The opioid epidemic: Is relief under our nose?

As deaths from opiate overdoses continue their climb to unprecedented levels - up 46 percent in 2013 over 2012 and still climbing - could crucial relief to the crisis be right under our noses, hidden in plain sight? We’re talking about medical marijuana.

In 2012, Massachusetts voters, by 63 percent, instructed our Department of Public Health to set up a medical marijuana program for this medicine to be available for debilitated patients through licensed dispensaries. By the end of 2013, each of the Bay State’s 14 counties was to have at least one dispensary. As of today, none has opened, though a few dispensaries have been authorized to put seeds in the ground. Doctors are throwing up their hands over the complexities of certifying patients to obtain it.

In 2013, after the voter mandate, the DPH held “listening sessions” around the state, at which patients and others were invited to give DPH listeners three minutes on the subject of medical marijuana, ostensibly for the purpose of informing the DPH’s crafting of regulations to implement the medical program.

The sessions drew hundreds, including many former opiate addicts, their friends, family members, and their doctors. They gave heart-rending testimony about how medical marijuana enabled them to wean themselves off prescription narcotics, and restore their lives to normal. Many made it clear that it was not the addiction that was destroying their lives, but the prescription narcotics themselves. They were desperate to stop taking them. Medical marijuana gave them an exit from opioids.

DPH staff sat attentively, scratching notes.

A year ago, Gov. Deval Patrick declared the opioid epidemic to be a public health emergency and directed the DPH to act. The DPH assembled a 36-member Task Force of notables, held focus groups, and in June issued a 32-page report. The report is plump with platitudes - “Finding: There is a need for increased education for youth and families about the dangers of drug use” - but nowhere in those 32 pages does the term “medical marijuana” appear.

Since then, nearly a thousand more Bay Staters have died from overdoses.

Was Gov. Patrick’s DPH listening at its own listening sessions? Did those piteous fellow citizens, who anguished to speak publicly about so private a subject as their own wretched struggle with opioids, deserve to be taken seriously?

Apparently not.

In a study published in the October edition of the respected Journal of the American Medical Association in Internal Medicine, researchers compared the level of opioid overdose deaths in states with a medical marijuana program to the level in states without one, and found that the medical marijuana states had 25 percent fewer overdoses.

Repeat: States with medical marijuana have 25 percent fewer overdose deaths from opiates.

On taking office, Gov. Charlie Baker appointed his own emergency task force, the Opioid Working Group, to recommend steps to curb the epidemic. Like the DPH's listening sessions, the Working Group has held “Open Dialogues” around the state. We appeared before them in Greenfield last month. We implored them to read the testimonies from the medical marijuana sessions, and provided journal citations to the new research on medical marijuana as an effective treatment for opioid abuse. The Working Group’s recommendations to the governor are due out next month.

Diligence requires the Working Group to examine all available evidence, anecdotal and scientific, on the efficacy of medical marijuana as an exit drug from opiate addiction. If they dismiss the patient accounts and the JAMA findings, let them say why. If not, their first recommendations to Gov. Baker should include

· That he commit to fulfilling the voter mandate for 35 dispensaries to be open for qualifying patients without further delay;

· That until 35 dispensaries are open, he instruct the DPH to rescind its rule forbidding licensed caregivers - cultivators for patients who can’t - from assisting more than one patient; and

· That he order the DPH to liberate physicians from the burdensome rules and regulatory obstacles standing between their patients and legal and safe access to medical marijuana.

None of these steps will cost the taxpayers a dime or risk the public health or safety, and they hold promise of saving lives now at risk.

There’s only one circumstance in which the Working Group should not make those recommendations to the Governor: that he beat them to it.

Richard Evans and Michael Cutler, Northampton lawyers, represent no clients with interests before the DPH.