Well, to begin with: Courtney himself says that no, he absolutely did not. More in a moment.

But close readers of the Lost Coast Outpost and High Times might be forgiven for supposing otherwise. Last week LoCO contributor Kym Kemp posted a video in which the doctor – a staunch medical marijuana advocate – touts the medical benefits of raw, non-psychoactive cannabis consumption.

In the video, Courtney’s partner, Kristen Peskuski, recites a long list of ailments that the treatment regimen pioneered by Courtney has cured her of – among them asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, cervical cancer and sterility.

“My partner is a cannabis physician,” Peskuski says in the video. “We worry about the legalities of growing our own right now, and whether it could jeopardize his medical license.”

After thinking about this for a bit, it occurred to me: Wouldn’t this constitute a violation of medical ethics? May a doctor prescribe an experimental treatment on a person he is romantically involved with?

As it turns out, a doctor who becomes romantically involved with a patient is guilty of more than a violation of medical ethics – he has broken the law, and subject both to disciplinary action from the California Medical Board and criminal prosecution.

Again: Courtney – who announced his candidacy for the vacant Second District Congressional seat a few months ago – insists that this is not the case, despite what has been written about his relationship with Peskuski in the past.

In California, the prohibition against sexual relationships between doctors and patients is codified in the Business and Professions Code, sections 726 and 729. The first of these sections allows the California Medical Board to apply disciplinary sanctions against doctors who engage in sexual relations with their patients. The second defines such relations as “sexual exploitation” – a criminal act – and provides sentencing guidelines for those found guilty of that act.

In addition, Section 729 mandates that the consent of the patient in such cases may not be considered a defense. It also specifies that doctors may not break off their professional relationship with a patient “primarily” for the purpose of beginning a sexual one.

The law may seem unduly harsh, especially when it comes to relationships that are indisputably consensual. The medical profession, though, takes it very seriously indeed. The American Medical Association lays out the justification for this in its Code of Medical Ethics:

Sexual or romantic interactions between physicians and patients detract from the goals of the physician-patient relationship, may exploit the vulnerability of the patient, may obscure the physician’s judgment concerning the patient’s health care and ultimately may be detrimental to the patient’s well-being.

In a publication titled “Preventative Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins,” the purpose of which is to help physicians avoid disciplinary action, an investigator for the California Medical Board quotes Dr. John R. Sealy, who is named as an “expert” on sexual misconduct among physicians, on the signs that he trains investigators to look for in cases of suspected violations, and the reasons why violations should be considered unethical:

Sexual misconduct usually begins with relatively minor boundary violations. Boundaries include time, place/space, money, gift/services, clothing and language.

Crossing boundaries by a professional is almost always a power differential.

The professional must refrain from obtaining personal gratification at the expense of the patient/client. The main source of personal pleasure comes from the professional pleasure gained in helping the patient/client. The fee for professional services is the only material satisfaction a physician should receive from a patient/client.

As you would expect, both the law and the Medical Board make an exception for physicians who provide care for their spouses or “people in an equivalent domestic relationship.” Courtney’s relationship with Peskuski would certainly qualify at this point.

But the same would not be true of their relationship at the beginning – at least as it was portrayed in a High Times Medical article published last year, which was linked to in last week’s Lost Coast Outpost post.

The article is a profile of Peskuski’s road to overcoming the numerous maladies she says she has suffered from since birth. She discovers that smoking cannabis cures many of her problems, but she wishes to do more.

“That’s when she met Dr. William Courtney, a well-known physician in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, who advised her to start eating raw cannabis,” according to the article. They became closer, and the two started to share their research into marijuana. He loaned her medical books to read.

“Over time,” the article states, “they became a couple.”

On Friday, though, Courtney told the Lost Coast Outpost that the chronology given in the article was simply mistaken. For one, he said, he has never been Peskuski’s physician of record. For another, he said that Peskuski was already undertaking his raw juiced cannabis treatment on her own by the time that they did meet. He said that he believed she originally encountered his method by reading about it in New Settler Interview magazine.

Courtney said that Kemp simply erred in reporting the story – perhaps natural, since their relationship was not the primary focus of the article. “There were just some assumptions that turned into text,” he said.

Nevertheless, it appears that Courtney never asked the magazine to correct this potentially legally actionable aspect of the article. And in a short video called Leaf, which was produced by an advocacy organization called Cannabis International that the couple heads, Peskuski tells the story in a way that seems more congruous with the article’s version of events than the one Courtney gave the Lost Coast Outpost last week.

“I went to talk to William as a friend and as a doctor about his experience with patients and how they use cannabis,” Peskuski says the video. “Seeing what the juicing did for me, using it in this form it was so significant. It changed my life. About four to six weeks after I started on juicing every day, I had no more back pain. I didn’t need pain pills. I felt the best I ever had.”

In any case, Courtney told the Lost Coast Outpost that despite the very large claims made for the benefits of juiced marijuana in his videos and his other advocacy work, he himself does not think of the regimen he has pioneered in terms of traditional medical treatment. It is more akin to a food or dietary supplement, he said, and therefore less subject to oversight by the Food and Drug Administration or other regulatory entities.

“I never even refer to it as medicine anymore,” as Courtney says in the video posted on the Lost Coast Outpost last week. “It strictly is a dietary essential.”