Boys and girls this is not California, or Oregon, or even Nevada. This is the Deep South. Prescription for pot?
My colleague, Amos Bailey, gives some excellent summaries here:
Besides acting as an analgesic for chronic-pain patients, marijuana is used as an appetite stimulant and anti-nausea drug.
Doctors believe it works in the part of the brain that controls hunger and nausea. But they don’t understand the precise biochemistry, said Dr. Amos Bailey, director of Palliative Medicine at the Birmingham VA Medical Center. Bailey also started the palliative care unit at Cooper Green Hospital, where terminal cancer patients receive hospice care.
Legal drugs do not work on everyone. Doctors may try three or four medicines on a cancer patient, and that patient may still be wracked with nausea and may still lose weight, he said.
“Having something such as marijuana that’s part of the class of drugs you can use means you have possibilities for people who do not respond to conventional treatment,” Bailey said.
Bailey and his staff occasionally prescribe Marinol, a drug that is legal. It contains a synthetic from of THC, the major component of marijuana. But there are drawbacks to Marinol.
It costs from $400 to $800 a month, more than triple that of common cholesterol medications or painkillers. And because Marinol comes in pills, patients cannot control the dosage as well as they can with smoked marijuana. Also, marijuana, like all herbal remedies, has other active components not replicated in the synthetic forms.
“Quite frankly, this is something that patients may have already taken into their own hands,” he said. “And it makes sense to me when patients tell me the Marinol helped some, but the marijuana helped more,” Bailey said.
He never recommends marijuana, instead he reminds patients that marijuana is illegal and they could get into trouble.
But in the delicate dance between law-abiding physicians and desperately sick patients, it is understood that some patients use marijuana on their own.
It can be an excellent treatment, especially for Vietnam-era veterans who are comfortable using marijuana. “If it were legal, it would make it a lot easier to have these discussions, and for selected patients, I think it would be helpful,” Bailey said. “I don’t think we should make people criminals if we can avoid it, particularly very sick people.”
So apparently the Alabama legislature will examine this issue:
What Campbell says helps her most is marijuana. For a tee-totaling North Alabama Baptist, it’s been a lot for her to reckon with.
Yet she has decided to go public with her condition and her clandestine self-medication in hopes that marijuana will become legal for specific medical purposes if enough patients and doctors speak out. A bill introduced this legislative session would allow doctors to prescribe marijuana to patients suffering with fibromyalgia and other conditions such as glaucoma, HIV and cancer. The drug would remain illegal for everyone else.
Some physicians support it, saying marijuana is safer and more effective on certain patients than conventional drugs. They say legal painkillers such as Lortab, Xanax and Oxycotin are stronger and more addictive. Other doctors say the risk of sending the wrong message to young people outweighs any benefit of marijuana.
We should make this decision based on data, not belief. But then, we are not allowed to do the right studies to learn the risks and benefits.
