Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

No longer a practicing physician, Saratogan Dennis Augustine serves the Santa Clara County Medical Cannabis Club as administrator and liaison to physicians.

Volunteer Power

Saratogan works to make a difference with both his time and his money

By Sarah Lombardo

Saratogan Dennis Augustine, M.D., may have retired from medicine, but it doesn't mean he's stopped helping people. The podiatric surgeon has been involved in a number of volunteer efforts to help people in need since he left his successful and lucrative San Jose practice in 1989 at the age of 39. From working on a needle-exchange program to help curb the spread of HIV among drug users to, most recently, being named medical director of the San Jose-based Santa Clara County Medical Cannabis Center in March, Augustine is active anywhere he feels he can help.

Even though he is no longer a practicing surgeon, having retired after experiencing burnout and job-related back and neck strain, Augustine said he still considers himself a healer through his volunteer work with the sick and through donations to the arts and education.

He and his wife, Cecile, donated $10,000 to the Medical Cannabis Center, in addition to the more than 20 other charities to which they give time and money. Among these are the Saratoga Education Foundation, Eastfield Ming Quong Foundation, the Hakone Foundation and Saratoga Contemporary Artists.

Augustine also donates to Saratoga schools to help keep music programs funded. Last December, he gave $500 for a new tuba for the Redwood Middle School band, and $1,000 to the school band uniform fund.

And in 1993, Augustine, who took up the saxophone at the age of 40, initiated performing-arts grants for Saratoga schools. Through the program, Augustine awards grants of up to $2,500 every year.

At the Medical Marijuana Center, Augustine serves as the liaison between the nonprofit center and physicians. He also assists with efforts to get the center working efficiently. He does not prescribe marijuana, make diagnoses or treat patients, and he volunteers his efforts, getting paid only $1 a year for his work.

The former street-gang member said he sees his work at the center as a return to his youth, during which he admittedly experimented with marijuana. Now, however, instead of buying pot on the street to get high, he's helping to make it available to people who need it to relieve pain.

Working with the needle-exchange program was the first step in going full circle, from the streets in Hoboken, N.J., to graduating from the Illinois College of Podiatric Medicine in Chicago, authoring two books and eventually owning a home in Saratoga. Augustine said he used to--and still hears-- stories about some of the people with whom he grew up dying of AIDS from IV drug use, and felt he needed to work against that.

"I wanted to do something substantial," he said. "I started going back to the streets reminiscent of where I grew up. You realize when you run away from something, you have to turn back sometime."

So in the early '90s he began volunteering for the Aids Resource and Information Services (ARIS) Risk Reduction Program, exchanging clean needles for used ones. At the time, it was a controversial program. Some who opposed it said it just encouraged drug use; others said it wouldn't be effective; and everyone said it was more than a little dangerous. Holding out a bag and letting possibly HIV-infected people drop used needles into it, just inches away from your own hands, is risky, Augustine admits.

"This may not be what others want to do, but I felt comfortable with it," he said.

And it didn't go unnoticed. His work earned him and his colleagues a commendation from the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors in 1995. Just a year earlier, the Rotary Club of Saratoga awarded him its first Volunteer of the Year award.

When Augustine read an article chronicling the plight of activists Jesse Garcia and Peter Baez in their attempt to open a medical marijuana distribution center in San Jose, he simply wrote in the margin, "Help these guys." Soon after, he was the center's medical director.

Augustine said he feels it is his job to try to dispel the myths about marijuana and extol its benefits for those suffering from debilitating pain from AIDS, multiple sclerosis, cancer or glaucoma. No one has ever died from an overdose of marijuana, he points out. Marijuana is a natural painkiller that was used for years before it was outlawed, he adds. Besides, he bluntly states, it helps people.

"What is a doctor supposed to do?" he said. "We are supposed to save lives and relieve pain and suffering."

Augustine points out that many more harmful and potent drugs are prescribed by doctors to ease pain--morphine, for example--and said he wonders why some people think nothing of taking those other drugs, but shrink from supporting the medical distribution of marijuana. It's simple misunderstanding, he said.

"If there is a substance that is 4,000 years old and has proven to be helpful, let's look at it rationally and say, 'OK, let's compare it,' " he said. "If we can eliminate the bias and faulty thinking, we can help a lot of people."

As for questions about the addictiveness of marijuana, and many people's idea that marijuana use can only lead to more harmful drugs, Augustine offers a simple comparison to everyday addictions, such as caffeine.

"There are all sorts of benign addictions that people don't pay attention to, but they point to marijuana as the evil one, the Evil Weed, if you will," he said. He added that, on the addictiveness scale, nicotine places first for strongest addictive qualities, yet cigarettes are both legal and harmful.

Augustine also points out that 66 percent of all Santa Clara County voters approved of Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, which paved the way for centers such as the one in San Jose to try to open up. But, he said, the struggle is not over just because the act passed.

A patient at the center agrees. "It's by no means over," Kerry Kier, a music broker, said. Kier, a former Hawaii resident and now a Los Gatan, suffers from a broken back and is 100 percent blind. He said the center provides him the security to seek what he needs to ease his pain.

In the islands, he said, he had friends from whom he could buy. But when he moved here, he didn't know anyone. And for a blind person to try to find someone to buy marijuana from would have been "absolutely ridiculous," he said.

"With a center like this, I know I can go in and I know I'm going to be safe," he said.

Kier said he has noticed an improvement in the center since Augustine's appointment. Augustine, whom he describes as being "very collected, very together," has brought an efficiency to the center. "He came in with some good ideas on how to organize the center so it could be more productive all the way around," Kier said. "He brought in corporate ideas, the way you'd run any other business."

Augustine said he, Garcia and Baez are creating a model for other centers to follow, a model that strives against stereotypes of smoke-filled rooms with high-as-a-kite clients. For example, patients are not allowed to smoke on the premises, and the trio has teamed up with San Jose city and law enforcement officials to create a model facility.

Augustine said he challenges skeptics to come into the center. What they will see, he said, are ill people who need to be helped--people like the families of some those who oppose the center.

"They or their families will someday be faced with terminal illness, and having marijuana is certainly better than being addicted to other [legally prescribed] drugs," he said. "This is certainly a viable alternative."

But it's an alternative many don't get.

Augustine recently returned from a trip home to Hoboken, where the joy of watching his father, Frank, inducted as a Grand Knight in the Knights of Columbus was slightly marred by the news that 75 percent of the graduating high school class of just a few years after his are dead.

Augustine said it confirmed his fears that his hometown area hasn't been as active as it could have been, through programs such as Santa Clara County's needle exchange, to prevent the spread of HIV. But, he said, it also strengthened his resolve to continue his volunteer work.

Augustine may have retired, but he seems harder at work than ever. "Volunteerism is what runs this country," he said.

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