Should Hepatitis C Patients Who Smoke Marijuana Be Eligible For Liver Transplants?
ScienceDaily (Oct. 22, 2008) — The pain is debilitating. The only option: smoking medical marijuana. That’s the reality for many hepatitis C patients whose road to health includes a liver transplant. Although Canadian transplant centres are more willing than those in the United States, not everyone says yes to liver patients who smoke marijuana, and a University of Alberta researcher says that decision-making process is unacceptable.

Karen Kroeker, along with three other students at various universities, sent out surveys to a number of transplant clinics across the United States and Canada. Results found that the difference between the two countries were obvious in some patient groups: around 60 per cent of Canadian centres would either do the surgery or consider it for a liver transplant patient who smoked marijuana, while 70 per cent of U.S. transplant programs said absolutely not. Kroeker also found that patients in both countries, who have no social support—meaning they have no family, friends or a social worker—aren’t likely to receive the organ they need.

The problem Kroeker has with these results: the lack of literature to support the surgeons’ decision. As a result of her findings, which will be published in the November issue of Liver International, Kroeker says physicians need to determine eligibility criteria for liver-transplant patients that pertains directly to the likelihood of a patient rejecting the organ and is based only on empirical medical evidence.

When a patient is being reviewed for eligibility, whether they smoke marijuana shouldn’t be a factor, she says. “If we have evidence to say the patients don’t do well, then I think that’s a reason to exclude people,” Kroeker said.

She cites alcohol use as an example. When transplants first began to be performed, those who drank alcohol weren’t eligible for a new liver. Kroeker’s study found, however, that surgeons conducted studies on the topic of abstinence and liver health and, as a result of that research, transplant rules changed. If the patient has been sober for six months, 94 per cent of the clinics in North America will now consider transplantation.

This was the tragic situation for Timothy Garon, a legal medical marijuana patient whose doctor recommended he use cannabis to treat his pain.  He was top of the list to receive a new liver to save his life, with only two weeks left to live, when the university hospital denied him a transplant because of his medical marijuana use.  ”Come back after 6 months sobriety,” they told him – a man with two weeks to live.  Tim Garon died because of ignorance and prejudice about marijuana and its users, plain and simple.

Transplant centers will bring up the idea that marijuana users are more apt to reject the organ or that using marijuana post-transplant may cause harm to the person with the compromised immune system.  They’ll claim that marijuana could have molds or fungi and the transplantee could easily die.  There is absolutely no medical evidence or research to back that claim, which is more ludicrous when you consider that the patient could use cannabis edibles, tinctures, or vaporization and avoid any harms from smoking.

No, what is happening here is the old guard AMA medical establishment can’t have “druggies” getting livers and kidneys and hearts.  They can’t be showing any legitimacy to cannabis via tolerance of herbal, non-prescribed, un-bar-coded, unadvertised remedies with no corporate backer who sends reps with samples to doctors’ offices and treats doctors to fun and informative island junkets.

The most maddening thing is that for many patients like Tim Garon, whose bodies are so weak and compromised, cannabis is the best-tolerated, most-effective medicine they can use.  They can eat, they keep weight on, and yes, they get a little high, and if you’re dying of liver failure, couldn’t you use a little something to brighten your day?  In a situation like that, the high IS medical!

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