- Pierce Fenwick, Staff Writer
A CT Hospice is Testing Cannabis as an Opioid Alternative
"From start to finish, it took three years for Jim Prota, the hospice’s pharmacy director, and his colleagues to bushwhack through red tape to get the clinical trial off the ground. The idea of using marijuana for medical reasons isn’t new — the movement was born out of the AIDS crisis in the ‘90s, and 29 states and Washington, DC, now allow medical marijuana in some capacity.
"But in the eyes of the federal government, cannabis is an illegal drug, so the hospice had to gain approval from the Food and Drug Administration. It also needed the Drug Enforcement Administration to give its permission for the hospice to distribute a Schedule 1 drug, the category the federal government reserves for drugs it considers to have a high potential for abuse and no medical value."