New Mexico considers cannabis for more uses
Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 3:37 pm | By: Radical Russ
ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) – Post traumatic stress disorder, nerve pain and Hepatitis C could soon be added to the list of ailments treated by medical marijuana in New Mexico.
On Thursday, petitioners asked a medical group to recommend the use of medical marijuana for several other ailments.
So far four of the 17 ailments petitioned Thursday will be placed on a recommendation list that will go to the secretary of health for approval.
The panel has tabled some ailments including chronic pain. They said some of the tabled ailments need to be further researched.
The use of medical marijuana to treat depression was denied by the panel.
New Mexico has the most restrictive list of conditions for which medical marijuana is approved:
Under current state law, the only qualifying conditions for the medical cannabis program are:
- Cancer
- Glaucoma
- Multiple Sclerosis
- Epilepsy
- Spinal Cord Damage with Intractable Spasticity
- HIV/AIDS
- Also, any patient in hospice care could qualify.
The lack of chronic pain and chronic nausea on this list is a huge problem. Most patients in the other twelve medical marijuana states qualify for those conditions and cannabis gives them a huge measure of relief. Addition of nerve pain and Hep C are good, and adding PTSD would be a move most of the medical states haven’t recognized. I would have also liked to have seen depression make the list as well.
Sometimes I wonder if the medical marijuana programs in these states are deciding on qualifying conditions not on the basis of medical science, but rather to insure that there aren’t too many patients in the program.
(We here in Oregon often hear that medical marijuana is “out of control” because we have over 22,000 registered patients, as if there is some magic number at which there are “too many” medical marijuana patients. Oregon’s OSCaR database registers cancer patients in Oregon and there are 17,000 of them per year. If everyone in Oregon who could qualify got a card did get a card, we’d probably have 100,000 patients!)
Topics: Albuquerque, New Mexico
