In between Jay-Z and Lady Gaga songs on Redding's hip-hop and pop music station, an advertisement proclaims that for just $149, a new doctor in town will evaluate a patient for medical marijuana.
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai's advertisement would have been unthinkable until nine months ago, when President Barack Obama directed federal authorities not to prosecute people if they're complying with states' medical marijuana laws.
Ever since, what were once quiet medicinal marijuana clinics working on the fringes of medical communities up and down the state have rapidly become more mainstream.
They've also become more common locally.
In the past year, two clinics, including Sumchai's on Bechelli Lane, have opened in Redding, bringing to five the total number of doctors who regularly travel to Redding to see patients seeking medical marijuana recommendations. Only one of the doctors practicing at the clinics actually lives in the north state.
Police, members of the local medical community, advocates for the legalization of marijuana and the doctors at Redding's longest-running cannabis clinic say they have doubts about the legitimacy of some of the new traveling medical cannabis doctors.
Critics say California's voter-approved medical marijuana laws give doctors broad discretion as to whom they can recommend marijuana, making it easy for an unscrupulous physician to make huge profits giving marijuana recommendations to anyone willing to hand over enough cash.
"I would guess if they had $150, they would come away from there with a recommendation for medical marijuana," said John Thulin, who heads the Shasta County Interagency Narcotics Task Force.
New cannabis doctors in town
The new cannabis doctors who recently have arrived in Redding aren't talking.
A woman behind the counter Thursday at Sumchai's clinic in the Mission Square shopping center said Sumchai doesn't give interviews, but the clinic's manager would respond to questions by e-mail. E-mailed questions weren't answered.
Green Relief Management Services, a San Francisco-based company, manages Sumchai's other two medical marijuana clinics in San Francisco and in Sacramento.
Sumchai, one of at least 13 people to run against San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2007, is a general practice physician who also specializes in sports medicine, according to the Medical Board of California.
For 20 years, Sumchai had practiced emergency medicine, general surgery and neurosurgery at San Francisco Bay Area hospitals.
At one time, she also was the emergency physician for the San Francisco Giants, according to medical board enforcement documents.
Sumchai surrendered her license in 2001, and it was revoked outright in 2004, after a bout of post-traumatic stress disorder and three criminal convictions left her unfit to care for patients, according to the documents.
Her license was fully reinstated in 2009 under the condition that she continue to a see a psychiatrist.
The other newcomer to open a clinic in town in the last year is Dr. Cristal Speller, a Glendale-based physician who holds clinics in Redding, Chico, Santa Barbara, Palmdale and Northridge, according to her website, naturalcare4wellness.com.
She didn't respond to an e-mail request for an interview. Efforts to reach her by phone this week and at her practice on Friday, the only day she's in Redding each week, were unsuccessful.
Speller, whose medical board license says she specializes in pediatric medicine, told the Record Searchlight last fall that she abides by all California laws. All of her patients must bring a note from a doctor, medical records or a radiology report before she will write a 12-month recommendation.
Just minutes after the clinic opened Friday, there were about 10 people hunched over clipboards filling out paperwork inside her office in the Market Street Promenade, formerly called the Downtown Mall.
While Sumchai charges $149 for an initial consultation, Speller charges $170. A follow-up visit is $150, she said in September.
Speller said in the earlier interview that she has written thousands of recommendations since 2005.
'They don't have our standards'
Dr. Michael Gitter, the 66-year-old owner of Redding's longest-running medical cannabis clinic, on Charles Drive in north Redding, said he has his doubts about some of the traveling physicians working out of multiple clinics around the state.
"They don't have our standards," Gitter said without naming whom he was criticizing.
Two years ago, Gitter, who is based in the Los Angeles area where he runs a traditional medical clinic serving poor, inner-city residents, bought the Redding practice from his business partner, Dr. Philip Denney, an iconic figure in the medical cannabis community.
Gitter shares the practice with two doctors, Dr. Terrence Malee, a retired emergency room and urgent care physician from Junction City, and Dr. Gary Taff, a doctor and health care system administrator who's based in Mendocino County.
When a patient comes in, they must have an appointment and documentation from their physicians before receiving a recommendation, Gitter said. They also must undergo a complete physical examination. The cost for an exam is $200. Most exams last around 15 minutes.
Malee, a spry 70-year-old physician of 43 years, ran St. Joseph General Hospital's emergency room in Eureka for five years. He said Thursday that in his exams, he's found undiagnosed physical problems like tumors that his patient's regular doctor had missed.
He said the doctors at his clinic strive to winnow out those looking to abuse the system.
He gave the example of a cage fighter who came in to his office trying to intimidate him into getting a recommendation that allowed him to have 7 ounces of marijuana in a week, when most patients are only recommended 2.
"I said, 'Look, bud, the last time you went to the doctor and asked him for 1,000 Vicodin, did he give it to you? No. Well, I'm not going to give you 7 ounces either," Malee said, laughing.
Indeed, later on Thursday a man entered the clinic carrying a doctor's recommendation a friend had let him borrow. The recommendation from a Southern California physician said the patient could legally grow 100 plants.
The man was hoping Malee would recommend he could grow the same amount. Malee quickly denied his request for so many plants.
Gitter said his office staff takes further efforts to stop people looking to abuse California's "wonderful" medical marijuana laws.
In the history of the clinic, only about three people under 18 have ever been given a doctor's recommendation for medical marijuana. Each of them were "very sick kids," and they where directed not to use cannabis without a parent present, he said.
Gitter said patients between 18 and 21 years old who still live with their parents also must bring their parents with them.
Malee said he'll see 30 patients a day. He works four days a week every other week.
Huge financial incentives
Critics say the financial incentive is clearly there for an unscrupulous doctor to abuse the system.
If a doctor sees 30 patients a day at a minimum of $150 a patient, that's $4,500 per day, or more than $1 million a doctor can make in a normal working year.
"It's easy money," said Dr. Craig Kraffert, a Redding dermatologist and real estate developer, noting that the physicians running these clinics face very small overhead costs and don't actually have to perform procedures on patients.
Kraffert said that as an entrepreneur, he could see the appeal of starting such a moneymaking practice, but he decided it would be unethical to do so.
He said he believes the majority of patients seen by the doctors are those hoping merely to legalize their recreational marijuana use.
Redding Police Chief Peter Hansen agreed. He said the cannabis doctors are practicing what he believes amounts to medical fraud.
He contends that when his officer conducted an undercover sting on Denney's practice in Redding, he was given a recommendation for medical marijuana for a vague complaint of insomnia.
He said that doctors will give marijuana for any malady, however imagined. In fact, a Redding teenager obtained a marijuana recommendation after complaining that her braces hurt her mouth, he said.
"'You have a hangnail. Does smoking marijuana help you with your hangnail?' 'Well, yes it does.' 'Here's a recommendation.'" Hansen said. "It's fraud. It's a scam."
Dr. Dan Lensink, immediate past president of the North Valley Medical Association, said doctors in his medical association haven't taken an official position on marijuana clinics.
Although they appreciate the will of the voters in passing the state's medical marijuana laws, they, too, have their doubts about the cannabis clinics.
"It's my anecdotal experience that there is a rather freewheeling willingness by doctors not part of our established medical community to swoop in and prescribe marijuana in an environment where 'medical purposes' appears to be interpreted very liberally, well beyond the best interest of the patient without appropriate medical work-up for underlying conditions, and without due consideration for other medications with a better side-effect profile," Lensink said Thursday in an e-mail. He said he has concerns that there are no real standards of care by which cannabis doctor must abide.
'Harm reduction clinic'
Malee, Gitter and Denney, who still runs a medical cannabis clinic in Carmichael, countered that their clinics are filling a much-needed void in the local medical community.
Gitter said he and his two fellow physicians in Redding have around 130 years of medical experience between them.
They're legitimately giving medicine to patients who need it, they say.
Too many doctors, they say, are unwilling to provide or have outright shunned cannabis as medicine.
Malee calls his practice a "harm reduction clinic," geared toward weaning patients off much more dangerous pharmaceutical drugs.
Malee said he's being smoking recreational marijuana since he was an air combat surgeon and helicopter door gunner in Vietnam. It was only in the past three or four years that he came to realize how beneficial cannabis is medically, he said.
He rapidly listed a broad array of maladies cannabis treats, ranging from cancer to back pain to nausea to restless leg syndrome.
"Most doctors think it's a recreational drug with few or any medicinal properties," Malee said. "What I've found since I've been doing this is that cannabis has more medicinal properties than any other drug I've ever prescribed in over 43 years of medicine."
Malee, Gitter and Denney say they're worried that unscrupulous doctors might harm the medical cannabis movement they've worked so hard to further.
"These sort of traveling road shows don't really help us," Denney said. "This just plays right into the hands of those who oppose us. They say, 'See, I told you it's a sham.'"
NewsHawk: Ganjarden: 420 MAGAZINE
Source: Record-Searchlight
Author: Ryan Sabalow
Copyright: 2010 Record-Searchlight
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai's advertisement would have been unthinkable until nine months ago, when President Barack Obama directed federal authorities not to prosecute people if they're complying with states' medical marijuana laws.
Ever since, what were once quiet medicinal marijuana clinics working on the fringes of medical communities up and down the state have rapidly become more mainstream.
They've also become more common locally.
In the past year, two clinics, including Sumchai's on Bechelli Lane, have opened in Redding, bringing to five the total number of doctors who regularly travel to Redding to see patients seeking medical marijuana recommendations. Only one of the doctors practicing at the clinics actually lives in the north state.
Police, members of the local medical community, advocates for the legalization of marijuana and the doctors at Redding's longest-running cannabis clinic say they have doubts about the legitimacy of some of the new traveling medical cannabis doctors.
Critics say California's voter-approved medical marijuana laws give doctors broad discretion as to whom they can recommend marijuana, making it easy for an unscrupulous physician to make huge profits giving marijuana recommendations to anyone willing to hand over enough cash.
"I would guess if they had $150, they would come away from there with a recommendation for medical marijuana," said John Thulin, who heads the Shasta County Interagency Narcotics Task Force.
New cannabis doctors in town
The new cannabis doctors who recently have arrived in Redding aren't talking.
A woman behind the counter Thursday at Sumchai's clinic in the Mission Square shopping center said Sumchai doesn't give interviews, but the clinic's manager would respond to questions by e-mail. E-mailed questions weren't answered.
Green Relief Management Services, a San Francisco-based company, manages Sumchai's other two medical marijuana clinics in San Francisco and in Sacramento.
Sumchai, one of at least 13 people to run against San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2007, is a general practice physician who also specializes in sports medicine, according to the Medical Board of California.
For 20 years, Sumchai had practiced emergency medicine, general surgery and neurosurgery at San Francisco Bay Area hospitals.
At one time, she also was the emergency physician for the San Francisco Giants, according to medical board enforcement documents.
Sumchai surrendered her license in 2001, and it was revoked outright in 2004, after a bout of post-traumatic stress disorder and three criminal convictions left her unfit to care for patients, according to the documents.
Her license was fully reinstated in 2009 under the condition that she continue to a see a psychiatrist.
The other newcomer to open a clinic in town in the last year is Dr. Cristal Speller, a Glendale-based physician who holds clinics in Redding, Chico, Santa Barbara, Palmdale and Northridge, according to her website, naturalcare4wellness.com.
She didn't respond to an e-mail request for an interview. Efforts to reach her by phone this week and at her practice on Friday, the only day she's in Redding each week, were unsuccessful.
Speller, whose medical board license says she specializes in pediatric medicine, told the Record Searchlight last fall that she abides by all California laws. All of her patients must bring a note from a doctor, medical records or a radiology report before she will write a 12-month recommendation.
Just minutes after the clinic opened Friday, there were about 10 people hunched over clipboards filling out paperwork inside her office in the Market Street Promenade, formerly called the Downtown Mall.
While Sumchai charges $149 for an initial consultation, Speller charges $170. A follow-up visit is $150, she said in September.
Speller said in the earlier interview that she has written thousands of recommendations since 2005.
'They don't have our standards'
Dr. Michael Gitter, the 66-year-old owner of Redding's longest-running medical cannabis clinic, on Charles Drive in north Redding, said he has his doubts about some of the traveling physicians working out of multiple clinics around the state.
"They don't have our standards," Gitter said without naming whom he was criticizing.
Two years ago, Gitter, who is based in the Los Angeles area where he runs a traditional medical clinic serving poor, inner-city residents, bought the Redding practice from his business partner, Dr. Philip Denney, an iconic figure in the medical cannabis community.
Gitter shares the practice with two doctors, Dr. Terrence Malee, a retired emergency room and urgent care physician from Junction City, and Dr. Gary Taff, a doctor and health care system administrator who's based in Mendocino County.
When a patient comes in, they must have an appointment and documentation from their physicians before receiving a recommendation, Gitter said. They also must undergo a complete physical examination. The cost for an exam is $200. Most exams last around 15 minutes.
Malee, a spry 70-year-old physician of 43 years, ran St. Joseph General Hospital's emergency room in Eureka for five years. He said Thursday that in his exams, he's found undiagnosed physical problems like tumors that his patient's regular doctor had missed.
He said the doctors at his clinic strive to winnow out those looking to abuse the system.
He gave the example of a cage fighter who came in to his office trying to intimidate him into getting a recommendation that allowed him to have 7 ounces of marijuana in a week, when most patients are only recommended 2.
"I said, 'Look, bud, the last time you went to the doctor and asked him for 1,000 Vicodin, did he give it to you? No. Well, I'm not going to give you 7 ounces either," Malee said, laughing.
Indeed, later on Thursday a man entered the clinic carrying a doctor's recommendation a friend had let him borrow. The recommendation from a Southern California physician said the patient could legally grow 100 plants.
The man was hoping Malee would recommend he could grow the same amount. Malee quickly denied his request for so many plants.
Gitter said his office staff takes further efforts to stop people looking to abuse California's "wonderful" medical marijuana laws.
In the history of the clinic, only about three people under 18 have ever been given a doctor's recommendation for medical marijuana. Each of them were "very sick kids," and they where directed not to use cannabis without a parent present, he said.
Gitter said patients between 18 and 21 years old who still live with their parents also must bring their parents with them.
Malee said he'll see 30 patients a day. He works four days a week every other week.
Huge financial incentives
Critics say the financial incentive is clearly there for an unscrupulous doctor to abuse the system.
If a doctor sees 30 patients a day at a minimum of $150 a patient, that's $4,500 per day, or more than $1 million a doctor can make in a normal working year.
"It's easy money," said Dr. Craig Kraffert, a Redding dermatologist and real estate developer, noting that the physicians running these clinics face very small overhead costs and don't actually have to perform procedures on patients.
Kraffert said that as an entrepreneur, he could see the appeal of starting such a moneymaking practice, but he decided it would be unethical to do so.
He said he believes the majority of patients seen by the doctors are those hoping merely to legalize their recreational marijuana use.
Redding Police Chief Peter Hansen agreed. He said the cannabis doctors are practicing what he believes amounts to medical fraud.
He contends that when his officer conducted an undercover sting on Denney's practice in Redding, he was given a recommendation for medical marijuana for a vague complaint of insomnia.
He said that doctors will give marijuana for any malady, however imagined. In fact, a Redding teenager obtained a marijuana recommendation after complaining that her braces hurt her mouth, he said.
"'You have a hangnail. Does smoking marijuana help you with your hangnail?' 'Well, yes it does.' 'Here's a recommendation.'" Hansen said. "It's fraud. It's a scam."
Dr. Dan Lensink, immediate past president of the North Valley Medical Association, said doctors in his medical association haven't taken an official position on marijuana clinics.
Although they appreciate the will of the voters in passing the state's medical marijuana laws, they, too, have their doubts about the cannabis clinics.
"It's my anecdotal experience that there is a rather freewheeling willingness by doctors not part of our established medical community to swoop in and prescribe marijuana in an environment where 'medical purposes' appears to be interpreted very liberally, well beyond the best interest of the patient without appropriate medical work-up for underlying conditions, and without due consideration for other medications with a better side-effect profile," Lensink said Thursday in an e-mail. He said he has concerns that there are no real standards of care by which cannabis doctor must abide.
'Harm reduction clinic'
Malee, Gitter and Denney, who still runs a medical cannabis clinic in Carmichael, countered that their clinics are filling a much-needed void in the local medical community.
Gitter said he and his two fellow physicians in Redding have around 130 years of medical experience between them.
They're legitimately giving medicine to patients who need it, they say.
Too many doctors, they say, are unwilling to provide or have outright shunned cannabis as medicine.
Malee calls his practice a "harm reduction clinic," geared toward weaning patients off much more dangerous pharmaceutical drugs.
Malee said he's being smoking recreational marijuana since he was an air combat surgeon and helicopter door gunner in Vietnam. It was only in the past three or four years that he came to realize how beneficial cannabis is medically, he said.
He rapidly listed a broad array of maladies cannabis treats, ranging from cancer to back pain to nausea to restless leg syndrome.
"Most doctors think it's a recreational drug with few or any medicinal properties," Malee said. "What I've found since I've been doing this is that cannabis has more medicinal properties than any other drug I've ever prescribed in over 43 years of medicine."
Malee, Gitter and Denney say they're worried that unscrupulous doctors might harm the medical cannabis movement they've worked so hard to further.
"These sort of traveling road shows don't really help us," Denney said. "This just plays right into the hands of those who oppose us. They say, 'See, I told you it's a sham.'"
NewsHawk: Ganjarden: 420 MAGAZINE
Source: Record-Searchlight
Author: Ryan Sabalow
Copyright: 2010 Record-Searchlight
