Capitolwire: Medical cannabis debate still raging despite General Assembly’s budget fever.

By Christen Smith
Staff Reporter
Capitolwire

HARRISBURG (June 15) — Medical cannabis advocates welcomed a heavyweight into their corner Thursday when talk show host Montel Williams appeared at a state Capitol rally for Senate Bill 3.

Williams, at times choking back tears, spoke candidly about his 16-year struggle with multiple sclerosis, and how living with constant pain left him hopeless and suicidal — until his physician suggested medical cannabis.

“It wasn’t until I started using medical cannabis on a daily basis and getting my system really saturated with cannabinoids that I started getting relief,” he said.

Williams blamed politics for keeping the bill off Gov. Tom Wolf’s desk—who just last month hosted a roundtable discussion at the Governor’s Residence to “dispel misinformation” about the bill. SB 3, which would create the Medical Cannabis Act, passed 40-7 in the Senate last month, but has yet to receive consideration in the House Health Committee.

If approved, the bill would give medical cannabis access to patients diagnosed with seizure disorders, HIV, cancer, PTSD, ALS, wasting syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injuries, glaucoma, severe fibromyalgia, Crohn’s disease, diabetes and chronic pain.

Bill sponsor Sen. Mike Folmer, R-Lebanon, has said the current list is prohibitive and hopes one day the law will allow physicians more leeway in recommending cannabis to patients.

The self-proclaimed “bible-believing Christian” also says House members still on the fence — or far from it — just need more education about the drug’s medical benefits. After all, he says, it’s how co-sponsor Sen. Daylin Leach, D-Montgomery, was able to bridge the ideological chasm that divides the two lawmakers on most issues.

And while support for medical cannabis in the House appears higher now than in months past, the representative firmly planted in the opposition’s corner says the rush to judgment on medical cannabis is one mistake he cannot make.

“I know I’ve been the target of the disdain for the pro-marijuana proponents,” said House Health Committee Majority Chairman Rep. Matt Baker, R-Tioga, during an interview Thursday. “My opposition is based upon the preponderance of evidence from the medical community that medical marijuana should not be legalized outside the federal approval process so as to make sure what’s approved is safe for children and adults alike.”

Baker, who is often politicized as the only man standing between thousands of patients and access to medical cannabis, says the rhetoric is displaced.

He says he isn’t some heartless politician beholden to special interests. He’s taking into consideration the cries of concern from more than two dozen advocacy groups opposed to the bill, including many associations who represent the diseases found in Senate Bill 3’s list of qualifying conditions.

For a list of organizations who oppose medical cannabis, CLICK HERE.

“I do care deeply about the health and well-being of the people of this great state,” Baker said. “My heart breaks for them … but, I really believe medicine should be left to the medical and scientific experts, not politicians.”

Baker says it would be irresponsible for him to schedule a vote on the bill when the federal government has yet to change the drug’s “Schedule One” classification — meaning marijuana sits in the same category as heroin, LSD, crystal methamphetamine and other drugs known to be highly addictive, unsafe and providing no accepted medical benefits.

“The people of Pennsylvania deserve medicine that’s proven to be safe and effective and is supported by the medical community and approved by the FDA and this does not accomplish that goal,” he said.

While he may be the legislative face of the opposition, Baker says he is just one of many in the House opposed to the idea.

“I gave up trying to predict what votes would be a long time ago,” he said. “All I know is I’m hearing more and more opposition from the members of the House, from more groups across Pennsylvania, as well as the nation.”

In a letter sent to House lawmakers in March, Dr. Amy Brooks, president of the American Epilepsy Society, said the unregulated strains of “artisanal cannabis products” currently on the market in states that have legalized medical marijuana can cause more harm than good for patients with drug resistant seizure disorders.

Citing a study performed at the Children’s Hospital Colorado and published in the journal Epilepsy & Behavior, Brooks says results show that “high CBD” oils resulted in “no significant reduction in seizures in the majority of patients.”

For those who did report improvement, such progress was not associated with a positive change in “electroencephalograms (EEGs), the gold standard monitoring test for people with epilepsy.”

Brooks said, in 20 percent of the cases studied, cannabis use worsened seizures and even caused “significant adverse events.”

“These are not the stories that you have likely heard in your public hearings, but they are the reality of practitioners at Children’s Hospital Colorado who have cared for the largest number of cases of children with epilepsy treated with cannabis in the U.S.,” she wrote. “The families and children coming to Colorado are receiving unregulated, highly variable artisanal preparations of cannabis oil prescribed, in most cases, by physicians with no training in pediatrics, neurology or epilepsy. As a result, the epilepsy specialists in Colorado have been at the bedside of children having severe dystonic reactions and other movement disorders, developmental regression, intractable vomiting and worsening seizures that can be so severe they have to put the child into a coma to get the seizures to stop.

“Because these products are unregulated, it is impossible to know if these dangerous adverse reactions are due to the CBD or because of contaminants found in these artisanal preparations.”

“If we are going to call something medicine, I think we need to hear from the experts in the medical community,” Baker said. “They are all of one accord in not supporting Senate Bill 3 and not supporting legislation that is outside the approval process of the FDA. I just think it sets a terrible precedent.”

SB 3, if enacted, would engineer a brand new industry of licensed growers, processors and distributors, managed by a State Board of Medical Cannabis Licensing.

Fred Sembach, Folmer’s chief of staff, said SB 3 addresses purity and uniformity concerns by requiring “testing by certified laboratories for each of the medical cannabis license holders.”

Baker says the bill could also open a floodgate for other pharmaceutical or drug advocates exploiting a perceived loophole in the FDA approval process.

“It goes beyond just this issue,” he said. “Who’s to say they are not going to come back and say ‘well you did it for marijuana, now I want it for LSD or Ecstasy or heroin or some other drug that may not be on anyone’s list, but they want to bypass the FDA to get any drug approved.”

Sembach said medical cannabis isn’t like any pharmaceutical available today.

“Cannabis is a natural plant that has been demonized despite the extensive research on its benefits,” he said. “Senator Folmer would be hard pressed to name another plant with the medical benefits of cannabis that has needed such justification and legislation for its use.”

Josh Stanley, the owner of a cannabis cultivator and breeding nonprofit in Colorado, which has recently approved recreational use of marijuana, said lawmakers and others in Pennsylvania simply “fear what they don’t understand.”

Stanley has testified at hearings for both Senate Bill 3 and its predecessor, Senate Bill 1182, which passed in the Senate 43-7 in October 2014.

“It’s our first natural reaction,” he said during a hearing last year. “And for 85 years, we’ve been given, at the very best, misinformation about this plant and, at the very worst, an innate fear that’s lasted up until the present day. These fears are breaking up now with the help of proof and science.”

Stanley’s company developed the hemp strain Charlotte’s Web, which he said is very high in Cannabidiols (CBD), a compound with anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, and very low in Tetrahydrocannabinols (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.

He said the drug could be used to treat a variety of diseases like cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, and multiple sclerosis. The safety profile for the plant is “off the charts,” he said.

And some in Pennsylvania’s own medical community support his claims.

In a January 2014 hearing for Senate Bill 1182, House Majority Leader Mike Turzai’s own wife, Lidia Comini Turzai, a physician, submitted written testimony in support of the Charlotte’s Web strain. She wrote that it has the ability to improve the lives of children diagnosed with seizure disorders by reducing seizure activity.

Dr. Erik Rupard, an oncologist in Reading, in an interview with Capitolwire last year, said “if marijuana is addictive, especially for those patients of mine truly in need of relief, so be it.”

“Medicines that we give to our cancer patients are known to be addictive,” he said. “They cause the patients to be dependent on them and we don’t really mind that … the doctors, the patients, we don’t mind if they become addicted if it provides a far better quality of life for the last 12 months of their life.”

The anecdotal stories of medical cannabis relief have been at the center of weekly SB 3 rallies in and around the capitol, but the message is always the same: it worked when nothing else would.

Despite this, and the tidal wave of public opinion — 88 percent of Pennsylvania voters, according to one Quinnipiac poll, support medical marijuana — Baker is unmoved.

“I just don’t think that’s the kind of medicine people are going to feel safe and comfortable with when we have already heard testimony that it can be a disaster,” he said.

There is more than one path to a floor vote for bills in the General Assembly, however.

House Majority Leader Dave Reed, R-Indiana, said during a press call in April it is his “hope and expectation” that a bill will receive a House floor vote later this spring with input from both Democrats and Republicans. He said there is “widespread support” for the concept, and said House Republicans are committed to a product that provides medical opportunities “to those truly in need,” but in a manner that is “tightly regulated” and avoids unintended consequences.

So if not SB 3, then what?

House Bill 608, sponsored by Baker, amends the existing Controlled Substance, Drug, Device and Cosmetic Act, and was re-introduced in January as a way to give the state Department of Health more power to keep up with the constantly-rotating cycle of chemicals commonly mixed in street drugs.

House Republican Caucus spokesman Steve Miskin said the bill “has amendments that are essentially SB 3.”

HB 608 was referred to the House Rules Committee on June 2.

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