Last weekend, we posted about the NORML rally that took place at City Hall, right before the St. Patrick's Day parade. One of those demonstrators was Dr. Sunil Aggarwal—a resident physician at the NYU Rusk Institute Of Rehabilitation Medicine—who posted the text of his speech in our comments section. The speech is worth a read as it contains some interesting pot-related NYC history:

"Marijuana 'tea pads' were established about 1920 in New York City. They resembled opium dens or speakeasies except that prices were very low; one could purchase a usable amount of cannabis for a quarter if smoked in the pad, or for even less if one bought the marijuana at the door...by the 1930s there were said to be 500 of them in New York City alone...a little more than DOUBLE the number of Starbucks there are in NYC today.”

We got in touch with Dr. Aggarwal, whose research sparked the American Medical Association's decision to urge the federal government to reconsider the classification of cannabis as a dangerous drug, to share his encyclopedic knowledge about Earth's most misunderstood shrub. Since he just moved to New York seven months ago he doesn't have any wild stoned NYC stories to tell—but he is still probably one of the most knowledgable "weed doctors" in the whole country:

How did you get involved with NORML? It started in 2003 during my medical training, when they were having panels about cannabis policy decisions and they needed representative health professionals. I met a lot of people in the NORML chapters there. When I went to my first national conference in 2005, Rick Steves, the travel guy, gave me 100 bucks to attend! He's one of the lead spokespeople.

Is New York ever going to have legalized medical weed? What about New Jersey? It looks like New Jersey is finally going to implement the law. There have been some issues that Governor Christie has addressed involving NIMBY politics—these politics are hard to predict, although the law is in place.

This is the third or fourth attempt in New York, and we're going to have get past long first steps. There's not a lot of organization among the health care people here. We need a system to cultivate here. Think about this, we've had clinical trials at Columbia Medical and in NYU where we've used marijuana from a dispensary in Mississippi, or a cannabis spray, which we had to import from England. We're already having patients in research, instead of Mississippi or the UK we should produce it here in the state.

How did you get so knowledgable about the history of weed in New York City? I did a PhD in medical geography, the human-environmental relations of cannabinoids in the state. I was trying to understand how the plant got here, and reading that history you find out about the Jazz era...there was a big hub here in the teens and 20's, it was openly tolerated. Harpers and the New York Times would send reporters to these marijuana "tea pads," some of which were on rooftops of buildings, a lot in Harlem [ed. note: Someone should tell all of the current rooftop tokers to call their sessions "Tea pads."]. People would order cannabis from ads in the New York Times...that's what i wanted to get across to people—there were lot of efforts to fully surpress and forget about it, and most of it was more available than Starbucks coffee today.

How does New York compare with Seattle's drug policies? [New York] is a more policed city than Seattle, with a lot more discretion. The headquarters of High Times magazine is here, so the first thing that strikes me is the absence of green-friendliness here.

At the same time, I think we have very favorable institutions here, like i said, Columbia and NYU have done research. We just don't have the same thing on the ground. It's everywhere, but nobody wants to talk about it and i think that has a lot to do with the 50,000 arrests—that's the most shocking part of it.

So we've gotta ask, you HAVE sparked up a doobie before, right? Of course, I've used cannabis before. It's like a coming of age for adolescence. There's plenty of talk about how it destroys brain cells, but research continues to shows that cannabinoids are neuroprotective and can be helpful, postive, relaxing—I know that from personal experience. It should be available for people, medical needs being the most pressing and obvious.

We need to accept that intoxication is part of a normal human behavior [ed. note, fruit flies too!] and we should regulate it for least amount of harm. People might use it to appreciate art and movies, there are industrial uses, nutritional uses, the list just goes on and on. It's a really useful plant and we really need to end the prohibition.

What's a great activity to do while under the influence? And did you, after the NORML rally? I guess, um, listen to your favorite music or, whatever you would do during the parade but with less vomiting. I guess I would take a walk on the East River waterfront. I didn't partake, although I'm sure some people did. I did make some new friends at the rally, walked to Chinatown and ate some vegan chocolate chip cookies, which are really yummy.

Final note: a few minutes after we conducted the interview, Dr. Aggerwal sent us a text message: "No smoking—vaporizing...that's my only statement. (:" And yes, his happy face was oddly reversed, but we didn't ask why. :).