"Better late than never." That's how Dr. Jim Maier of Scarborough describes the timing of his group's position nearly three months after voters expanded the state's ten-year-old medical marijuana law. Maier is a psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of children who are vulnerable to psychotic illness.
"We have seen kids whose psychosis was accelerated by marijuana, and we've seen even kids that we've treated who got psychotic again when they experimented with marijuana use. So it's not a harmless drug and we really want to get the word out as much as possible that risks and benefits need to be carefully measured."
Maier says a state task force created to come up with rules for implementing the new law chose not to include a prohibition on prescribing marijuana to children under 12. If lawmakers can't bring themselves to reconsider that option, the psychiatrists say the very least they could do is create a physician-oversight panel to review the circumstances around which medical marijuana is prescribed to kids.
Dr. Gary Allegretta is a pediatric palliative care physician at Maine Medical Center. He says medical marijuana could be used to treat critically ill children under some circumstances. "We have a variety of good medications for pain and symptom relief, such as narcotics, but at times it's not completely effective for kids. It would be a reasonable approach to allow a child maybe 12 and up with parental consent to use medical marijuana for certain symptoms like pain and nausea."
"What we hope to prevent is throwing open a barn door like California did where almost any young person can get marijuana for the most trivial indications," says Maier. A recent study by the University of Michigan found that for the first time in the U.S., more teens smoke marijuana than smoke cigarettes.
Dr. Ed Pontius is a physican-psychiatrist from Portland, who also serves as medical director at the Crisis and Counseling Centers in Augusta. "I work with people who have significant problems with drug abuse, and it's rare in the folks I'm working with that they didn't have early exposure to marijuana as well," he says. "So in a state where the number one cause of death for younger Mainers is overdose, we really need to do what we can to put the brakes on."
Pontius says the fact that marijuana is becoming more broadly accepted, and that the word "medical" is so commonly associated with it now, makes young people think it's a benign drug. The problem, says Dr. Maier, is that medical marijuana is four-to-five times more potent than it was a couple of decades ago. It's been shown to interfere with brain development, specifically around motivation and concentration. And that's another reason he advises caution.
Lawmakers, meanwhile, are still considering their options on the age question. "I think there were mixed opinions about whether we ought to find a specific age and put that in the law or not," says Democratic Rep. Anne Haskell of Portland, who served on the governor's medical marijuana task force. She also co-chairs the Legislature's Criminal Justice Committee.
Haskell says she personally did not support limiting medical marijuana to kids under a certain age because, she says, there may be teens undergoing chemotherapy for whom it might be effective. "What I believe is that we can trust our physicians here in Maine," she says. "Nobody can get this unless a physician who has a relationship with that patient fills out a certificate, and I really think the professionals understand that this is not to be given out willy nilly and that there won't be hundreds of kids running around with access to marijuana."
Lawmakers and the public will get a chance to weigh in with Haskell. The final recommendations of the task force are being drafted into a bill that will be coming up for public hearing in the Health and Human Services Committee later in the session.
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