IN MEMORIAM: TOD MIKURIYA

Pioneering researcher on marijuana and cannabis therapeutics dies at
73.

Tod Hiro Mikuriya, MD, prominent psychiatrist and advocate for the
legal use of marijuana for medical purposes, has died at the age of
73.

After earning his medical degree at Temple University he completed
a psychiatric residency at San Francisco's Southern Pacific General
Hospital. This was followed by service in the US Army Medical Corps
and at state hospitals in California and Oregon. He was Director of
the Drug Addiction Treatment Center of the New Jersey NeuroPschiatric
Institute. In the 1960's he directed marijuana research for the
National Institute of Mental Health's Center for Narcotics and Drug
Abuse Studies (predecessor of today's National Institute on Drug
Abuse) but when the research failed to support the government's view
of marijuana as a dangerous drug, he believed the evidence instead of
the politicians. That ended his career with the federal government.

In the subsequent years, he practiced psychiatry in California.
Following passage of the California Compassionate Use Act (Proposition
215) in 1996, Dr. Mikuriya served as Medical Coordinator of the
Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, the Hayward Hempery, and the San
Francisco Cannabis Buyers' Club - organizations established to provide
access to medical marijuana for patients. In 2000 he founded the
California Cannabis Research Medical Group http://www.ccrmg.org/ , a
non-profit organization "dedicated to conducting quality medical
marijuana research, to ensuring the safety and confidentiality of all
research subjects, and to maintaining the highest quality of standards
and risk management".

He described the roots of his activism in the ironic statement that,
"I had the good fortune to have a Japanese father and a German mother
in a small Pennsylvania town during the Depression and World War II,"
As a consequence of this background, "my sister and I were chased,
shot at, beaten up, spat upon, called names. The local kids chased us
like a pack of dogs. I realized that people could be brainwashed and
trained to hate. The same thing has been done with marijuana and
marijuana users. I've learned to fight back."

He fought the good fight against bad laws and their abusive
enforcement for many years and at high personal cost. His passing will
be mourned by the many he helped and by those who seek to see drug
policy based on realities instead of propoaganda.

A collection of some of his writings on drug policy can be found
online at the Schaffer Library of Drug Polcy.
http://www.druglibrary.org/special/mikuriya/tod_mikuriya_collection.htm