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VY: You had told me earlier about a trial where, that you would go to. And I was interested to hear how you talked about how the Quakers supported him doing silent witnessing?

MM: Yes. We have attorney general of California, who at that time, 215, really was very angry that (215) was passed. "How dare the marijuana be legal?" So Dan Lungren said to all his sheriffs, all this police, "Let's get Mikuriya and Schoenfeld." All right, that means that everybody is going to find some ("dirt" on Tod). So he's taken to court because they picked some people that were they were (Tod's patients) to have marijuana and they were sure that they were dealing it. So (police) picked (patients out and) listed them as the drug dealers. (Selected patients) said, "Well, I want to talk about my condition in front of the judge." Because you don't know if you're (not) a medical marijuana doctor and a psychiatrist, what the conditions are of these people. They look perfectly normal. So they arranged for them, the people, to be called Patient A, Patient B, Patient C and so on. So the first patient was a lady who took birth control drugs and smoked. You can't smoke tobacco and have birth control drugs. But she did, and she got a stroke. And so they did an operation on her at Stanford, so when they called Stanford, they say she is alive and she wants to testify on this case. "What's your feeling about it?" They were so surprised she was still alive, and they said, "Go for it," and they supported that. So she was one of the first persons to speak out. She was wheelchair-bound, and only with marijuana could she speak in a way that she could be understood, but she spoke like [mimics voice]. And so she had very halting speech. Now, do you think she's going to be a drug dealer if she could hardly speak, and her husband is pushing her around and she's partially paralyzed! How could they name her as now (only because) he's authorizing her for marijuana medicine, and she's going to be classified as a drug dealer by this police group.

Okay, so there were about nine of them. One of them was a lovely blond girl, she was about twenty-one, just gorgeous. She's obviously a dealer because she doesn't have any problems. So she gets on the stage and she says, "I'm a patient of Dr. Mikuriya, and you know, I need marijuana because I am rageful. My father has been abusing me, sexually abusing me since I was ten. And when I was sixteen, I was able to escape, but I have very big anger issues, and I could just go off like that. So he has been helping me, and the marijuana has been helping me to find alternate ways of dealing with my sudden bursts of anger." But (just) to look at her, she has no problem in the world, she's just a gorgeous blonde.

The next person comes in, he was a construction worker. Has a long ponytail and everything. His problem is he cries too easily. And construction workers are not allowed to cry and be sensitive like that. So Dr. Mikuriya has him working with weavers who were a calm group of people who welcomed and are kind to him, and don't set him off with anything. So he's very appreciative of Dr. Mikuriya, but he's speaking now because you know, he really can't say this to his fellow construction workers, how he's feeling.

Then another one is a police officer. "See, I got this recommendation." I said to Tod, "Why did you give him this recommendation?" He said, "Just look at his nose, he's alcoholic, you can see all the blood vessels coming out on it." And he said the reason he wanted to get (marijuana), because he lost his guns (which) he left it in the back of his car, and he lost some other things. The police looked down on him. So he's trying to do something to bring up his image, (so) the police look at him (again with respect).

So in the back of this court, which was obviously set up, were these Quakers that had this five-inch circle that said "Witness" on them. They were dressed in three-piece suits, and they would come every day. It wouldn't be the same people, but they would be all dressed in three piece business suits. And they would sit there looking at the judge, who, everybody knew would "just say no to drugs." Well, what else does he say no to? Does he say no to medical marijuana?

(There) was the "expert witness" that they had for this trial, (who) had never prescribed marijuana, she didn't know anything about marijuana, and yet she was their expert doctor.

So as a result of this, (Tod) got fined for the cost of this trial plus he got an oversight doctor to work with him because he kept bad records. You know, he said he had a cut on this index finger of the left hand, it needs one stitch. "You have to write more than that." You know, nobody ever looks over doctors' analysis of patient records, but he had to have his looked over. So you know they were looking for something. And they never got their two hundred and forty thousand dollars for the cost because a lawyer got it removed. I mean, what is the justification for paying for this?

VY: Yeah.

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