Georgia, meanwhile, permitted limited medicinal use of marijuana but did not set up dispensaries. As a result, patients resort to ordering it online or driving to another state to get it.
The conflict in the law makes her uneasy. But Ms. Barrett, who had been on opioids for a decade, said she feels so strongly about it working that “if someone wants to arrest me, bring it on.”
Others experience mixed results.
Melodie Beckham, who had metastatic lung cancer, tried medical marijuana for 13 days in a clinical trial at Connecticut Hospice before deciding to quit.
“She was hopeful that it would help her relax and just kind of enjoy those days,” said her daughter, Laura Beckham.
Instead, it seemed to make her mother, who died in July at age 69, “a little more agitated or more paranoid.”
The marijuana “didn’t seem effective,” nor did it keep her mother from hitting her pain pump to get extra doses of an opioid, her daughter said.
The researchers running the trial at Connecticut Hospice spent 2 years getting necessary approvals from the FDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the DEA.
Since May, the trial has enrolled only 7 of the 66 patients it plans to sign up because many patients were too sick, too close to death, or simply couldn’t swallow the pills. So far, the trial has shown “mixed results,” said James Prota, director of pharmacy for the hospice.
Researchers point out they are still exploring the basics when it comes to marijuana’s effects on older adults or the terminally ill.
“We just have no data on how many older adults are using medical marijuana, what they are using it for, and most importantly, what are the outcomes,” said Brian Kaskie, an associate professor at the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health in Iowa City. “It’s all anecdotal.”
Mr. Kaskie, who specializes in public policy and the aging, received grants from the state of Colorado and the Chicago-based Retirement Research Foundation to survey the use of medical marijuana by older Americans.
In many quarters, there’s a growing appetite for solid information, he said.
“When I first started this, my colleagues joked we were going to find all the aging hippies who listen to the Grateful Dead,” said Mr. Kaskie, who has been studying medicinal marijuana for years. “Now, they’re starting to realize this is a legitimate area of research.”
Twenty researchers received marijuana from the federal program last year, which was more than any previous year since 2010, according to NIDA statistics.
In a recent funding announcement, the National Institutes of Health requested grant applications to study the effects of marijuana and other drugs on older adults and pain. NIH, however, continues to funnel much of its funding into studying the adverse effects of marijuana, researchers said.
Although NIH acknowledged in one of the announcements that some research supports “possible benefits” of marijuana, it emphasized “there have not been adequate large controlled trials to support these claims.”
Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.