In 1969, the year of the famous Woodstock music festival and the height of the hippie movement, Gabriel Nahas attended a meeting of the parent teacher association at a local school that would change the direction of his life.

At the meeting, Nahas, a professor of anesthesia at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, heard a detailed presentation of the increasingly widespread use of marijuana in US cities. He was shocked. For more than a decade he had been publishing papers regularly on cardiac, pulmonary, and coronary research and was a recognized expert on acidosis.1 2 3 But from that point on, his main research interest switched to an effort to try to prove the dangers of marijuana and other illicit drugs.