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.