Medical marijuana should not be a “first line treatment” for anxiety, former Pennsylvania health secretary Rachel Levine said in 2019. But there are no health department regulations requiring marijuana to be used along with counseling or therapy.
Leise Hook / For Spotlight PA
Leise Hook / For Spotlight PA
Medical marijuana should not be a “first line treatment” for anxiety, former Pennsylvania health secretary Rachel Levine said in 2019. But there are no health department regulations requiring marijuana to be used along with counseling or therapy.
Airdate: Monday, February 6, 2023
Remember the fight over whether to legalize medical marijuana in Pennsylvania less than a decade ago? Parents of children who suffered seizure disorders and had fewer seizures when they used medical marijuana led that battle. When medical marijuana was approved, it was hailed as a victory for those children but also for the two political parties in Pennsylvania’s capitol coming together for a good cause.
Fast forward to 2023. Medical marijuana has been approved for more than 20 medical conditions, but there is one condition that is getting more prescriptions than others – anxiety disorder.
It has led to questions about marijuana’s effectiveness, how the state’s program is administered, marketing, incorrect medical claims and how doctors are getting paid.
Spotlight PA reporter Ed Mahon investigated the issue and was with us on The Spark Monday.
Mahon provided statistics on the number of prescriptions for those listing anxiety disorders as the reason for seeking medication, “We looked at data for six years. We offer 2021 as the example. But there were more than 385,000 certifications that year. More than 230,000 had anxiety listed as one of the qualifying conditions. And then there were about 151,000 where that was the only qualifying condition.”
Mahon was asked whether medical marijuana relieves anxieties,”We talked to a lot of experts and the consensus is that there’s not significant scientific evidence to say that it does help with anxiety. There’s not the clinical data to support that claim. I mean, there was a big report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that found that that there’s evidence that it can make social anxiety disorder worse. And then overall, there’s just a lot of unknown about whether it will help across the board. I mean, one doctor we talked to, he compared it to wine, like you can have a glass of wine at night and that might make you feel less anxious. But that doesn’t mean it’s a it’s something he would want to prescribe as a medical treatment.”
Read Ed Mahon’s Spotlight PA story on medical marijuana here.
