New Mexico’s medical marijuana program is gaining momentum, but some activists say it isn’t progressing fast enough to meet the needs of its patients.
In December, the Medical Marijuana Advisory Board held a public hearing in Santa Fe to allow people to petition for more health conditions to be treated by the drug.
Of the five health conditions on the meeting’s agenda — including obsessive-compulsive disorder and hepatitis C — only one was approved by Secretary of Health Alfredo Vigil. The condition added to the list that allows people to apply for a medical cannabis card was inflammatory autoimmune-mediated arthritis.
“With the other conditions, the research was very sketchy,” Vigil said. “And by that I mean I only use sources of information that I know to be reliable and scientific. I‘m a board-certified physician, and I’ve been on the clinical faculty of the medical school for many years. That’s the world I live in; that’s the way I approach things.”
Linda Gordos, a doctor on the advisory board, said there aren’t enough reliable studies to reference, because the substance has been heavily regulated.
“It is challenging for cannabis because it has been restricted, and essentially it has been restricted from being used in a lot of medical research,” Gordos said. “Some of what we deal with in the medical literature is testing that is maybe done on animals, and looking at where cannabis reacts and what it does to cells. We just don’t have enough clinical data to back up the human condition trial data.”
Gordos said newer studies gathered information on cannabis that was previously unknown. She said the human body naturally produces a substance that cannabinoids mimic.
“There are different types of cannabinoid receptors in the body; they’re located all through the body,” she said. “There were originally two receptors that were identified as cannabinoids. Now there is newer data out suggesting that cannabinoids may react with other receptors in the body.”
Gordos said the advisory board and the secretary of health need clinical data to back up patient testimony. The purpose of the advisory board is to listen to the concerns of potential patients and make recommendations to the secretary, Vigil said.
”(Advisory groups) provide a specific perspective, and that’s critical,” Vigil said.
Medical marijuana activist Larry Love started a radio blog about the progress of the program in New Mexico. Love said Vigil hasn’t attended any hearings and can’t see how medical cannabis improves the life quality for hundreds of patients.
“I was at the last meeting, and there was a board of doctors up there that listened to the testimony of patients about how medical marijuana helps their conditions,” Love said. “If (Vigil) was down there, then he could see the testimony in front of him. There’s the evidence. I’ve been told by his office that he won’t attend this meeting either.”
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Love said he started a campaign to get people to call into Vigil’s office and ask that he attend the March 30 meeting.
“It’s pretty common that the kinds of people that are going to get the advice aren’t sitting there throughout the entire thing,” Vigil said.
Love said the biggest problem facing the program right now is the lack of distributors.
“The (Department of Health) has set the criteria that each approved producer can handle 100 patients with the 95 plants, which is the maximum they are allowed to grow,” Love said. “So, at this point, with over 1,500 patients approved, there are only five producers, which means they are 10 producers behind approving them in order to add enough medicine for the patients.”
Love said the Department of Health is not approving producers fast enough for the number of patients they accept each month. Love said there are about 200 cards issued each month.
“I understand there are over 35 applicants that want to grow medical marijuana,” he said. “Dr. Vigil has stated in the past that he is going slowly because he does not want there to be an excess of medicine around that might hit the streets, so he’s purposefully moving slow. But he’s moving too slowly to the detriment of the patients.”
Vigil said the program avoided many problems that other states have encountered.
“I think we have been fairly quick in putting something together of this complexity with all those components,” Vigil said. “Our reputation around the country is one of having one of the most solid and sustainable programs that has been developed yet. And we get contacted constantly by both advocates as well as state governments that say they want to go down the same road and they want to know how we did it.”
*Medical Marijuana Advisory Board Hearing
March 30
Harold L. Runnels Building
1190 St. Francis Dr., Santa Fe
10 a.m. – noon
For more info visit MedicalMarijuanaRadio.com *
