CANADIAN MAN OFFERS HIS KIDNEY FOR KILO OF MARIJUANA

OTTAWA, July 16 (Reuters)- A Canadian man ended up with his nose out of
joint on Thursday after local hospital officials blocked his plan to trade
one of his kidneys for about a kilogram of marijuana.

Peter Shields, a 51-year-old paraplegic, made his unusual offer in a memo
posted on a bulletin board at the Ottawa Hospital this week, shortly before
undergoing ulcer surgery.

Shields said he wanted to do his part as an organ donor while ensuring a
small supply of the drug he has used to control pain since a 1973
motorcycle accident left him paralysed from the chest down.

``I did it out of the goodness of my heart. I've got a body here and
two-thirds of it doesn't work, so I don't need two kidneys to make
one-third work,'' Shields told Reuters in a telephone interview from his
hospital bed.

``I'm not selling anything. Marijuana has no value and there is no value to
a kidney either,'' Shields added.

Shields, who clashed with hospital authorities last November when he smoked
marijuana as a patient, said his offer went unanswered only because he was
placed on a different floor following surgery.

He said the marijuana would have lasted him a couple of months.

Shields' offer left hospital officials fuming.

Organ selling is illegal in most countries, including Canada, and has been
condemned by the World Health Organisation, though an international panel
on medical ethics recently advised reconsideration of the ban to cope with
a worldwide shortage of donors.

Under Canadian regulations, donations of kidneys from living donors are
only allowed when the donor is a family member or close friend and then
only after extensive testing.

``We are not into bartering,'' Linda Panther, a nursing manager in dialysis
and transplantation, told the Ottawa Citizen newspaper. ``We only take
kidneys from cadavers, people who have died, or the other area is the
living donor programme.''

Despite reports of growing waiting lists for organ transplants worldwide,
the thought of organ vendors openly plying their trade often evokes public
horror.

In 1990, two doctors in Britain were struck off the medical register after
a ``kidney-for-sale'' scandal, in which impoverished young Turkish men had
been brought to Britain and paid about 2,000 pounds ($3,340) each for their
kidneys.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski