{"id":41559,"date":"2020-03-08T05:00:12","date_gmt":"2020-03-08T13:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2020\/03\/08\/tod-mikuriya-grandfather-of-medical-marijuana\/"},"modified":"2020-03-08T12:36:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-08T20:36:00","slug":"tod-mikuriya-grandfather-of-medical-marijuana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2020\/03\/08\/tod-mikuriya-grandfather-of-medical-marijuana\/","title":{"rendered":"Tod Mikuriya: Grandfather of Medical Marijuana"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Dr. Tod Mikuriya was a critical force in the
\nsuccessful and ground-breaking effort to legalize medical marijuana in
\nCalifornia in the 1990s. Now his papers
\nare available<\/a> to researchers through a newly archived collection at the
\nNational Library of Medicine.<\/p>\n

The Berkeley psychiatrist, who died in 2007, was hailed as the grandfather of the medical marijuana movement, backing up the activists with unimpeachable scholarly chops to the rage of the Drug War establishment. It was hard to assail his credibility, as he had actually headed up the National Institute of Health\u2019s cannabis research program in the 1960s before defecting to the side of the people being studied, so to speak.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

An \u2018Inappropriate Attack of Curiosity\u2019\u00a0<\/h4>\n

Mikuriya was born in a rural part of
\nPennsylvania\u2019s Bucks County in 1933, to mixed German and Japanese immigrant
\nstock. This obviously made him the target of prejudice during his childhood in
\nWorld War II, an experience to which he would later attribute his rebellious
\nstreak.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mikuriya received his bachelor\u2019s degree in psychology from Reed College in
\nOregon in 1956, before serving a medic in the Army. He then went to medical
\nschool at Philadelphia\u2019s Temple University, where the turning point in his life
\noccurred.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As he would years later\u00a0relate to video-journalist<\/a>\u00a0Ruby Dunes on the sidelines of a cannabis conference in Santa Barbara, in 1959 Mikuriya was \u201cstruck by an inappropriate attack of curiosity\u201d after reading an unassigned chapter in a pharmacology textbook that mentioned the widespread medicinal use of cannabis in the United States before it was outlawed in 1937. <\/p>\n

He was sufficiently intrigued that on summer break between semesters that year, he overcame his ingrained fear and traveled to Mexico to seek the stuff out, buying a small quantity from a street-dealer. Nothing would ever be the same for him.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1966, Mikuriya began directing the drug addiction treatment center of the\u00a0New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute, at Princeton. That same year, he travelled to Morocco\u2019s hashish heartland of the Rif Mountains<\/a>, where he smoked\u00a0kif<\/em>\u00a0with Berber tribesman who had resisted French colonial efforts to stamp out cannabis smoking.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was also during this period that he discovered and immersed himself in the works of Sir William Brooke O\u2019Shaughnessy, the Irish physician who\u00a0researched<\/a>\u00a0the long tradition of medicinal use of cannabis in India in the 19th century. Mikuriya came to\u00a0view O\u2019Shaugnessy as a \u201cpersonal hero.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mikuriya was also among the first scholars to\u00a0re-explore<\/a>\u00a0the findings of the\u00a0Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report<\/a>, the 1894 study ordered by British colonial authorities to examine the supposed cannabis problem in the subcontinent, which instead determined that use is \u201ceither harmless or even beneficial.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1967, Mikuriya became a researcher at the Center for Narcotics & Drug Abuse Studies of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), itself a division of the\u00a0National Institutes of Health. This agency was the predecessor of today\u2019s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA<\/a>). There, he headed up what he would later call the government\u2019s \u201cfirst overground cannabis research program.\u201d (He would learn there was a \u201cconcurrent secret study\u201d going on at\u00a0Edgewood Arsenal<\/a>\u00a0in Maryland, linked to the\u00a0CIA\u2019s search<\/a>\u00a0for truth serums and psychotropic warfare agents.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

He was dispatched to California for the study, to observe the habits of the hippies who were then bursting upon the scene. But as Martin Lee writes in his book\u00a0\u201cSmoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana<\/a>,\u201d \u201cMikuriya realized that as far as cannabis was concerned he had more in common with the reefer rebels he visited in Northern California than with the \u2018repressed bureaucrats\u2019 who debriefed him when he returned from the West Coast.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1968, Mikuriya stepped down from his NIMH position and moved to Berkeley, where he took up a private psychiatric practice. The most important work of his life was about to begin.<\/p>\n

Intellectual Force Behind Medical Marijuana Push\u00a0<\/h4>\n

In 1972, Mikuriya published the\u00a0Marijuana Medical Papers:
\n1869-1972<\/a>, a\u00a0germinal work<\/a>\u00a0that was instrumental in launching the modern movement
\nfor medical marijuana.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

As this movement began to take off in California amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Mikuriya came to be seen as the intellectual prowess behind the activist efforts.<\/p>\n

San Francisco\u2019s cannabis crusader Dennis Peron was\u00a0viewed as the key architect<\/a>\u00a0of Proposition 215, the 1996 ballot measure that made medical marijuana legal in California, but it was Mikuriya who helped draft the text. If Peron was the father of the medical marijuana movement, Mikuriya was its grandfather, providing guidance behind the scenes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After the passage of 215, he founded\u00a0Mikuriya Medical Practice<\/a>, which lives on today and touts itself as \u201cCalifornia\u2019s original medical marijuana consultation service.\u201d During this period, he was writing numerous medical marijuana recommendations for patients every day. He was fondly known to his following as \u201cDr. Tod.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the following years, he would found the California Cannabis Research Medical Group and its latter offshoot, the\u00a0Society of Cannabis Clinicians<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But his open stance also attracted unwelcome if inevitable attention from the authorities. President Bill Clinton\u2019s hardline drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, publicly derided Mikuriya\u2019s medical practice and advocacy as \u201cthe Cheech and Chong show.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Finally, in 2000, the\u00a0Medical Board of California\u00a0accused Mikuriya of unprofessional conduct for allegedly failing to conduct proper physical examinations on 16 patients for whom he had recommended cannabis. The case was based on the testimony of undercover agents, including police. He would tell the medical board at his disciplinary hearing, \u201cNever before had a fake witness infiltrated my practice and created a fraudulent medical record. It\u2019s most upsetting.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

None of his legitimate patients complained about his conduct \u2014 on the contrary, several testified to the Medical Board in his defense.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2004, the Medical Board gave Mikuriya five years\u2019 probation and a $75,000 fine. He appealed the ruling, and was allowed to continue practicing under the supervision of the state-appointed monitor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018First-line Medication\u2019\u00a0<\/h4>\n

Mikuriya died of cancer in May 2007. His\u00a0obituary in the New York Times<\/a>\u00a0noted that he was reported to have recommended cannabis
\nfor nearly 9,000 patients.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And he was quite out of the closet about his own use. As the\u00a0Los Angeles Times reported<\/a>\u00a0in 2004, \u201cHe willingly acknowledges, unlike most of his peers in cannabis consulting, that he does indeed smoke pot, mostly in the morning with his coffee.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Mikuriya told Ruby Dunes in the interview the year before he died, \u201cCannabis is far less dangers than most any other medication you can think of, especially when dealing with chronic conditions. Cannabis should be looked on as a first-line medication, instead of it being something that you try when you give up on all the conventional treatments.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

TELL
\nUS,<\/strong>\u00a0do
\nyou consider cannabis a first-line medication?<\/p>\n

The post Tod Mikuriya: Grandfather of Medical Marijuana<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n


\n
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Dr. Tod Mikuriya was a critical force in the successful and ground-breaking effort to legalize medical marijuana in California in the 1990s. Now his papers are available to researchers through a newly archived collection at the National Library of Medicine. The Berkeley psychiatrist, who died in 2007, was hailed asContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[148,50,53,5044,13361],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41559"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41559"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41560,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41559\/revisions\/41560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}