A new bill, H.R. 5247, will provide different options to suffering patients; and the bill is personally backed by United States President Donald Trump. So, how exactly will this effect medical cannabis?
The Right-to-Try Act would allow eligible patients – defined as a patient with a potentially fatal condition – to choose treatment options that haven’t been fully approved by the FDA yet. H.R. 5247 passed the House of Representatives on Tuesday with a vote of 250 to 169, following a unanimous win with the Senate last summer.
Since the bill is set to include a long list of medications, will medical cannabis be one of them? That’s a very strong possibility; courtesy of a new clinical trial centered on the effectiveness of using medical cannabis to treat veterans with post traumatic stress disorder. The research is being conducted by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Sciences (MAPS), headquartered in Santa Cruz, California.
Based on this study, medical cannabis meets all the requirements needed to be approved for the Right-to-Try bill. The criteria includes, “a stage of a disease or condition in which there is reasonable likelihood that death will occur within a matter of months,” and/or “a disease or condition that would result in significant irreversible morbidity that is likely to lead to severely premature death.”
“This is really a law for people who are very sick, who have exhausted all treatment options and who cannot enroll in a clinical trial,” states Starlee Coleman, a senior policy adviser at the Goldwater Institute. “For people living in a state where right-to-try is already on the books, they already have the ability today to work with their doctors directly to approach a drug company with a drug in clinical trials and ask for the option to try that drug outside of the clinical trial,” she continued.
There are currently 38 states that have Right-to-Try laws on the books. However, this is a federal bill that would make the option available to patients throughout the whole country.