A bill that would allow medical marijuana as a substitute for opioids in short-term scenarios cleared another hurdle this week in the New York State Senate.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, two New York senators announced they had introduced a bill that would allow the use of medical marijuana as an alternative to opioids in certain instances. New York Sen. George Amedore, co-chair of the New York State Senate Task Force on Heroin and Opioid Abuse, and Sen. Kemp Hannon, chair of the Senate Health Committee,\u00a0announced their bill<\/a>\u00a0and advanced it through the Senate Health Committee that very same day.<\/p>\n The big factor that makes this New York bill different than other examples of states trying to swap pot for\u00a0opioids<\/a>\u00a0is that it\u2019s not condition-specific, it\u2019s timeframe-specific.<\/p>\n In Colorado, for example,\u00a0lawmakers are considering a bill<\/a>\u00a0that would allow doctors to prescribe medical cannabis for any condition \u201cfor which a physician could prescribe an opiate for pain.\u201d<\/p>\n In Illinois, legislators\u00a0are considering granting access<\/a>\u00a0to people who are prescribed opioids the opportunity to become a temporary patient of the state\u2019s medical marijuana program.<\/p>\n Under the current New York law, however, medical marijuana can be recommended for chronic or severe pain \u2014 but patients must have been experiencing the pain for at least three months or must be a situation where it\u2019s reasonable for the doctor to presume the patient will experience the pain for that time period or longer.<\/p>\n The proposed law before the New York state senate, S.8820, would allow medical marijuana to be used as an alternative to opioids to treat episodic pain for conditions expected to last less than three months.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen faced with patients who are at high risk for addiction, or are in recovery, physicians need an alternative to help with pain management without the inherent risks that come with prescription opioids,\u201d said Amedore. \u201cWe know medicinal marijuana can be an effective pain management tool for chronic pain \u2013 this legislation addresses a gap that we have heard about from many physicians and patients when it comes to pain management. This bill helps patients, and ultimately, will help reduce the use of highly addictive opioids.\u201d<\/p>\n Hannon noted that the legislation was about providing tools to physicians combating the opioid overdose epidemic \u2014 an epidemic that sees most users get hooked over the counter.<\/p>\n \u201cEquipping doctors with all of the resources available to them to fight this statewide scourge is essential,\u201d said Hannon. \u201cAlthough we have passed crucial legislation and have invested millions towards education, prevention, and treatment, more must be done.\u201d<\/p>\n We reached out to the\u00a0Marijuana Policy Project<\/a>\u00a0to find out how popular this kind of short-term care option, where cannabis serves as an opioid substitute, is becoming across the nation.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, we have seen this before. The issue is that \u2018chronic pain\u2019 is pain that goes on for a long period of time, when in some cases, like after surgery, a patient may have terrible pain for short period and thus not qualify for the medical program and be forced to use opiates instead,\u201d MPP Legislative Counsel Kate M. Bell told Cannabis Now. \u201cIdeally, the qualifying condition would be \u2018severe pain,\u2019 as opposed to \u2018chronic pain.\u2019 Other states are looking at allowing medical cannabis any time that the doctor is prescribing (or would otherwise prescribe) opiates.\u201d<\/p>\n Bell noted\u00a0MPP tracks the language from state to state<\/a>\u00a0regarding how medical cannabis programs deal with pain and they are almost all slightly different.<\/p>\n \u201cWith more people recognizing that medical cannabis is one tool to help address the opioid crisis, I think we\u2019ll see more and more efforts to ensure that the qualifying conditions in medical marijuana programs permit cannabis to be used as a substitute for opiates whenever they would be prescribed,\u201d said Bell.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, do you think expanding access to cannabis can help fight the opioid epidemic?<\/p>\n The post Lawmakers Debate How Cannabis Should Replace Opioids<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
A bill that would allow medical marijuana as a substitute for opioids in short-term scenarios cleared another hurdle this week in the New York State Senate. On Thursday, two New York senators announced they had introduced a bill that would allow the use of medical marijuana as an alternative toContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,292,139,208,4475,1145,738,81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26641,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26640\/revisions\/26641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Marijuana For Opioids: Condition-Specific or Time-Based?<\/h4>\n
Nationwide Trends Toward Replacing Opioids With Cannabis<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Lawmakers Debate How Cannabis Should Replace Opioids<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"