Up Close: Dr. Tod Mikuriya - Restore Cannabis!

Dr. Mikuriya felt cannabis was an important issue being swept under the rug and believed it was important to elevate conciseness and bring back cannabis to the awareness of the medical community as a therapeutic agent.

By Michael Bachara, Hemp News Correspondent

In this recently un-earthed 1991 Time 4 Hemp interview, Dr. Tod Mikuriya talks about the importance of true cannabis research in the United States.

In 1966, Mikuriya became director at the drug addiction treatment center of the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute, in Princeton. In 1967, he became a consulting research psychiatrist at the Center for Narcotics and Drug Abuse Studies of the National Institute of Mental Health, where he was in charge of marijuana research. He left the assignment because he felt that the agency was interested primarily in research that highlighted the negative effects of the drug.

Mikuriya would eventually go on to become an author of Proposition 215, the 1996 state ballot measure that made it legal for California doctors to recommend marijuana to their patients.

Through his career, Dr. Mikuriya reportedly had approved cannabis for nearly 9,000 patients. "It had been available to clinicians for one hundred years until it was taken off the market in 1938," he told The East Bay Express, a Northern California newspaper, in 2004. "I'm fighting to restore cannabis."

Mikuriya passed away in 2007, but the good doctor left the world with a higher conscientiousness for cannabis reform and his input to society grows daily.

Time 4 Hemp: http://www.time4hemp.com

Footage archived by the Campaign for the Restoration and Regulation of Hemp (CRRH).