Nearly half of U.S. physicians with opinions support legalizing marijuana as a medicine, according to the results of a national survey presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. The survey, which polled 960 physicians, is the first such study conducted since state voters began approving laws in 1996 legalizing medical pot use.
Researchers at Providence Rhode Island Hospital polled physicians in five specialties: addiction medicine-psychiatry, general psychiatry, obstetrics-gynecology, family practice and internal medicine. Thirty-six percent of physicians affirmed that “Doctors should be able to legally prescribe marijuana as medical therapy.” Thirty-eight percent of those polled disagreed, and 26 percent had no opinion.
Researchers reported that doctors surveyed in specialties that frequently saw cancer patients supported prescribing medical marijuana in greater numbers than those who did not.
NORML board-member Rick Doblin said that the results demonstrate there exists “a substantial number of patients whose physicians don’t think that they are getting the most appropriate medicine.” However, he criticized the study’s small sample size and questioned the five specialties selected for the survey. “Those chosen do not reflect the specialties that most frequently come in contact with medical marijuana patients,” he noted. Doblin co-authored a survey of more than 1,000 clinical oncologists in 1990 that found 48 percent would prescribe marijuana to their patients if federal law permitted it.
An additional survey conducted by the U.K. medical website Medix UK found that more than 80 percent of British doctors would prescribe marijuana to patients with cancer or multiple sclerosis if it was legal, Bloomberg news reported today.
For more information, please contact Paul Armentano of The NORML Foundation at (202) 483-8751 or Rick Doblin, Executive Director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), at (617) 484-9509.
