By the Numbers: Medical Marijuana

Fewer scripts written when medical marijuana is an option

http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/Medicare/59740?xid=NL_breakingnews_2016-08-18&eun=g578717d0r

Two dozen states legalized marijuana for medical use, yet there has been little research into how those policies affect clinical care. Using data from Medicare Part D, Ashley C. Bradford, MD, MPH, and colleagues, set out to see how practices in states with such laws vary from those that don’t.

In a paper for Health Affairs, Bradford compared the average annual daily dose prescriptions for drugs that treat nine conditions shown to be affected by marijuana. Bradford’s team found that, with the exception of two conditions, drugs were prescribed less often in those states that have medical marijuana laws.

The difference was most pronounced in prescriptions of drugs to help relieve pain.

Bradford went a step farther, calculating the cost savings to Medicare from medical marijuana policies were about $165.2 million in 2013 alone. At that time, only 17 states and the District of Columbia had implemented such laws.

“We forecast that if all states were to have adopted a medical marijuana laws by 2013, total spending by Medicare Part D would have been $468.1 million less in that year than it would have been had no state adopted such a law,” Bradford wrote.