Tod Hiro Mikuriya (20 September 193320 May 2007) was an American medical doctor and psychiatrist. Known as an outspoken advocate for the use of cannabis for medical purposes and its legalization, he is often regarded as the grandfather of the medical cannabis movement in the United States. Personal life Mikuriya was born in Fallsington, Pennsylvania, from German teacher Anna Schwenk and civil engineer Tadafumi Mikuriya, an Issei descendant of the Japanese samurai nobility. Growing up in the Quaker community of Fallsington, Pennsylvania and attending Quaker schools (George School, Haverford College) it was the compromise chosen by his parents that the three Mikuriya children were raised as Quakers. "The Quakers were proprietors of the Underground Railway, I’m proud to say. The cannabis prohibition has the same dynamics as the bigotry and racism my family and I experienced starting on 7 December 1941, when we were transformed from normal-but-different people into war-criminal surrogates." In a 1998 interview, Mikuriya (whose father was a converted Christian and whose mother a follower of the Baháʼí Faith), made a connection between his family background and his views in relation to cannabis. Mikuriya claimed he first heard of cannabis in a children's book in 1959. In 1951, Mikuriya graduated from a private Quaker preparatory school. He graduated a bachelor’s degree from Reed College in 1956 and was drafted into the Army the following year. Mikuriya served at Brooke Army Hospital psychiatric ward before graduating his medical degree in 1962 at Temple University, with an internship at Southern Pacific Hospital (San Francisco) and residencies in psychiatry at Oregon State Hospital and at Mendocino State Hospital. Mikuriya died at his home in Berkeley, California on 20 May 2007, aged 73, after a long battle with cancer. Professional career Mikuriya first directed a center for the treatment of drug addiction in Princeton, New Jersey (1966–1967) before being appointed director of non-classified marijuana research for the National Institute of Mental Health Center for Narcotics and Drug Abuse Studies in 1967. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he authored a number of academic publications creating the debate on the therapeutic use of cannabis within the medical community, including proposing cannabis as a substitution agent as well as on issues related to the legality of cannabis. His 1972 self-published book Marijuana Medical Papers 1839–1972 became a landmark in the modern movement for the legalization of Medical marijuana. Collected from the reference section