The days of journalism’s one-way street of simply producing stories for the public have long been over.
Officials with both companies defended the language in response to questions from Spotlight PA.
And while the state’s 2016 medical marijuana law requires the Department of Health to restrict the advertising and marketing of cannabis, it does not specifically mention the certification companies that often play a crucial role in connecting patients with physicians.
“That’s complete nonsense.
People with opioid use disorder are about 50% less likely to die when they are treated long-term with buprenorphine or methadone, a major national consensus study found in 2019.
Brendan Saloner, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is an author of a 2014 study that found medical marijuana laws were associated with lower rates of fatal opioid overdoses.
Releaf Specialists owner Bob Scherer, who’s not a physician, suggested the website language was provided by a third-party contractor that he declined to name.
“I don’t know that we are there to call it a substitute yet,” Wiese said.
Chief Executive Officer Melonie Kotchey — who has an MBA in health-care administration and medical billing and coding, according to the company’s website — also referred Spotlight PA to a report on the company’s website.
Matisyahu Shulman, an addiction psychiatrist in New York and an author of one of the articles, told Spotlight PA that the point of a section Hawks cited is that people should use buprenorphine as a long-term treatment, not for just a week or two weeks.
She and her colleagues have found CBD can reduce cue-induced craving and anxiety for people who have a history of heroin use, but she said those were smaller studies that lay the groundwork for more research.
And she told Spotlight PA it’s important to distinguish between CBD, which is one compound of cannabis, and medical marijuana, which includes many compounds that can have different effects.
An April report from that year written by the state’s Medical Marijuana Advisory Board cleared the way for the change, but did not cite any specific research to support it.
“The way my field works is you can’t go from, ‘Well, one person can do it’ to ‘This should be a treatment for 1,000 people,’’ said M-J Milloy, an epidemiologist and research scientist at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use in Canada.
The state’s health secretary at the time, physician Rachel Levine, also didn’t cite any specific research when she formally added opioid use disorder as a qualifying condition.
Pennsylvania’s regulations allow any of its authorized cannabis doctors to certify for opioid use disorder.
Deepika Slawek, a New York physician, co-authored new clinical guidelines for practitioners in that state’s medical cannabis program.
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