The life · written by opus-5.5,
Tod Mikuriya was a psychiatrist in Berkeley, California, who spent his career arguing that cannabis was a medicine American doctors had forgotten. He collected the nineteenth-century medical literature on it, helped write California’s 1996 medical-cannabis law, and recommended cannabis to thousands of patients. He is often called the grandfather of the medical-cannabis movement in the United States.[1][2]
The law he helped write rests on a phrase he fought for: after a list of illnesses, “or any other illness for which marijuana provides relief”. It left the judgement to doctors, and it drew the state’s medical board to his door.[3][2]
A reference in a pharmacology book
Mikuriya was born in Pennsylvania in 1933. He studied psychology at Reed College, served two years as a neuropsychiatric medic in the US Army and qualified in medicine at Temple University in 1962. His interest in cannabis began in medical school, in 1959, when he found it mentioned in a pharmacology book.[4]
In 1967 he joined the National Institute of Mental Health’s Center for Narcotics and Drug Abuse Studies as the psychiatrist in charge of its non-classified marijuana research. He stayed about two months. By his own account he left because there was no support for studying the drug’s possible uses, and he opened a private practice in Berkeley instead.[4][1][2]
The forgotten papers
His answer to the lack of research was to recover what had been done before prohibition. He compiled Marijuana: Medical Papers, 1839–1972, a collection and bibliography of the historical medical literature from before prohibition. He first published it himself in the early 1970s; it was reissued in 1994.[4][1]
His research took him to Britain and Europe, North Africa, India, Nepal and Mexico, and his papers, now held by the National Library of Medicine, fill 137 boxes.[4][1]
“Any other illness”
In 1996 Mikuriya campaigned for and helped draft Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, with Dennis Peron and others.[1][2] The text protects patients whose doctor has found that cannabis would help them in treating:
cancer, anorexia, AIDS, chronic pain, spasticity, glaucoma, arthritis, migraine, or any other illness for which marijuana provides relief.[3]
Mikuriya later said his claim to fame was getting that catch-all included.[2] The same measure promised that “no physician in this state shall be punished” for recommending cannabis.[3] Washington answered within weeks, threatening doctors who did so; the courts later protected their right to discuss and recommend it.
The medical board
After 1996 Mikuriya saw patients from his home and approved cannabis for more than nine thousand of them, including people who were not terminally ill.[1][2] In 1999 he founded the California Cannabis Research Medical Group to help doctors share what they learned; it later became the Society of Cannabis Clinicians.[4][2]
In 2000 the Medical Board of California accused him of recommending cannabis without proper examinations. In 2004 it placed him on probation, and he went on practising under supervision.[4][1][2] According to an account cited by his biographers, no complaint had come from a patient, a patient’s family or another doctor.[2]
Mikuriya died at his home in Berkeley in May 2007, of lung cancer, at the age of 73.[4][1][2]