TOD H. MIKURIYA, 73, DIES; BACKED MEDICAL MARIJUANA

Dr. Tod H. Mikuriya, a California psychiatrist who was widely regarded
as the grandfather of the medical marijuana movement in the United
States, died on May 20 at his 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 last 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 R. McCaffrey, director of the Office of
National Drug Control Policy under President Bill 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 medical marijuana that
began in the "Reefer Madness" era of the late 1930s.

"It had been available to clinicians for one hundred 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 United
States Army.

Dr. Mikuriya earned his M.D. from Temple University in 1962. While
studying there, he became intrigued by a reference in a pharmacology
textbook to the medical use of marijuana, the first stirrings of his
future career.

From 1966 to 1967, Dr. Mikuriya directed the drug addiction treatment
center of the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute, in Princeton. In
1967, he became a consulting research psychiatrist at the Center for
Narcotics and Drug Abuse Studies of the National Institute of Mental
Health, where he was in charge of marijuana research. He left the post
after several months, he later said in interviews, because he felt
that the agency was interested primarily in research that highlighted
the negative effects of the drug.

Dr. Mikuriya is survived by two sisters, Mary Jane Mikuriya and
Beverly Mikuriya; a son, Tadafumi, known as Sean; and a daughter,
Hero. Information on other survivors could not immediately be confirmed.

Among doctors who support the therapeutic use of marijuana, many are
publicly circumspect when asked if they ever take a taste of their own
medicine. Not so Dr. Mikuriya. As The Los Angeles Times reported in
2004, "He willingly acknowledges, unlike most of his peers in cannabis
consulting, that he does indeed smoke pot, mostly in the morning with
his coffee."