SHOOTING VICTIM SAYS MARIJUANA EASED PAIN

SAN FRANCISCO - Craig Michael Bird has lived in pain since Oct. 14, 1996,
when a friend's son fired the bullet that remains lodged near his spine.

For months, Bird said, he was in unbearable agony. He took pain-killers of
all sorts. He tried acupuncture. He volunteered for a study of opiates that
put him in a stupor. Miserable, desperate, he attempted suicide. Then
Lynnette Shaw, who runs a cannabis resource center in Marin County, gave him
a marijuana cigarette.

He lit up and for the first time in months, Bird says, his pain eased.

His appetite returned, too; that night, he ate steak.

Life didn't seem so bad after all.

"It was the turning point of when I started getting positive," the burly
former truck driver recalled one late spring evening. "I don't know why it
works, but it works. It feels like the pain turns into a liquid and it
drains right out of me."

Nearly two years later, Bird still puffs marijuana now and again throughout
the day. He says it enables him to manage his pain with little more than an
occasional aspirin. It also enables him to manage a storage business and
small marina on a river near San Francisco Bay.

"Before I couldn't even deal with the public, now I'm running a business,"
he said, sitting in a straight-backed chair and savoring a Marlboro
cigarette in the twilight. "It has to be the herb."

Thousands of others echo Bird's contention that marijuana has been their
wonder drug. Its boosters contend it can ease nausea brought on by powerful
medicines and chemotherapy, stimulate the appetites of those suffering from
AIDS and terminal cancer, control pain, slow the advance of multiple
sclerosis and reverse glaucoma.

"When a drug's been around for 5,000 years, there's a lot out there on it,"
said Dr. Richard Bayer, an internist from Portland who helped spearhead the
initiative to allow medical marijuana use in Oregon. "If I had been alive
and practicing medicine 100 years ago, I could have prescribed it."

He cannot prescribe it today. The federal government classifies marijuana as
a Schedule I drug, a category that includes chemicals presumed to have no
medical benefit. Marijuana has been illegal since 1937.

Bayer and other medical marijuana advocates want the federal government to
reclassify it at least to Schedule II, which would allow doctors to write
prescriptions for it, but acknowledges the potential for abuse. Current
Schedule II drugs include morphine and amphetamines.

This spring, 11 experts at the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the
National Academy of Sciences, released a review of research on the effects
of marijuana that had been requested by the Clinton administration. They
concluded that marijuana is useful in treating pain, nausea and weight loss.

But they also warned that the smoke from marijuana can be even more toxic
than that of cigarettes and so long-term use should be discouraged.