The Scoop on Georgia Medical Cannabis Study

Georgia is not one of the 23 states with a medical marijuana bill, but on August 27, 2014, the first of five hearings of the Georgia Medical Cannabis Joint Study Committee began. At the meeting the members of the committee gathered information provided by expert witnesses and public testimonies. The information began to help them determine if the best course of action would be to enact legislation allowing patients with qualifying conditions to use prescription medical marijuana.

Georgia state representative, Allen Peake told Atlanta Progressive News, “We are going to learn from the hearings if there are other diagnoses that are worth looking at and evaluating to see if medical cannabis does provide a solution. In a terminal illness situation, I think it is something to look at.” Peake was pleased with how the first meeting turned out. Peake explained, “It is imperative that we, as lawmakers, do everything within our means to study medical cannabis, so we can help those families who are suffering from a terminal illness here in Georgia find a solution – one that will not require them to travel outside of our state, thus becoming ‘medical refugees.’”

Many families over the course of a couple of years moved to Colorado from Georgia to take advantage of the medical marijuana law. In Colorado, they’re able to treat their children using cannabis oil to reduce seizures in children with epilepsy.

Paige Figgi, mother of a seven-year-old little girl, spoke at Georgia’s first committee. She explained to the group how her daughter would suffer from 1,200 seizures a month when she was only two years old. After trying all types of medications, Paige started using cannabis oil, and her daughter’s seizures greatly reduced down to only one or two a month.

Matt Cook, a regulatory expert for alcohol and medical marijuana also spoke at the committee. He explained, “If you know where it’s at and know who is growing, you can regulate. If you don’t regulate, it’s going to end up on the black market, but if you over-regulate and over-tax this industry, you will push people to the black market.”

New York: The 23rd State to Legalize Medical Marijuana

On July 5, 2014, New York became the 23rd state to sign a medical marijuana bill under the Compassionate Care Act. This bill is extremely limited, and allows doctors to prescribe patients a non-smokable form of marijuana to patients with severe ailments recognized by the state. The only qualifying conditions include:

Cancer
Epilepsy Huntington’s
Disease
Spinal cord damage
HIV/AIDS
Neuropathies
Multiple Sclerosis
Parkinson’s Disease
Lou Gehrig’s Disease
Inflammatory bowel disease

According to the bill, “patients may not possess whole-plant cannabis. Only oils, pills, and/or extracts prepared from the plant may be obtained.” Many people are less than thrilled about the bill because it leaves out many serious conditions, and it does not allow patients to smoke cannabis. It also only allows very few dispensaries to operate.

Actress and comedian Whoopi Goldberg shared her thoughts on the matter, “New York medical dispensaries will only sell tinctures, edibles, and oils for vaporizing. I still think vaporizing is the best delivery method for medical cannabis, and I appreciate that he (Governor Cuomo) making an anti-smoking statement by not selling the actual bud. But it feels like he’s limited people’s ability to deal with their illness in a way that works for them. I’m not sure that’s the best way to go about it because I think people should decide how they want to digest their medical marijuana.”

Qualifying patients shouldn’t expect to get medical marijuana any time soon though. New York’s medical marijuana program will take about 18-months to become up and running. It has taken years for New York to finally pass a medical cannabis bill, but as stated in an article by Quartz, “only 10% of patients who can use medical marijuana have the right disease to qualify for it.” The report also states though that the list of diseases is very premature, and they plan on adding more conditions to it in the future. Dr. Howard Zucker, New York State Commissioner of Health explains, “We need to start at some point. As we move forward on this, we will conduct more research to see what new diseases we can add, and we will modify accordingly.”

Is Medical Marijuana Linked to Fewer Pain Killer Related Deaths?

Pain killer related overdoses are on the rise, but a recent study published by JAMA Internal Medicine suggests that the states that have legalized medical marijuana may experience fewer opiate-related deaths. When individuals with chronic pain have medical marijuana as an option for relieving their pain, they tend to rely on that more than the use of prescription pain killers. The author of the study, Dr. Marcus Bachhuber explains, “We think people with chronic pain may be choosing to treat their pain with marijuana rather than with prescription pain killers, in states where this is legal.”

The study collected data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from each state from 1999 to 2010, studying the prescription painkiller overdose rate versus whether the state had passed a medical marijuana law. The study concluded that in states where medical marijuana is legal, there are approximately 25 percent less death caused by painkiller overdose.

Dr. Bachhuber is a doctor at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center who works with many people with chronic pain. He explains, “sometimes, people with chronic pain would say only marijuana worked, or they tried marijuana as painkiller and found it worked better than prescription pills.”

The study also explains, “in summary, although we found a lower mean annual rate of opioid analgesic mortality in states with medical cannabis laws; a direct causal link cannot be established. If the relationship between medical cannabis laws and opioid analgesic overdose mortality is substantiated in further work, enactment of laws to allow for use of medical cannabis may be advocated as part of a comprehensive package of policies to reduce the population risk of opioid analgesics.”

American has a significant problem with prescription pain medication. As explained in Newsweek, deaths from prescriptions like Vicodin and OxyContin have almost tripled since 1991, and every day, there are 46 pain killer overdose-related deaths in the United States. Marijuana is much less toxic than using opioids, and it’s impossible for anyone to die from overdosing on marijuana.

 Not everyone agrees that the medical marijuana is linked to the fewer painkiller related deaths though. Chief medical officer at Phoenix House, a national nonprofit addiction treatment agency, Dr. Andrew Kolodny states, “You don’t have primary care doctors in these states prescribing marijuana instead of Vicodin.”