Donald Abrams
Assistant Director of the AIDS Program at San Francisco General Hospital and Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Donald Abrams received his MD from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1977 and has long been at the forefront of HIV research and treatment.  He is Chairman and Principal Investigator of the Community Consortium, an association of Bay Area HIV Health Care providers, and has published numerous works on treatments and clinical aspects of HIV infection.  After years of extensive research into the medicinal effects of marijuana on AIDS patients, Dr. Abrams recently received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct the first federally sanctioned study of the potentially therapeutic effects of smoked cannabis in over thirty years.  This study, focused on the ability of cannabis to alleviate symptoms of pain and neuropathy in AIDS patients, is currently in progress at the University of California, San Francisco.  Dr. Abrams received the Assistant Secretary of Health’s Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in 1990, and currently works in San Francisco.