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Marijuana as medicine drives doctor’s practice
Peter Larsen | The Orange County Register | 11/01/2005

LAKE FOREST, Calif. — The two skater dudes slouched into the doctor’s office, tattooed, pierced and looking for medical marijuana.

I’ve got insomnia, doc — and pot helps me sleep, Skater No. 1 told Philip A. Denney.

But with no medical records to back up his claim — no credible medical history at all — the answer he got was no.

Expecting much the same from Skater No. 2, Denney stepped into the next examination room and asked him why he wanted a doctor’s approval to use marijuana.

I’ve got aggressive, metastatic bone cancer — I might not live much longer, the young man told Denney.

And after examining the man and his medical records, Denney wrote him the letter he sought.

“They looked so similar that I was prepared and had it in my mind that they wouldn’t qualify,” says Denney, who with a partner operates offices dedicated solely to medical marijuana in California.

“And I was just floored when I did the exam. Because where his friend was in no way qualified, he was absolutely qualified. I was looking at a dead man.”

When California voters endorsed marijuana as medicine in 1996, Denney offered only the silent support of his ballot to the controversial law.

“Like most physicians, I didn’t see any need to get involved and put my wallet at risk,” he says.

He believed in the law. And he believed that cannibis — his favored term — held promise for many patients.

But the federal government and the state medical board warned doctors to be very careful in how they implemented the new law, threatening their licenses if they stumbled.

Still, Denney, 57, couldn’t shake the feeling that he ought to be involved.

And so in 2000, a few years after the initial furor of Proposition 215 subsided, he opened an office in Loomis, near Sacramento, and started seeing patients in need of medical marijuana.

Almost overnight, Denney says he had so many patients he decided to resign his hospital job and make his new specialty a full-time job.

Five years later, Denney says he feels like he and his partner, Robert Sullivan, are on the cutting edge of medicine, law and politics, nearing the day when medical marijuana will be common practice.

Denney grew up in Hyattsville, Md., outside Washington, D.C. Bored with school, he joined the Navy at 17, enlisting to avoid the grunt’s life in Vietnam.

“It turned out it was a salvation for me,” Denney says about his four years of active duty. “I was going nowhere fast. And I did really well.”

While based in Willow Grove, Pa., he started college between anti-submarine flights over the Atlantic.

He also discovered pot.

“In those days you could be on any ship in the world and the stoners hung out on the fantail where the smoke just drifted away,” Denney says.

“To tell you the truth, I was disappointed,” he says of trying it. “I thought, ‘People spend money for this? I’d rather have a couple of beers.”’

Eventually, though, it seemed harmless and pleasant enough that he used it as “an occasional sort of party thing,” he says.

What struck him more, Denney says, was the sense that what he heard from the government — the “reefer madness” arguments against it — didn’t match what he saw.

Marijuana users “got into a lot less trouble than those who were drunks,” he says. “It didn’t make them use heroin.”

After leaving the Navy and graduating from Ohio University, Denney landed at the USC medical school, where he read medical literature on cannibis but graduated with a firm belief in traditional medicine.

“I had bought into the American ideal that anything good had to come out of a pill bottle,” he says. “We really looked down on natural remedies then. Those things were considered fringey.”

Thirty years later, Denney has a different point of view.

A dead ringer for a skinnier Santa — white hair, bushy beard and a warm smile that sets his eyes to twinkling behind wire-framed glasses — Denney describes the joy he gets from his patients every day.

“There’s not a single day that goes by that I don’t hear something that moves me to tears,” he says. “Nothing is better than having a patient come back and say, ‘Gee, doc, I feel so much better.”’

His patients are young and old — the oldest, a 93-year-old grandmother with crippling rheumatoid arthritis. They are poor and rich, business owners and laborers, liberals and conservatives.

“I see a wide range of political viewpoints,” he says. “I see people who are staunch conservatives on every issue except for this.”

His patients come to him for pain-related reasons, including migraines, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis and cancer-related problems such as nausea from chemotherapy, Denney says.

Denney screens his patients by phone, requires medical records from their personal doctors and does a complete exam. It discourages anyone trying to fake his or her way to an approval letter.

Because of all that, he has had no problems with law enforcement or the medical board.

“Am I worried?” he says. “No. Because I’m not doing anything illegal or immoral. I’m practicing medicine, just as I’ve always done.”

Five years ago, when there were only three or four other doctors in the state doing what he does, Denney says he sometimes felt like the Lone Ranger, out there on his own.

Now, as more states adopt laws like California’s — there are 13 so far — Denney thinks the tide is turning. Soon he will fly to Arkansas to testify to the legislature on a proposed medical-marijuana law.

“It gives me great hope,” he says.

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