In a letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), U.S. senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, both Massachusetts Democrats, encouraged the approval of an application sent by Lyle Craker, a professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts, to grow high-quality marijuana for medical research, according to the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

The letter supports marijuana cultivation for clinical experimentation. They wrote that "UMass is one of the nation's most distinguished research universities, and it is highly qualified to manufacture marijuana for legitimate medical and research purposes," according to the Gazette.

"We believe that the National Institute on Drug Abuse facility at the University of Mississippi has an unjustifiable monopoly on the production of marijuana for legitimate medical and research purposes in the United States," the senators state in their letter, according to the Gazette. "The current lack of ... competition may well result in the production of lower-quality research-grade marijuana, which in turn jeopardizes important research into the therapeutic effects of marijuana for patients undergoing chemotherapy or suffering from AIDS, glaucoma, or other diseases."

Craker submitted his application in June of 2001. In December 2001, however, the DEA announced that the letter had been lost. Craker resubmitted the original application on Aug. 20, 2002. Kennedy and Kerry wrote their letter to encourage the DEA to make a decision.