From The Mikuriya File

Moving the file cabinets. Don’t have time to decide which Manila folders are worth keeping so I’m bringing them all. There’s a whole drawer devoted to Tod H. Mikuriya, MD, the Berkeley-based psychiatrist who helped lead the medical marijuana movement. I first interviewed him in 1996, and we became fast friends. Saw each other or talked on the phone almost every day until he died in May 2007.

I opened one of the folders, thinking I’d just take a quick glance. On top was a copy of the chart that Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey had cited during a press conference, televised live by CNN in December ‘96, at which he and other top Clinton Administration officials threatened to revoke the licenses of California doctors who approved marijuana use by patients. Tod had added a comment, “Whose list is this? Not mine.” (I pursued the question and the genesis of the list was revealed in an AVA exclusive, in January of 1997.)

The folder included a copy of the letter of protest that Tod had sent to McCaffrey: “I was astonished and deeply offended by your presentation at the White House press conference December 30 on California Proposition 215, in which you identified me by name in association with a chart listing possible uses for Marijuana, which you labeled ‘Dr. Tod Mikuriya’s medical uses of marijuana’ and ridiculed as a ‘Cheech and Chong show’…”

Next I came across a prophetic three-page letter from Tod to President William J. Clinton that begins, “I contemplate a career change from psychiatrist in private practice for 29 years to defendant in federal court or some other venue. Efforts to sanction California physicians for recommending the medical use of cannabis will be hurtful, ineffectual, and politically suicidal…”

Tod had a bent for florid phrases, and maybe “politically suicidal” was not applicable to Bill Clinton, who had just been re-elected. But the passage of Prop 215 by California voters gave Clinton (and Vice President Gore, and the Democratic Party) a golden opportunity to own “the marijuana issue” from them on. When Prop 215 passed, Clinton and his minions could have said, very sternly, “We have serious concerns about this new law, and will be monitoring the situation very closely, and we will immediately impose the federal ban if any impact on public health is detected.” Then, when that impact was negligible and more states moved to legalize the herb for medical use, the Dems could have claimed credit for having ended Prohibition! They knew damn well it was benign. Gore had been a heavy user. Ditto Barack Obama. Were the DNC strategists so politically disconnected from us, the people, that they didn’t know we were truly fed up with Prohibition?

No, they were too in thrall to Big Pharma. And so they blew it. By 2014 Mitch McConnell would save his Senate seat by promising would-be hemp farmers that he was going to advance their cause.

Back in the ‘90s I was managing editor of Synapse, the internal weekly at UCSF. The job left me time to produce the journal Tod envisaged, in which doctors could share findings and observations, and keep up with developments in the field of cannabis medicine. Soon Tod himself was being investigated by the state medical board and it was obvious that the legal/political side of the story had to be covered alongside the science/medicine side. We changed the name of our publication from The Medical Marijuana Update to The Leaflet and laid out a four-column, 11 x 17 inch tabloid (just like Synapse) that would be printed at Howard Quinn, a union shop in the Mission (SF). We weren’t in a super-hurry because we didn’t have a distribution network. 

At the time Prop 215 passed. very few California MDs had been willing to approve cannabis use to treat conditions less grave than AIDS, cancer, MS and seizure disorders. Tod was willing to approve its use to treat any condition for which a patient claimed it had provided relief. (His typical interview was 12-15 minutes. His study of the pre-prohibition literature had convinced him of marijuana's astonishing versatility and relative benignity.) Tod foresaw that other doctors would adopt his approach and that  "Cannabis Clinician" would emerge as a type of medical specialty. He was an intrepid organizer, but it wasn't until the winter of 1999 that he called to order the first meeting of the California Cannabis Research Medical Group. (It was held at an old-age home in San Pablo that Ram Dass had offered to buy for Tod as a gesture of support. But the wise one then reneged.)

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Ignoring Prop 215

The few people who know anything about the history of the medical marijuana movement in California might be able to name the Republican Attorney General who led the opposition to Prop 215. But he, Dan Lungren, was gone from Sacramento when the law was disimplemented. And it was liberal Democrats who did it!  

Bill Lockyer, a Lib Dem who succeeded Lungren, did not direct California district attorneys to follow the letter and spirit of the law created by Prop 215. Instead he created a "Medical Marijuana Task Force" chaired by Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (also a Lib Dem) to draft "enabling legislation" that would "clarify" the law. The Task Force held nine meetings in the years ahead, while Mikuriya and all but one of the original members of his pro-cannabis doctors' group were investigated by the medical board. Tod was prosecuted by the AG's office and put on probation. He  appealed and lost. His appeal at the Superior Court level was cut short by the grim reaper. 

Dear Bill,

“When you took Office in January our hopes soared. We believed you would end the Lungrun template of terror when you articulated your intention of enforcing the law. Unfortunately, that has not happened. The Lungren guidelines continue unchanged. California physicians remain cowed and intimidated by both local criminal justice entities and federal threats...

“My correspondence with the 58 counties reveals most of them failing to implement or comply with the Compassionate Use Act of 1996. The criminal justice entities in most counties remain lawless. My patients and I have been at the mercy of police, prosecutors and judges who run roughshod over Californians trying to exert their rights... The Attorney General continues to fail to see the laws of the state uniformly enforced. The passive and enabling policy you have articulated allows local prosecutions to proceed which appear to violate California law. This is quite different from being a legislator seeking accommodation and consensus. During your watch i=as California’s “top cop” you must exert leadership over a vast civil servant empire and utilize executive orders and policy to properly direct the troops. As an elected leader you operate at a disadvantage, as civil service employees are functionally tenured and you are only temporary. Only with executive command initiative can any substantive changes be accomplished in the well-entrenched subculture of the criminal justice system. The official position of refusal to become involved with locally prosecuted cases would appear to be illegal or inappropriate.

“‘The Attorney General shall have direct supervision over every district attorney and sheriff and over such other law-enforcement officer that may be designated by law, and all matters pertaining to the duties of their respective offices, and may require any of said officers to make reports concerning the investigation, detection, prosecution, and punishment of crime in their respective jurisdictions.’“ The ongoing cases in the counties since your taking office and announcing a substantive change in policy has obviously and painfully not taken place because of your acting like the legislator instead of assuming the mandated executive leadership role.