It’s been a bit rough of a ride for medical marijuana patients lately. Luckily California is taking measures to protect them.
Governor Jerry Brown announced Monday that he’d signed a law preventing doctors and hospitals from denying organ transplants to medical marijuana users based purely on their cannabis use. It’s great legal protection for medical users, if a little sad that they still need such protection. Unfortunately with the way the law views marijuana now, that’s not likely to change anytime soon.
The new law protects medical marijuana users from being treated like drug abusers by their healthcare providers, when instead they’re following the doctor’s orders. The bill makes it clear in no uncertain terms that the bill “would prohibit a hospital, physician and surgeon…or other person from determining the ultimate recipient of an based solely upon a potential recipient’s status as a qualified patient…or positive test for the use of medical marijuana.” The doctors must do a case-by-case survey of impact of the medicinal cannabis on the prospective recipient.
It’s another in a long list of trends of local governments taking marijuana decriminalization into their own hands. Medical marijuana is still, after all, widely considered to be experimental (at best), and so far only 23 states and Washington D.C. approve it. This could also be due to the fact that the federal government has it classified as a “Schedule I” drug, meaning they believe it to be not only the most dangerous class of drug with a high potential for abuse, but that there are no currently accepted medical uses. It also makes researching them difficult, if it’s even an option.
Which leaves medical marijuana users in a tricky catch-22: How can you prove cannabis has a medical value worth protecting if its classification locks it up so much it’s all but impossible to research?
To be fair, there has been some improvement on cannabis research in the past few years. With states like Washington decriminalizing recreational weed, it’s easier for researchers to launch projects. As of last month, researchers hoping to conduct pot studies no longer need to submit proposals to the U.S. Public Health Services (something not required of any other Schedule I drug).
But as Hilary Bricken notes on the Canna Law Blog, there’s still some big hurdles for researchers to researchers to overcome:
Despite the [changes,] the National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA] remains the only “lawful” marijuana grow in the U.S. and researchers must still acquire the seeds and plants from National Institute’s lone Ole Miss grow and this remains quite difficult. But that’s not all: researchers must also acquire a Schedule I license from the Drug Enforcement Administration to receive, cultivate or maintain cannabis for research which is equally hard to get.
MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy, has plenty of legal sources for researchers interested in its potential to treat PTSD or anxiety. With NIDA retaining a sort of research monopoly over marijuana, scientists are bound by their guidelines—which are a “congressional mandate only study substances of abuse as substances of abuse.”
This year, for the first time in decades, a federal judge did consider de-scheduling marijuana. Ultimately she declined to find marijuana’s scheduling to be unconstitutional, but there’s a chance the case could make it on appeal to the Ninth Circuit—or even the Supreme Court.
Not many people still believe it earns that classification and some have even bluntly called it “unethical not to do research” on the effects of cannabis. Undoubtedly thousands of medical marijuana patients (already armed with years of anecdotal evidence) would echo that thought. Their entire treatment plan, after all, could be revolutionized, which would touch on plenty of other applications of the law as well: where unemployment benefits fit in; whether you could tax a prescription of cannabis; what your property insurance has to cover when your grow house goes up in flames; even the effect of heavy marijuana use on organ recipients.
But short of a change in how the federal government approaches the drug there’s not much hope for a change to come. But without it, any innovation goes up in smoke.