CHILLICOTHE – Medical marijuana dispensary Verdant Creations will open in Chillicothe soon pending final pharmacy inspection, but Adena Health System is hesitant to recommend or prescribe medical marijuana to its patients once it does.
Dr. John Gabis will oversee the evaluation of medical cannabis for Adena Health System.
On a federal level, marijuana is still considered a Schedule One drug along with heroin, LSD, and others considered to have a high potential for abuse and no governmentally recognized medicinal value.
This prevents it, on a federal level, from being legally prescribed or provided by doctors in the United States, although it can be recommended due to a doctor’s First Amendment right to recommend treatment as established by a 2002 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case.
On the state level, however, medical marijuana was legalized in 2016 by Ohio House Bill 523 under the Ohio Medical Marijuana Control Program (MMCP). The first dispensaries in Ohio opened in January.
Thirty-three states have legalized some form of medical marijuana, and nine states have legalized the drug for recreational use, as of July. Just because its use for medical purposes has been approved in Ohio, it doesn’t mean doctors and health systems are required to endorse or prescribe the drug.
“We recognize that some patients don’t respond to the usual approach for symptom relief,” said Gabis. “Federally, it is a schedule one substance, and that makes us a little nervous to be pursuing it in a broad approach.”
Adena Health System is currently conducting a limited pilot program to measure the health system’s ability to “manage” it’s recommendation process.
“It’s not about whether medical cannabis is helpful,” said Gabis. “It’s about whether we can be compliant with all the things we need to be compliant with.”
The pilot involves 10 patients who have a condition that medical cannabis can be legally treated by the drug in Ohio.
In Ohio, medical marijuana can be recommended for a list of 21 separate medical conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder, AIDS, cancer, chronic pain and a variety of other diseases and disorders.
The full list can be found at https://medicalmarijuana.ohio.gov.
There is no set timeline on when the health system will make a final decision on whether to broadly recommend medicinal cannabis.
Verdant Creations declined to comment for this story.
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