Medical cannabis: The bottom line

It’s been asked many times, in these pages and elsewhere, just how many people are going to have to suffer, and for how long, for no better reason than politicians protecting themselves from being called “soft” on drugs.

The medicinal properties of marijuana are no longer cogently debatable. The list of conditions it helps, and symptoms it relieves, is too long and too well documented by too many credible sources for any state still to be clinging to Drug War illogic on the subject of legal, regulated cannabis.

That’s just the medical and humanitarian argument. Researchers at the University of Georgia have come up with another compelling one: money.

We’re not even talking about the economic impact of legalized pot for recreational use, and the taxes it has generated in states where it is lawfully sold.

No, this is strictly an argument about the impact of strictly medicinal marijuana on other medical costs.

A UGA study published in the July issue of Health Affairs tracks the Medicare prescription drug benefit savings in states that had legalized medical cannabis.

“The savings, due to lower prescription drug use, were estimated to be $165.2 million in 2013, a year when 17 states and the District of Columbia had implemented medical marijuana laws,” UGA reported. “The results suggest that if all states had implemented medical marijuana the overall savings to Medicare would have been around $468 million.”

Those are big numbers, but small percentages of Medicare budgets. Still, they suggest, the study maintains, that people in those states are using marijuana instead of traditional (and often expensive) prescription meds to relieve a variety of conditions.

It also suggests, writes lead researcher Ashley Bradford, that people “are really using marijuana as medicine and not just using it for recreational purposes.”

More political cover for more reasonable laws. Not that any should still be necessary.

This story was originally published July 9, 2016 at 6:03 PM with the headline "Medical cannabis: The bottom line."