According to new federal regulations, patients being treated at Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics will be able to use medical marijuana in the 14 states where it has been legalized.
The Veterans Affairs Department directive is intended to clarify current policy in the coming week that says veterans can also be denied pain medication if they use illegal drugs. Veteran groups have continually complained that this could bar veterans from VA benefits if they were caught with medical marijuana.
The new guidance does not authorize VA doctors to start prescribing medical marijuana, which is considered an illegal drug under federal law. But, it will make clear that in the 14 states where federal and state law are in conflict, VA clinics will allow the use of medical marijuana for veterans already prescribed it from other clinicians.
“For years, there have been veterans coming back from the Iraq war who needed medical marijuana and had to decide whether they were willing to cut down on their VA medications,” said John Targowski, a legal adviser to the group Veterans for Medical Marijuana Access.
Targowski told The Associated Press (AP) in an interview Saturday that confusion over the government’s policy might have led some veterans to lose trust in their doctors or avoid the VA system altogether.
Dr. Robert A. Petzel, the VA’s undersecretary for health, sent a letter this month to Veterans for Medical Marijuana Access that spells out the department’s policy. The guidelines will be distributed to 900 VA facilities around the country next week.
Petzel made it clear that VA doctors could reserve the right to modify a veteran’s treatment if there were risks of a bad interaction with other prescription medications.
“If a veteran obtains and uses medical marijuana in a manner consistent with state law, testing positive for marijuana would not preclude the veteran from receiving opioids — narcotic painkillers which include morphine, oxycodone and methadone — for pain management,” Petzel wrote, adding “the discretion to prescribe, or not prescribe, opioids in conjunction with medical marijuana, should be determined on clinical grounds.”
Under the previous policy, local VA clinics in some of the 14 states had opted to allow the use of medical marijuana because there had been no rule explicitly barring them from doing so.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, there are 14 states and the District of Columbia with medical marijuana laws: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
New Jersey also recently passed a medical marijuana law, which is scheduled to be put into place next January.
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