The New York Times reports today that elderly people who live in nursing homes or assisted living centers are using marijuana daily to cope with pain and other physical aggravations. Sometimes they do this with the help of the institution they’re living in. Other times they keep the marijuana locked in a safe within their room and use it somewhat surreptitiously.
I decided to blog about this article when I came to the closing anecdote about Marcia Dunetz, an 80-year-old Parkie who lives in a nursing home in the Bronx:
Last fall, the first three residents [of the Hebrew Home in the Bronx] started taking marijuana pills. Their families obtain the pills at a dispensary in Yonkers run by Etain, a company licensed by the state to sell medical marijuana to qualifying patients or their designated caregivers, who must live in New York. Dr. Palace [the nursing home’s medical director] said that as the program expanded this month, as many as 50 residents could be using marijuana.
Marcia Dunetz, 80, a retired art teacher who has Parkinson’s, said she worried at first about what people would think. “It’s got a stigma,” she said. “People don’t really believe you’re not really getting high if you take it.”
But she decided to try it anyway. Now, she no longer wakes up with headaches and feels less dizzy and nauseated. Her legs also do not freeze up as often.
That Marcia Dunetz doesn’t get high may be because her medical-grade marijuana has been cultivated to include less THC, the component that makes you feel stoned, and more of the other active medicinal ingredients.
Senior citizens are now using marijuana for health purposes in various locations around the world. It’s not happening all over the United States, because each state has its own rules regarding medical marijuana, and some states ban it outright.
New York State, where I live, allows medical marijuana for only a small number of illnesses. The approved list includes Parkinson’s disease, but only if you’re a Parkie with “an associated or complicating condition.”
From the NY State government website:
You are potentially eligible for medical marijuana if you have been diagnosed with a specific severe, debilitating or life threatening condition that is accompanied by an associated or complicating condition. By law, those conditions are: cancer, HIV infection or AIDS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury with spasticity, epilepsy, inflammatory bowel disease, neuropathy, and Huntington’s disease. The associated or complicating conditions are cachexia or wasting syndrome, severe or chronic pain, severe nausea, seizures, or severe or persistent muscle spasms.
New York State also doesn’t allow you to smoke medical marijuana; you have to consume it as a pill, as an oil that you drink with tea, or in some other non-smokeable form. This makes no sense to me. As I recall from my heady college days (pun intended), when you smoke marijuana you know within a minute or two whether you’re feeling the effects and don’t need any more. When you drink marijuana tea or eat a hash brownie, it may take an hour for the effects to kick in. Since older people often take marijuana for pain, why should they wait that long?
