PHYSICIANS DIVIDED ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

LOS ANGELES (Reuters Health) - Using marijuana for treating serious medical
conditions continues to be a topic of national debate. While eight states
have passed laws allowing physicians to prescribe marijuana and the US
Supreme Court is considering a major California case on the issue, little
is known about doctors' willingness to prescribe it.

The results of a national survey presented here at the annual meeting of
the American Society of Addiction Medicine indicate that physicians are
about evenly divided on this question.

When researchers at Providence's Rhode Island Hospital asked 960 doctors to
respond to the survey item, "Doctors should be able to legally prescribe
marijuana as medical therapy," 36% agreed, 38% disagreed and 26% were neutral.

"We hypothesized that physicians would be more likely to support medical
marijuana use in states with legislative mandates," lead author Anthony
Charuvastra told Reuters Health. "However, we discovered that was not the case.

"Instead we found that specialty, residence in a state that had ever
approved medical marijuana research and physicians' 'permissiveness' and
'non-moralism' attitudes were associated with supporting medical
marijuana," he added.

The researchers surveyed physicians in five specialties: addiction
medicine-psychiatry, general psychiatry, obstetrics-gynecology, family
practice and internal medicine. They found obstetricians-gynecologists and
internists more likely to support medical marijuana than other surveyed
specialists.

Because doctors in those two specialties are more likely to see cancer
patients, they may be more sensitive to marijuana's potential for managing
chemotherapy side effects and pain, the Rhode Island team proposed. They
noted that the other specialists surveyed are more likely to see active
substance abusers and may be more concerned about the drug's negative effects.