COUNTY TRIES PORTLAND MAN FOR GROWING MARIJUANA PLANTS

* Craig Helm says the drug relieves his multiple sclerosis symptoms; the
deputy DA calls studies cited junk science

HILLSBORO - Craig Helm knew what the law said about growing marijuana but
figured he had a pretty good reason for it.

Helm went on trial this week in Washington County Circuit Court on two
charges of felony manufacture and possession of marijuana, a drug he used
to treat muscle spasms caused by multiple sclerosis.

A jury will decide whether the pot patch he started in the spare bedroom of
his Hillsboro home was an appropriate "choice of evils."

Circuit Court Judge Gregory E. Milnes is allowing Helm to use the
choice-of-evils defense, a rarity in medical marijuana cases. It allows a
law to be broken to avoid "imminent public or private injury."

Testimony is expected to conclude today with the case going to the jury
after closing arguments.

Helm, 48, of Portland, lived in Hillsboro in 1996 when police raided his
home and found eight marijuana plants. He thinks police got his name from a
cannabis club he was associated with.

He told the jury Wednesday that he started smoking marijuana soon after he
was diagnosed with MS in 1992 while living in Arkansas. He moved to Oregon
the following year because the Southern heat was too debilitating. He
wasn't aware of Oregon's relatively lenient marijuana laws, he told the
jury, until after his arrest, although he knew it was illegal everywhere in
the country.

Marijuana, he said, was the best way to calm the violent and painful muscle
spasms in his legs. The former long-haul trucker is now considered fully
disabled and uses a wheelchair.

Prescription drugs helped reduce the frequency of spasms but lessened their
severity only marginally, if at all, he said. The drugs also brought
unwanted side effects, including tiredness, and, when he could still walk,
rubbery legs. The drugs also took a while to work.

"When I had a spasm," he said, "I couldn't take a pill and make it go away.
But I could smoke marijuana and it would immediately subside."

One spasm was so severe that he kicked a step and broke a toe.

[photo caption:]

Defendant Craig Helm and his attorney Leland Berger listen to testimony
from a medical witness on the effects of marijuana on Helm's multiple
sclerosis symptoms. Helm is being tried in Washington County court for
growing eight marijuana plants at his Hillsboro home.

Marijuana also helped him stave off the disagreeable option of surgically
implanting a pump that would feed drugs directly into his spinal column.
Only rarely, he said, did the marijuana make him high.

At first he bought marijuana off the street and from other persons with MS.
They all know, he said Wednesday, about the benefits of the drug. But he
started growing the plants because of the quality and cost, because he'd
tired of infighting at the cannabis club and because he was scared of
buying marijuana on the street.

Denis J. Petro, a neurologist from Arlington, Va., testified for the
defense Wednesday that a half-dozen studies have shown marijuana effective
in treating the muscle spasms associated with MS.

"There is adequate and well-controlled clinical evidence for marijuana in
treatment" of spasms, he testified.

Some of the tests, he said, involved the element in marijuana that makes
people high. Those have shown some success, he said. But the component in
marijuana that's most effective in treating spasms isn't associated with
those elements, he said.

Deputy District Attorney Greg Olsen sympathized with Helm's condition but
said the law is clear. He also dismissed the studies discussed by Petro as
"junk science." One of them, he noted, studied only one person.

Petro said the big drug companies, which often pay the expenses of drug
research, don't take marijuana seriously because they can't make money off
a drug that can be grown in the back yard.

Helm acknowledged that he smoked marijuana occasionally in the 1960s and
1970s before his MS diagnosis.

"I hate being the poster boy," Helm said of efforts to legalize marijuana,
"but something needs to change."