Ohio’s State Medical Marijuana Board is considering to expand its medical marijuana program to add more conditions.
These conditions would be added to the list of 21 conditions already that doctors are allowed to prescribe marijuana for. The conditions include: anxiety, depression, autism, insomnia and opioid use and addiction.
Insomnia and depression on the list would make Ohio the first state to include these conditions.
Cincinnati.com has revealed that roughly 1.6 million Ohioans are diagnosed with anxiety and 725,000 Ohioans have depression and 860,000 have insomnia.
“People have been reporting for decades that cannabis helps them overcome conditions like insomnia and anxiety,” Mason Tvert, a spokesperson for the Marijuana Policy Project stated. “It also poses fewer or less severe side effects than some of the prescription and over-the-counter medications that are on the market for treatment of these conditions.”
“Several states have enacted laws that allow medical cannabis for the treatment of these conditions, and a growing number of states are allowing cannabis to be used by any adult 21 and older for any purpose,” Tvert added. “These laws have been in place for years and have not led to the major problems some had feared, so we expect the impact would be similar in Ohio.”
Colton Grace, a spokesperson for Smart Approaches to Marijuana, remarked, “While some specific derivatives of the plant may have some medicinal properties, the use of whole plant marijuana as medicine is akin to smoking Willow bark for aspirin. We support any derivative that has proven efficacy for health issues and that can pass FDA scrutiny.”
“We are also concerned about the expansion of marijuana use to ‘treat’ mental illness symptoms,” Grace continued. “The vast body of research on marijuana shows it can have serious implications on mental health and we are just now beginning to see how today’s high potency marijuana affects the human brain. Legislators must stop outpacing science when it comes to the expansion of the use of marijuana.”
