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VY: You know, you had talked about, you brought up your brother a couple of times, and I wonder if you want to talk about him a little bit.

MM: I would love to talk about him because he, can you believe this boy was on probation when he was nine years old?

VY: Why?

MM: Well, you know, he's an advocate for rights of animals, he loved animals. And our neighbor next door said, "If your cat pushes over our garbage any more, I'm going to poison the cats." My brother was so stressed, he wrote a note and he said, "If you poison the cats, we're going to pepper your behind with buckshot. Cat lovers." Well, of course he knew who wrote that, the "cat lovers," in childish handwriting. So we had to go before the Justice of the Peace, and he had to be on his best behavior. But you know, he would speak up when he was four, the lady next door came in, she was red-faced, purple. She was screaming at my mother, and I remember holding on to my mother's skirt and looking at this woman with a red face yelling at my mother. Then I found out what happened. Our cats were urinating on her plants. And then when she was complaining, my brother, four years old, says, "They have to urinate someplace." So what does the lady say to this little kid? So she walks away. So he's always been speaking up for other people or other animals.

When he was in the military, he didn't like the fact that they had to buy, (at the) store, (a specific) shaving cream. So he wrote to the senator from the state and he said, "Why do they have a PX and I am only allowed to buy this shaving cream? What? Is somebody getting a kickback or whatever it is?" Well, it (became) a senate investigation, senator investigated this, something. And they said, "Oh, we're going to have an investigation." And the head of (soldiers) said, "Okay, Mikuriya, I know it's you or this other person, but when I find out, your life is going to be miserable." So at that time, my brother goes to the personnel and said, "Do they have a need for a psychiatrist or anything?" Oh, they have a desperate need in a medical center where they have the mentally sick. Tod was out the next day, and he was sent there. And while he was in Brook Medical Center, he saw them using all these drugs on patients, taking advantage of all the LSD and other kinds of drugs. So (the inmates) said, "Oh, I don't like this drug, it makes me tired." So on the weekend, he would take the drug to see how it made him feel, and (thus) he got interested in this drug therapy. And so he went and he said, "Oh, I want to go to medical school." So that's what they did, they let him out early. And he spoke some German, because he had German in high school. So he spoke German to the prisoners of war, and he could calm them down. Whereas the other Americans there couldn't speak German, couldn't empathize with them because they are prisoners of war and that's a big difference, they were just human.

And he got interested in marijuana in medical school because he was studying pharmacology, and in the book it said, "This drug has been available for millions of years, for thousands of years, for different countries." But it's illegal. "How can that be?" he says. So that made him interested in trying marijuana out. So he did it during his summer vacation, and then he studied in North Africa, Kief, and (marijuana) in Europe, India, and Nepal. And then he wrote a book about (marijuana medical papers).

VY: Well, I've seen him referred to as the Father of, the Japanese American Father of Medical Marijuana Movement.

MM: Well, it was like a passion in him. If something that worked for all these years, and suddenly it stopped, how could that be? How could you have (...) all the large pharmacies having the active ingredient, cannabis? It was a political decision, he couldn't believe that. So he wanted to put (cannabis) back on the formulary so that people could use it (again). And what he was finding in his patients, he was a therapist, and they would take (prescribed) drugs, but they would get bad side effects. And they found out that if they self-medicated with marijuana, they would find out they could control this or that problem that they have. So he started collecting data on that. And when they opened marijuana (dispensaries), he (found) five hundred uses for it. Because he was a researcher, every time they opened a new clinic, though it was illegal, he would go and he said, "Can I talk to your patients? I want to know why are they using (cannabis) and what is their medical condition that they're using it for?" So he started making this list of conditions, and then he had this sheet with a checklist. And so he could collate it with what the patients were taking for what problems.

And there was two propositions in California, Proposition 19 that didn't pass, and Proposition 215 which did. And he was so proud of himself because they were negotiating what could medical marijuana be used for? Could be used for cancer patients, for glaucoma. And Tod said, "But I have all these other reasons they could use for. So why don't we add, "or for any other medical condition that it's effective for?'" And he got that in the language of 215, and he said that's his, probably, best moment. And it's interesting that he worked for the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, as a director, and he supported marijuana. And when they found he supported marijuana after a year, they asked him to leave. Because they didn't want to be associated, because the government says it's illegal. So how can a member of their medical board, medical administration, saying that he supported it? So that's how he came out here from Washington to California, Berkeley.

VY: Oh, that's how he ended up on the West Coast?

MM: Yeah.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.