Andy Kinnon recently walked into an Orange County doctor's office looking for relief. When he walked out an hour later, Kinnon said, he had just the thing he'd been seeking: a recommendation, on embossed white paper signed and dated by a physician, for all the marijuana he could smoke.
"I suffer from migraine headaches," Kinnon, 41, explained. "They're wicked -- you have to shut out light and sound."
For years he'd tried various remedies, none of which had worked. Finally, in 1996, Kinnon said, he discovered the one thing that helped ease the pain -- cannabis, which he's been smoking ever since.
"I've tried everything else," Kinnon said. "Now I have the legal right to use it as medicine. These guys are folk heroes."
The guys he's talking about are Drs. Phillip A. Denney and Robert E. Sullivan, who last week opened in a Lake Forest strip mall a medical practice devoted to recommending medical marijuana to patients.
In focusing their entire practice on that narrow specialty, the pair joined a handful of doctors statewide -- mostly in Northern California -- openly promoting the treatment of a variety of ailments with cannabis, which California voters legalized with the approval of Proposition 215 in 1996. But both acknowledge they have also opened themselves to what they contend is police harassment and an array of challenges that they say have plagued many colleagues.
"I'm scared to death," Denney, 55, said Feb. 9, the day the office opened in a retail center just off Interstate 5 and Kinnon showed up to become their first patient. "I'm scared that the medical board will take away my license. I'm scared that the federal government will kick down my door and take me off to prison in handcuffs."
His fear is not entirely unfounded.
The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, generally considered the most authoritative source on such matters, lists on its website a dozen California physicians who routinely recommend cannabis as a treatment.
Despite a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the right of doctors to discuss marijuana with their patients, the website says at least eight of these doctors have come under investigation by the California Medical Board, following law enforcement complaints that their medical examinations of patients were a sham.
