Editorial: Pa.’s delayed medical marijuana research hinders rollout

Pennsylvania’s legislature will soon deliver medical marijuana research opportunities, and Pitt has the munchies.

Last week, Pitt’s School of Medicine sent out letters announcing its plan to search for research partnerships with companies to study the effects of marijuana on treating serious medical conditions.

Gov. Tom Wolf signed Medical Marijuana Act, Act 16, last April, legalizing access to medical marijuana for those with serious conditions, such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, intractable seizures or autism. The law also budgets state funding for research of the drug and studying the effectiveness of medical marijuana on serious conditions via a 5 percent tax on marijuana sales.

Although the state has yet to finalize temporary regulations for the program, Pitt is ready to begin research in a field scarcely touched by universities due to the drug’s Schedule I classification. The classification, which the DEA decided to uphold this summer, asserts that the drug has no acceptable medical use and puts severe restrictions on research into its medicinal effects by publicly funded institutions.

Despite the federal policy, 25 states have moved forward and enacted medical marijuana legalization to some extent — including Pennsylvania. The news came with some pushback from the Pennsylvania Medical Society, a physician association which opposed the legalization of medical marijuana without having the proper research to back it up first.

Of course, the catch-22 is that there’s little research because the drug remains illegal in the eyes of the federal government. The current predicament is self-perpetuating, leading us nowhere productive.

On both sides of the legalization debate, politicians and medical practitioners seem to agree that research is necessary for any program to be successful. Any good doctor should know the benefits and drawbacks of prescribing a drug. In that regard, Pitt’s effort to take up this cause and fill a gap is admirable. At the same time, further education should have been available — and executed — well before medical marijuana passed the state legislature, and that’s a misstep on the part of the federal government.

Ideally, marijuana should be treated like any other medicinal drug: distributed responsibly according to the standards set by sensible regulators. Instead, those state regulators have established extremely restrictive standards despite places such as Washington and Colorado seeing successful legalizations — due in large part to their state governments’ enthusiastic support. The former even disobeyed the DEA in August by creating their own cannabis research licenses in order to improve acceptance.

By only going far enough to make the drug attainable and not providing the money for research that would help doctors feel more comfortable prescribing marijuana, our state’s rollout is halfhearted at best.

Pennsylvania’s medical marijuana should function as a gateway drug to sensible law enforcement. Right now, the legislation is foggy.