cannabisnews.com: Shooting Victim Says Marijuana Eased Pain!





Shooting Victim Says Marijuana Eased Pain!
Posted by FoM on July 12, 1999 at 05:19:36 PT
By Joe Frolik, National Correspondent
Source: Cleveland Live
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.Pubdate: July 11, 1999© 1999 Cleveland Livehttp://www.cleveland.com/news/pdnews/metro/w11pati.ssf
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