Pubdate: Wed, 30 May 2007
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2007 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  http://www.mercurynews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: Margalit Fox, New York Times
Referenced: The East Bay Express article 'Witch-Hunt Victim or Shoddy 
Doc?' and photo http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v04/n1502/a01.html
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Mikuriya (Dr. Mikuriya)

DR. TOD MIKURIYA, MEDICINAL MARIJUANA LEADER

Dr. Tod H. Mikuriya, a California psychiatrist who was widely 
regarded as the grandfather of the medicinal marijuana movement in 
the United States, died May 20 at home in Berkeley. He was 73.

The cause was complications of cancer, his family told California 
news organizations.

Dr. Mikuriya, who helped make the use of marijuana for medicinal 
purposes legal in California, spent the past four decades publicly 
advocating its use, researching its effects and publishing articles 
on the subject.

He was an architect of Proposition 215, the state ballot measure that 
in 1996 made it legal for California doctors to recommend marijuana 
for seriously ill patients. He was also a founder of the California 
Cannabis Research Medical Group and its offshoot, the Society of 
Cannabis Clinicians.

As a result of his work, Dr. Mikuriya was considered a savior by 
some, a public menace by others. To his supporters, he was a 
physician of last resort: For years, a stream of patients with 
illnesses like cancer and AIDS made their way to his private practice 
in Berkeley. Dr. Mikuriya sometimes wrote a dozen or more 
recommendations for marijuana each day; at his death, he was reported 
to have approved the drug for nearly 9,000 patients.

Elsewhere, however, Dr. Mikuriya's work found little favor. In 1996, 
for instance, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, director of the Office of 
National Drug Control Policy under President Clinton, publicly 
derided the doctor's medical philosophy as "the Cheech and Chong show."

In 2000, the Medical Board of California accused Dr. Mikuriya of 
gross negligence, unprofessional conduct and incompetence for failing 
to conduct proper physical examinations on 16 patients for whom he 
had recommended marijuana. In 2004, the board gave him five years' 
probation and a $75,000 fine. Dr. Mikuriya, who appealed the ruling, 
was allowed to continue practicing under the supervision of the 
state-appointed monitor.

A longtime registered Republican (he became a Libertarian in later 
years), Dr. Mikuriya began researching marijuana's therapeutic 
possibilities in the 1960s. He maintained a list of more than 200 
ailments whose symptoms it was said to relieve, including stuttering, 
insomnia, premenstrual syndrome, writer's cramp, poor appetite and 
some side effects of cancer treatment, among them nausea and vomiting.

Dr. Mikuriya saw his work, he often said, as a means of righting a 
historical wrong, namely the backlash against medicinal marijuana 
that began in the "Reefer Madness" era of the late 1930s.

"It had been available to clinicians for 100 years until it was taken 
off the market in 1938," he told the East Bay Express, a Northern 
California newspaper, in 2004. "I'm fighting to restore cannabis."

Tod Hiro Mikuriya was born in Bucks County, Pa., on Sept. 20, 1933. 
His mother, the former Anna Schwenk, an immigrant from Germany, was a 
special-education teacher. His father, Tadafumi Mikuriya, the 
descendant of a Japanese samurai family, was a civil engineer. Tod 
Mikuriya received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Reed College 
in Oregon in 1956. From 1956 to 1958, he was a medic in the U.S. Army.

Dr. Mikuriya earned his medical degree from Temple University in 
1962. While studying there, he became intrigued by a reference in a 
pharmacology textbook to the medicinal use of marijuana, the first 
stirrings of his future career. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake