TOD MIKURIYA, 1933-2007

Tod Mikuriya, M.D., died Sunday at his home in the Berkeley Hills. He
was 73. The cause was complications of cancer. In the final days he'd
been in the care of his sisters, Beverly, an M.D. from Bucks County,
Pennsylvania, and Mary Jane of San Francisco, and his longtime
assistant, John Trapp.

Cancer had been diagnosed originally in his lungs, and as of last
March it had been detected in his liver, too. Dennis Peron and Dale
Gieringer threw farewell parties for him. He canceled a trip to
Hungary where he was to present a paper at the International
Cannabinoid Research Society meeting. His office began steering
patients to other doctors.

And then his condition improved. In late May 2006 Mikuriya attended
his 50th reunion at Reed College and sang rounds with his old
madrigal group. His office geared up again. He wrote the lead section
of an article recounting what California doctors had learned in the
10 years since the passage of Proposition 215 ("Medical Marijuana in
California, 1996-2006").

He met with a publisher about reissuing Marijuana Medical Papers, his
1973 anthology of pre-prohibition medical literature -the new edition
to include a CD containing eight more articles that had come to his
attention over the years. He had many visits from his 12-year-old
daughter, Hero, the apple of his eye; they even went cross-country
skiing one weekend.

As recently as this March Mikuriya played a key role organizing a
symposium at which retired colonel James Ketchum discussed the Army's
secret search for a cannabinoid-based incapacitating agent. Mikuriya
had begun assembling the contents for a new anthology, Cannabis
Clinical Papers, that would include studies by colleagues and three
major papers of his own: "Cannabis as a Substitute for Alcohol;"
"Cannabis as a First-Line Treatment for Mental Disorders;" and
"Cannabis Eases Post-Traumatic Stress." (The titles alone reflect the
relevance of Mikuriya's concerns. Even his historical studies related
to our present time and place. For example: "An 1873 survey by
British tax officials in India elicited a range of views on cannabis
that seems strikingly contemporary... 'the general opinion seems to
be that the evil effects of ganja have been exaggerated.'")

Mikuriya liked to use the slogans "Grandfather it in!" and "Back to
the future!" in discussing the legalization of cannabis for medical
use. The generations of Americans who discovered cannabis in social
settings in the 1960s and the decades that followed had no idea that
it had been widely used in this country between the Civil War and the
Great Depression, with tinctures manufactured by Eli Lilly, Parke,
Davis and other major pharmaceutical companies available by prescription.

For decades Mikuriya was the only M.D. among the small group of
activists and scholars who collected the bottles and labels and
sought to unearth and publicize the history that our educational
system had erased so systematically. Mikuriya was given to creating
polysyllabic phrases that forced one to puzzle over their meaning.
For example, America's cultural preference for the modern he called
"temporal chauvinism." Cannabis clubs, he said, showed the efficacy
of "proactive structuralism;" by which he meant, "People can create
something and, by doing so, set a precedent."

Tod Hiro Mikuriya was born in Eastern Pennsylvania in 1933 to Anna
(Schwenk) and Tadafumi Mikuriya. His father was a Japanese Samurai
who converted to Christianity, his mother a German immigrant and
practicing Baha'i. Tod and his two younger sisters went to Quaker
schools. "The Quakers were proprietors of the underground railway,"
Tod noted. "The cannabis prohibition has the same dynamics as the
bigotry and racism my family and I experienced starting on Dec. 7,
1941, when we were transformed from normal-but-different people into
war-criminal surrogates."

He graduated from Reed College in 1956, served as a medic in the U.S.
Army, and then attended Temple University School of Medicine. It was
at Temple that a reference in a pharmacology text to the medical
utility of marijuana triggered the interest that would define
Mikuriya's career. After getting his medical degree, Mikuriya served
an internship at Southern Pacific General Hospital in San Francisco,
specialized in psychiatry at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, and
completed his training at Mendocino State Hospital.

In 1967 he became director of non-classified marijuana research for
the National Institute of Mental Health Center for Narcotics and Drug
Abuse. He left the position after several months, he said, "When it
became clear they only wanted research into damaging effects, not
helpful ones."

Mikuriya moved to Berkeley in 1970 and entered private practice. He
was active in Amorphia, a West Coast reform group that eventually
folded into NORML, and helped organize a 1972 marijuana legalization
initiative, working alongside Michael and Michelle Aldrich, Pebbles
Trippet, and others who stayed with the struggle through the ensuing
decades of cultural and political rollback.

"Western medicine has forgotten almost all it once knew about the
therapeutic properties of marijuana," Mikuriya lamented to a UCSF
medical student interviewing him in 1996. (I had the privilege of
sitting in.) "Hemp-based tinctures and preparations were prescribed
for myriad purposes--analgesic and hypnotic; appetite stimulant;
anti-epileptic and antispasmodic; for the prevention and treatment of
the neuralgias, including migraine and tic doloreux; antidepressant
and tranquilizer; oxytocic (to induce uterine contractions); topical
anesthetic; withdrawal agent for opiate, chloral and alcohol
addiction; intraocular hypotensive; childbirth analgesic; hypothermogenic."

Cannabis is also an anti-asthmatic and antitussive (cough
suppressant), Mikuriya told the med student. It went out of favor
with doctors in the early decades of the 20th century "not because it
was deemed toxic or dangerous but because alternatives came on the
market--injectable opiates and synthetics such as aspirin and
barbiturates-- that were quicker-acting and offered more consistency
in dosage and patient response."

When Dennis Peron launched the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club at
the start of the '90s, Mikuriya saw "a unique research opportunity."
He began interviewing club members in an attempt to confirm or add to
descriptions in the pre-prohibition literature. When Prop 215 was
being drafted, Mikuriya contributed the all-important phrase in the
first sentence that allows doctors to approve marijuana use in
treating "any...condition for which marijuana provides relief."
(Eleven other states have since passed laws allowing marijuana use to
treat specific conditions. Mikuriya considered them all
intellectually dishonest compromises.)

Mikuriya's contention that marijuana alleviates an extremely wide
range of symptoms was ridiculed by Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey and
other federal officials at a press conference in December, 1996.
Reform advocates promptly sued the drug czar's office and obtained a
federal injunction confirming the Constitutional right of doctors and
patients to discuss marijuana as a treatment option. Nevertheless,
for several years following the passage of Prop 215, almost no
California M.D.s were willing to risk the wrath of the government by
putting in writing a recommendation for cannabis in the treatment of
say, depression, or lower back pain.People all over the state were
calling cannabis clubs to report that their doctors--many of whom had
expressed their approval of marijuana previously--would not give them
a written "letter of diagnosis" entitling them to join a club. These
people would very often be given the name and phone number of Tod Mikuriya.

Thus Mikuriya became the doctor of last resort for thousands of
California patients. He flew or drove with John Trapp to cities and
towns around the state to preside at ad hoc clinics.

"It's one of the most satisfying experiences for me as a psychiatrist
to be able to remove the stigma of criminality from an individual,"
he said after testifying for an alcoholic Vietnam vet in 1998. "Not
just the self-perceived stigma, but removing the real danger of civil
forfeiture and other kinds of state viciousness."

Mikuriya was investigated by the California medical board on the
basis of complaints from law enforcement officers (none from
patients, and no allegations of harm to a patient). At a disciplinary
hearing in 2003 all the patients named in the accusation praised and
thanked Mikuriya. He was placed on probation by the board, but
continued to practice until two weeks ago. Then his decline was rapid.

He had issued some 9,000 approvals. Mikuriya was the founder of the
Society of Cannabis Clinicians, a specialty group whose members have
issued more than 160,000 approvals.

"Tod was the mentor of every doctor working in the field," says SCC
president Philip A. Denney, M.D. "His observation that cannabis
alleviates so many seemingly disparate symptoms has been explained by
recent research showing that its active ingredients modulate
virtually every neurotransmission system in the body."

In other words, the finding the drug czar mocked as "a fraud" turned
out to be a most significant truth.

A Quaker service honoring our mutual friend will be held at 4:30 p.m.
today (Friday) at the Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento St.