To the Editor: The Union Democrat's editors have written an editorial so bad, "Pot farms thrive despite best CAMP efforts" (Aug 15), that it must be rebutted. You make sense when you say (addressing large illegal cannabis farms) "we don't need them..." Indeed, we don't. Those jobs and the profits from such massive commercial gardening need to go to workers and employers in the U.S., not foreign criminal syndicates. Your editorial says you "commend Campaign Against Marijuana Planting for doing an exemplary job of ridding both public and private lands of the plantations." It then goes on to say "the seizures have hardly put a stop to illegal growing." If CAMP were doing an exemplary job would record amounts of illegal cannabis be growing in our national parks and national forests? [continues 137 words]
County supervisors should approve ID cards for medical marijuana patients. The county Board of Supervisors is scheduled to consider the charged issue of having the Orange County Health Care Agency issue voluntary identification cards to medicinal users of marijuana, in compliance with state law. The supervisors should approve the program for several reasons. The first, of course, is that they are required by state law to do so. One might have argued that things should have been set up differently, with effective power lodged at the most-local level and flowing upward toward the state government. However, under California law counties are legally subdivisions of the state and are legally obliged to follow mandates of the state government. [continues 451 words]
More Than Ten Years After California's Compassionate Use Act Was Passed by Voters, State and Local Officials Are Still Collaborating With Federal Law Enforcement to Undermine It. On the morning of January 13, 2004, Tehama County prosecutor Lynn Strom unexpectedly announced that the state of California was dropping charges against Cynthia Blake and David Davidson for possessing and growing cannabis with the intent to distribute. While the two medical marijuana patients waited in the courtroom, Strom and the defense attorneys disappeared inside the judge's chambers to discuss the motion to dismiss. Moments later, more than a dozen sheriff's deputies pounced on the hapless couple, handcuffed them, and shoved them into an unmarked police car waiting outside the courthouse in the Sacramento Valley town of Corning. They were already en route to jail in Sacramento when Strom informed their lawyers that the state was bowing out because the Feds were taking over the case. [continues 707 words]
Ignorance Marches On Of all the men in the world, the one who happens to be best suited to our daughter lives in Bristol, England. This afternoon we were in the nearby town of Wells, drinking Guiness at a pub in front of which the Quaker leader William Penn used to address thousands of people and was once arrested for doing so. "Must remember to tell Tod about that," I thought (Tod Mikuriya, MD, being a Quaker from Pennsylvania who ran afoul of law enforcement himself). But of course Tod won't be there to tell about Penn when we get back. [continues 2359 words]
Like a lot of people who support marijuana use, psychiatrist Tod Mikuriya had detractors. (His work was called "the Cheech and Chong show" by Bill Clinton's drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey.) The longtime Republican believed in the therapeutic effects of the drug on more than 200 ailments and in 1996 saw a bill he crafted, Proposition 215, pass in California, legalizing the use of pot for the seriously ill. The "grandfather" of the medicinal-marijuana movement said his fight to "restore cannabis" stemmed from a backlash against its medical use following the late-'30s film Reefer Madness. He was 73 and had cancer. [end]
Dr. Tod Mikuriya, a California psychiatrist who was widely regarded as the grandfather of the medical marijuana movement in the United States, died May 20 at his home in Berkeley. He was 73. The cause was complications of cancer, his family told California news organizations. Mikuriya, who helped make the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes legal in California, spent the last 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. Sometimes Mikuriya's work found little favor. In 1996, General Barry McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy derided the doctor's medical philosophy as "the Cheech and Chong show," referring to two Hollywood movie characters known for their marijuana-themed humor. [end]
DR. TOD MIKURIYA: 1933 - 2007 Advocate for Use of Medical Marijuana California Psychiatrist Helped Create State Ballot Measure That Legalized Cannabis Use for Seriously Ill Patients NEW YORK -- Dr. Tod Mikuriya, a California psychiatrist widely regarded as the grandfather of the medical marijuana movement in the United States, died May 20 at his home in Berkeley. He was 73. The cause was cancer complications, his family told California news organizations. Dr. Mikuriya, who helped make the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes legal in California, spent the last four decades advocating its use, researching its effects and publishing articles on the subject. [continues 357 words]
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. [continues 429 words]
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. [continues 1391 words]
Dr. Tod H. Mikuriya, a psychiatrist who was a leading figure in California's medical marijuana movement, died from complications of cancer Sunday at his Berkeley home, his family said. He was 73. He helped draft Proposition 215, a state ballot measure that legalized marijuana for the seriously ill who have a doctor's recommendation. Since its passage in 1996, Mikuriya had written approvals for almost 9,000 patients, said his friend Fred Gardner. Mikuriya had studied the drug's therapeutic potential since the 1960s and briefly directed marijuana research at the National Institute of Mental Health. He left when he realized the government only "wanted bad things found out about marijuana," he told the online newsmagazine AlterNet in 2004. [continues 587 words]
When the Medical Marijuana Patients Union held a symposium in Fort Bragg in August, 2004, Sheriff Tony Craver asked an organizer to please introduce him to Dr. Tod Mikuriya. It turned out that Mikuriya had left after participating in a morning panel. "That's one man I've always wanted to meet," said Craver, looking down in disappointment. The sheriff knew there was something unique about Mikuriya, and so did half the cops and prosecutors in California, who, unlike Tony Craver, fiercely resented him for legitimizing people previously considered criminals. [continues 1503 words]
On March 20, student free speech joined the panoply of endangered fundamental rights ready to be stripped away from us due to the tragedy of the drug war. Kenneth Starr, former solicitor general, who reached broad fame by highlighting a presidential sex scandal in the Clinton years, stood before the land's highest court to argue the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case. It all started innocently enough when 18-year-old Joe Frederick sought his "15 minutes of fame" by pulling a harmless prank. In 2002, in front of his high school, during a procession of the Olympic torch relay brigade, Joe unrolled a 14-foot banner bearing the words "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." Soon after the cameras caught the act, his high school principal suspended him for ten days for displaying the banner, in apparent violation of school policy limiting speech that promotes illegal drug use. Frederick soon brought a lawsuit against his school principal in which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor, finding that the principal had violated Frederick's First Amendment rights. [continues 299 words]
How far can a school go in regulating what students say, even off campus? That's the question the Supreme Court is wrestling with in the case of Morse v. Frederick, also known as the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case. The case dates back to 2002, when the Olympic Flame was making its way to Salt Lake City. When the torch run passed through Juneau, Alaska, students from Juneau-Douglas High School were given a break from class to watch. Joseph Frederick, then a senior, was across the street from the school holding up a sign that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" (whatever that means) as the torch passed. [continues 858 words]
Justices in the Supreme Court's "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case appear to be interested in turning "Just Say No" into "Don't Even Say It," curtailing free speech rights. On Monday, March 19, the Supreme Court heard a case concerning the scope of student speech in public high schools. The case, Morse v. Frederick, involved an 18 year old high school student who was punished by school officials for displaying a banner on a sidewalk across the street from his school. The banner was destroyed and the student was suspended because officials believed the banner, which read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus," touted a pro-drug message in violation of the school's anti-drug policy. [continues 763 words]
The message connected drug use and religion in a nonsensical phrase that was designed to provoke, and it got Joseph Frederick in a heap of trouble. After he unfurled his 14-foot "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner on a Juneau, Alaska, street one winter morning in 2002, Frederick got a 10-day school suspension. Five years later, he has a date Monday at the Supreme Court in what is shaping up as an important test of constitutional rights. Students don't leave their right to free speech at the school door, the high court said in a Vietnam-era case over an anti-war protest by high school students. [continues 667 words]
Cannabis for the Wounded Screaming Chris Mathews and the corporate media would have us believe that it's only the living conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that are deplorable, not the medical care itself. Donna Shalala and Bob Dole have been assigned to investigate the situation. A superficial clean-up will ensue -rodents poisoned, moldy drywall replaced-while the quality of care gets lauded and prosthetic limbs are presented as proof that all is state-of-the-art. Out in California, however, doctors in the Society of Cannabis Clinicians question the care doled out at Walter Reed and other military hospitals where wounded soldiers and vets are treated with toxic medications* while the safest painkiller known to man is systematically withheld. "If anybody needs and deserves cannabis-based medicine, it's the thousands of soldiers who have been seriously wounded in Iraq," says Philip A. Denney, MD. "Cannabis would help in treating insomnia, pain, PTSD, and a whole array of symptoms that wounded vets typically face." [continues 1016 words]
In addition to DEA Administrative Judge Mary Ellen Bittner's non-binding recommendation that Professor Lyle Craker be allowed to grow cannabis for research purposes ( see http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2007/02/a_little_known.html ), a second cannabis-related medical milestone was reached this week: a paper from the University of California Medical School in San Francisco reporting that inhaled cannabis significantly reduced AIDS-related neuropathic pain in a small, but carefully controlled series of human subjects, was published in the peer-reviewed journal, Neurology ( see http://www.aidsmeds.com/articles/1667_11275.shtml ). Of the two events, the latter seems more likely to have both immediate and lasting impact on drug policy. There is also a decent possibility that the almost simultaneous announcement of the two events might have a synergistic effect by deterring Bittner's DEA superiors from rejecting her recommendation as they would otherwise be certain to do. [continues 499 words]
Advocates Say Continuing Treatment For Short-Term Inmates Cuts Recidivism With critics long holding that methadone is nothing more than a legal replacement for an illegal heroin addiction, few prisoners nationwide have received the bitter medicine in jail unless they were pregnant and at risk of losing an unborn child to withdrawal. But that is changing. Lehigh County Prison has agreed to join Northampton and Berks county prisons in taking the next controversial step: continuing methadone treatment for short-term inmates who had been taking the medicine before incarceration. [continues 1491 words]
TEN years ago, California voters were first in the nation to legalize the medical use of marijuana. We managed the Proposition 215 campaign, and later had similar success in six other states. When Proposition 215 appeared on the California ballot, political leaders and pundits of all stripes urged voters to oppose it. They made some dramatic predictions about what would happen if it passed. Let's go back and see how right, or wrong, they were. President Bill Clinton's drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, was blunt: Legal acceptance of the medical use of marijuana would "cause drug abuse to increase among our children." [continues 616 words]
Despite hysterical claims that the legalization of medicinal marijuana for use by the seriously ill would somehow kick-start a juggernaut of seemingly state-sanctioned drug use and abuse - a tired-ass hand-wringing worry brought, primarily, by your drug war pals at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, starting with Nineties czar Barry McCaffrey - it appears that, a decade after California voters passed the nation's first medi-pot law, the sky has not fallen. [continues 399 words]
