Talk:Norman John Doorenbos

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Page scope

Norman John Doorenbos is a biography of the medicinal chemist Norman John Doorenbos (1928–2006), written for his part in founding the University of Mississippi's cannabis programme under the federal contract of 1968. Pages that mention him use the form Norman Doorenbos; that title redirects here.

Data verification

Dates, posts and family follow Edward J. Kennelly's memorial in The ASP Newsletter 43(3), Fall 2007, p. 23. The contract and the first plantings follow the university's programme history (Wayback Machine copy of January 2026). The account of his part in the project follows Anthony Haden-Guest in High Times, November 1976. Discuss conflicts and corrections here.

Discussion

Place of death

The memorial says he died at the Rush Foundation Hospital in Meridian, Missouri. Rush Foundation Hospital is in Meridian, Mississippi, so the state in the memorial is probably a slip. A newspaper obituary, said to name Meridian, Mississippi, could not be opened. The article names the town only.

Dates not found

The year of his PhD at the University of Michigan, his first degree and the years of his posts at the University of Maryland, Southern Illinois University and the University of Wisconsin are not given in the memorial. Which campus of the University of Maryland and of the University of Wisconsin is meant is not stated.

Term as president of the Society for Economic Botany

The officers page of the Society for Ethnobotany (the society's present name) lists him under 1976; the society's older website lists Norm Doorenbos under 1977. The two lists differ by one year for other presidents too (Maynard W. Quimby: 1972 and 1973). The memorial does not mention the presidency. The article gives the 1970s.

Leaving the marijuana project

Haden-Guest (1976) puts resigned in quotation marks and links it to press coverage, including a piece in Rolling Stone that he does not identify further. The Rolling Stone article has not been found. The memorial says nothing of the project's leadership; it gives his years at the university as 1965–1977. Turner's appointment as director in 1971 also rests on Haden-Guest.

The 2004 article

The memorial quotes his recollection of 2004 in Economic Botany (vol. 58, pp. 172–178). The Crossref record for that article (doi:10.1663/0013-0001(2004)058[0172:BN]2.0.CO;2) gives only the heading Botanical Note, and the text has not been read, so the article cites the memorial for it.

Unconsulted works

Doorenbos, Fetterman, Quimby and Turner (1971) in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences and Quimby, Doorenbos, Turner and Masoud (1973) in Economic Botany are known here from their bibliographic records only; the article cites them for their subjects, not their contents. The Fetterman paper (1971) was read in its abstract.

Portrait

No freely licensed portrait has been found.