcover, at last appears in paperback. The barnstorming touring that Weil has agreed to of late has done a good job of keeping all this merchandise moving, but it has come at a personal price. Weil and his wife Sabine Kremp recently agreed to end their marriage, the split coming as much as a result of the new demands on Weil's time as anything else. "Running this empire," says Kremp, "has been tough."