In 2013, Dr. Sanjay Gupta — neurosurgeon and CNN’s chief medical correspondent — publicly changed his position on medical cannabis. More importantly, he apologised.

He wrote that the United States had been “terribly and systematically misled” about cannabis for nearly seventy years, and accepted his own role in that misleading. He also argued that it was irresponsible for the medical community not to provide the best care possible when that care could involve marijuana.

For LIBERA HERBA, the important part is not celebrity, television or conversion. It is the act of intellectual correction. A doctor looked back at the official story, checked it against patients, evidence and reality, and said:

I was wrong.

That matters.
Because cannabis history is not only the history of prohibition.

It is also the history of people slowly unlearning what prohibition taught them to repeat.

Factual Note

In 2013, Gupta published a public reversal on medical cannabis, acknowledging that he had previously accepted the official Schedule I framing too readily and apologising for his own role in misleading the public. The quote comes from that period of public commentary around CNN’s Weed documentary.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta
1969–

American neurosurgeon, medical reporter and writer. Chief medical correspondent for CNN, associate professor of neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine, and a public medical communicator known for health reporting and documentary work. In 2013, while working on the CNN documentary Weed, he publicly reversed his earlier opposition to medical cannabis.

Sanjay Gupta – the apology that changed the frame

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