By Dale Gieringer, Director, CA NORML

Like many medical marijuana users, Kristin Redeen needed additional prescription medications for her severe chronic pain. For seven years she had been treated at a private pain clinic in the Central Valley, where a doctor maintained her on Percocet, a semi-synthetic opioid. One day Kristin was unexpectedly asked to submit a urine sample.  

“They already knew about my medical marijuana use,” says Kristin, who contacted California NORML. “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”

When the test  came back, Kristin was informed that the clinic would no longer renew her prescription because she had tested positive for an illegal controlled substance. Her doctor at the clinic cited legal concerns, claiming –falsely– that DEA regulations forbid giving prescription narcotics to users of marijuana or other illegal drugs.

Kristin was cut off from her Percocet and began suffering seizures. She finally found a physician who was willing to prescribe her another opioid, Vicodin, but only at low doses insufficient to relieve her constant pain.

Kristin is one of a growing number of medical marijuana patients discriminated against by pain clinics. “I must have heard of 25 cases this year,” says Doug Hiatt, an attorney in Washington state. “It’s Jim Crow medicine.”

NORML has received a surge of complaints within the last six months.  Many medical marijuana users report that they can’t find a clinic willing to take them on.  Others, like Kristin, have been abandoned by clinics that suddenly adopted aggressive drug-screening policies.

Clinics say they are legally compelled to drug-test chronic pain patients so as to avoid liability for overdoses and diversion of prescription drugs, particularly opioids such as oxycontin –which have nothing to do with cannabis.

Chronic pain patients have good reason to object to being denied medical access to cannabis. Chronic pain is the leading indication for medical cannabis use, accounting for 90% of the patients in Oregon’s medical marijuana program.   More than 60 studies have shown cannabinoids to be effective in pain relief, according to a compilation by the International Association of Cannabis Medicine which includes four controlled studies of smoked marijuana by California’s Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.

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