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In his staunch opposition of legislation that would legalize medical marijuana in Pennsylvania, state Rep. Matt Baker (R-Wellsboro) has consistently said that he has read more than 150 “scientific studies showing the dangers of marijuana.”
Baker, whose opposition to the legislation is highlighted elsewhere in this issue, shared an email with City Paper last week filled with 194 links to the information that he says has formed his unfavorable opinion of medical marijuana. Some medical-cannabis advocates talked to for this story on the legislation say that they have heard about Baker’s information, but have never seen it. State Sen. Daylin Leach (D-Montgomery) has not only seen the list, but has responded in-kind to Baker saying that most of his information has been debunked. (That email can be found in its entirety below).
Over a few days, CP staff clicked on each and every link supplied to us by the senator. Few of the links go to actual studies, but instead direct to press releases or secondary sources about studies. Some links are dead and don’t go anywhere at all. Since Baker’s committee is tasked with deciding whether the senate’s medical-marijuana bill goes to the house floor for a full vote, CP wanted to provide Baker’s research links so readers could do their own inspection of the documents. The spreadsheet below contains the links, as well as a brief analysis of the substance of the information.
Text of Sen. Daylin Leach’s email to Rep. Matt Baker regarding Baker’s marijuana research:
Matt:
Thank you for your reply. I appreciate your concerns, but I have to say Matt, with all due respect, these articles have nothing to do with the Medical Marijuana bill the Senate passed. And I hope you really consider this. There is an enormous amount of unnecessary human suffering at stake.
I would note that none of the links you provide work. But I am familiar with, and have read, the conclusions the titles of the articles you cite come to. And for the sake of discussion I am prepared to put aside any controversy surrounding those conclusions and assume they are 100% true. They all basically say that if adolescents use marijuana “chronically”, “daily”, or “frequently” (as the studies say), there may be some long-term adverse impact on brain development.
There are several reasons why these articles should not impact our discussion of SB3.
First, these articles are all derivative of a couple of studies which examine the affects [sic] of marijuana on young teens with developing brains who frequently use marijuana recreationally. There are no studies which show adverse affects on adults whose brains are already developed. SB 3 does not authorize recreational use. It only authorizes medical use for certain specific conditions. Most of these conditions rarely if ever affect young adolescents.
Very few, if any children have PTSD, or Type 2 diabetes, or Chrohn’s Disease, or Fibromyalgia. And while there are a few teens who have cancer, statistically that is extremely rare when compared to cancer rates in older adults. So almost no children will be given medical marijuana for the conditions that make up the vast majority of cases for which it is approved.
The one approved condition which does impact young children and teens disproportionately is epilepsy. But the strains effective for treatment of Dravet’s Syndrome and other forms of childhood epilepsy are high CBD, low THC strains. These strains are not psychoactive. They do not get people high. And they do not risk the sort of damage to a developing brain that you are concerned about.
The other big flaw with the articles you cite, is that because they deal with recreational, rather than medical marijuana, they don’t compare the risks of marijuana with the risks of the alternatives. If you look at the side-effects and risks of the drugs [we] prescribe now for epilepsy, they make long-term psychic changes looks extremely mild. Their common side-effects include liver failure, kidney failure, respiratory failure, blindness, and death.
Chronic pain, which again, is extremely rare in children and teenagers, is treated with oxycontin, percoset, and morphine. All of which are far more damaging (and often less effective) than anyone’s ever alleged cannabis to be.
So Matt, again, the only connection that these articles have with what SB3 is trying to do is that they both have the word “marijuana” in them. It’s like citing a study showing the damage done to long-term morphine addicts to justify denying the use of morphine in a hospital for short term pain relief. I know how important that is. I’ve been rushed to the hospital twice with kidney stones. And Morphine made a huge, immediate difference.
This is an issue that should transcend ideology. That is why it passed the Senate overwhelmingly. That’s why liberals such as me, and conservatives such as Senators Folmer, Wagner, Corman and Barolotta voted for it. Anyone can get sick Matt. Anyone can have someone in their family who desperately needs this help. Please do what you can to get desperate people the help they so badly need.
Links provided by Rep. Matt Baker; Information analyzed by Aaron Warnick and Ashley Murray
This article appears in Jun 3-9, 2015.
I think it is important to add and I wish you had noted for this particular article that Matt Baker’s largest campaign contributor is BIG PHARMA – even though he ran unopposed
There is absolutely no doubt now that the majority of Americans want to completely legalize marijuana nationwide. Our numbers grow on a daily basis.
The prohibitionist view on marijuana is the viewpoint of a minority of Americans.. It is based upon decades of lies and propaganda put forth largely by The National Institute On Drug Abuse, commonly referred to as NIDA .
“While U.S. officials defend their monopoly, critics say the government is hogging all the pot and giving it mainly to researchers who want to find harms linked to the drug.
U.S. officials say the federal government must be the sole supplier of legal marijuana in order to comply with a 1961 international drug-control treaty. But they admit they’ve done relatively little to fund pot research projects looking for marijuana’s benefits, following their mandate to focus on abuse and addiction.
“We’ve been studying marijuana since our inception. Of course, the large majority of that research has been on the deleterious effects, the harmful effects, on cognition, behavior and so forth,” said Steven Gust, special assistant to the director at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which was created in 1974.”
Each and every tired old lie NIDA has propagated has been thoroughly proven false by both science and society.
Their tired old rhetoric no longer holds any validity. The majority of Americans have seen through the sham of marijuana prohibition in this day and age. The number of prohibitionists left shrinks on a daily basis.
With their credibility shattered, and their not so hidden agendas visible to a much wiser public, what’s left for The National Institute On Drug Abuse to do?
Maybe, just come to terms with the fact that Marijuana Legalization Nationwide is an inevitable reality that’s approaching much sooner than prohibitionists think, and there is nothing they can do to stop it!
Legalize Nationwide!…and Support All Marijuana Legalization Efforts!
He needs to go, he is unwilling to listen his constituents and he is only loyal to his campaign contributors. TRAITOR! http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/call-for-the-job-of-state-representative-matt/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=button&fb_ref=Default
Big pharma will lose a lot of money. They want the opiates prescribed instead of the marijuana. It is hard to believe that Baker’s opinions are not derived from the fact that he takes large contributions from big pharma that make money on the opiates.
Note too that the alternative for many to marijuana is opiates. How safe are those? They are all highly addictive and mind numbing. Thanks Baker for holding up the will of an entire state. You can be sure your actions will generate someone that will run against you next time.
I contacted Baker’s office about what 150 scientific studies were cited showing the dangers of marijuana. What I received back was a copy and paste of this web page http://www.populartechnology.net/2014/04/150-scientific-studies-showing-dangers.html
Just Google “150 scientific studies showing the dangers of marijuana”. This is the entire basis of his decision to not put SB3 up for a vote. An unpaid summer intern could have Google searched ‘scientific studies dangers of marijuana’ and then select, copy, pasted the tenth hit in about 3 minutes. (You never want to copy the first search result, it makes you look like you didn’t do your research and copied the first hit on Google.) That’s an example of how stupid he thinks his fellow Pennsylvanians are.
so this matt baker pretty much just looked up to word marijuana in his computer and just copy and paste links without even researching about the issue. sounds like George w bush when he just browse thru report of “massive weapons” in Iraq and starting a war. now this other idiot following previous president want to incarcerate Americans without even knowing what he talking about just like pr. bush.
Sad, especially since there is a place where he could have looked for “peer-reviewed” studies, like the 60 found here: http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000884
Many of these links are news articles about the same study. Nearly all have been refuted. This is why politicians should not play doctor.
REP MATT BAKER IS A CORPORATE “ALEC” PUPPET !! ….http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Penns…
His name may be Matt,but he seems much more like a colossal Dick to hundreds of thousands of angry Pennsylvania voters ! He can kiss my ass & his political career goodbye !!
By Ed Gogek
State legislatures across the country are legalizing medical marijuana, but the nation’s physicians aren’t requesting these laws. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Society of Addiction Medicine are both against medical marijuana laws. The American Medical Association doesn’t support them either.
Groups representing patients aren’t behind these laws. The American Cancer Society hasn’t demanded them, and the Glaucoma Foundation even warns patients against using the drug.
Instead, the demand comes from groups like the Drug Policy Alliance and Marijuana Policy Project. These are not medical organizations. They are part of a pro-legalization lobby supported by pro-marijuana billionaires. And they’ve apparently convinced state legislators to ignore some very serious problems.
The biggest problem is that medical marijuana laws are responsible for most of the growth in adolescent use. According to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey, teen use in the United States surged between 2005 and 2011. But it didn’t surge equally in all states.
Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) shows that the number of teens who smoked pot over the past month increased by 33 percent in medical marijuana states, but only by 6 percent in the rest of the country. In 2005, only about 20 percent of the U.S. population lived in medical marijuana states, yet those states accounted for more than two-thirds of the increase in adolescent use between 2005 and 2011. If it weren’t for states with medical marijuana laws, teen use would barely have increased at all.
There’s also evidence that, even among adults, nearly all the “medical” marijuana goes to drug abuse. The largest survey of medical marijuana patients, published in 2014 in the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice, found that only 6 percent reported using marijuana for cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s, Hepatitis C, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The vast majority — 91 percent — got their marijuana for pain.
Research shows that most chronic pain patients are women. In 2001, the journal Pain published a study by researchers who interviewed more than 17,000 people and found that 54 percent of those with chronic pain were female. On the other hand, five years of data from the NSDUH showed that adult marijuana abusers were 69 percent male. So if the pain patients using medical marijuana are genuine, they should be mostly female. If they’re substance abusers faking or exaggerating pain just to get high, they should be about 69 percent male.
Between 2011 and 2013, I contacted all the state medical marijuana programs and got data from seven. In all but one of the states, between 64 to 74 percent of the pain patients were male.
These numbers are nowhere near what we’d expect from a cross-section of legitimate pain patients. Instead, they’re clustered around the result we’d see if the patients were all substance abusers. So while not every medical marijuana patient is misusing the law just to get high, the great majority probably are.
A study from the 2011 Journal of Drug Policy Analysis found similar results. The researchers surveyed 1,655 consecutive patients from nine medical marijuana clinics in California, and found the average patient was a 32-year-old male who started smoking pot as a teenager.
Not only are these laws harmful, they’re completely unnecessary. While some seriously ill patients are helped by marijuana, there are four prescription cannabinoid medications that are just as helpful. So there’s no reason to use marijuana itself as medicine.
Two of these medicines, Marinol and Cesamet, are available by prescription in the United States. A third, Epidiolex or pure cannabidiol, is available for children with seizures through a special Food and Drug Administration program. The fourth, Sativex, is in the last stages of approval.
Some of these medicines have fewer side effects than marijuana and are more long-acting, which means they are better for genuine patients who don’t want to be stoned all the time. However, the biggest advantage of prescription cannabinoids is that they’re much less likely to be abused or diverted to teenage use than medical marijuana is.
State legislators who want what’s best for the country should ignore the pro-marijuana lobbyists and instead listen to the AMA, the Academy of Pediatrics, and the Society for Addiction Medicine. If we want to rein in teenage marijuana use and prevent widespread abuse of the drug, instead of passing new state medical marijuana laws, we should get rid of the ones we already have.
Ed Gogek, M.D., is an addiction psychiatrist and author of the book “Marijuana Debunked: A handbook for Parents, Pundits, and Politicians Who Want to Know the Case Against Legalization,” which is scheduled to be released in August by Chiron Publications. edgogek@gmail.com
I am a chronic pain sufferer. Every damn day I have to get out of my bed. Why? I have children who NEED me.. The task of just getting out of bed is absolutely terrible. The doctors have been using my body like I’m a lab rat… How is this fair? How is it fair that I have to take “Man Made” chemicals that make me even sicker? 16 years of torture…. I’m 38 and the doctors still after 16 years still don’t have a clue on how to treat me. Is this fair???? Is it fair that I am considered a criminal? Why,,,, because I know marijuana helps me everyday. Not only does it help with the tremendous amount of pain but, it helps with my mental state… Smoking marijuana helps me be a great Mom of 4.. Matt Baker I think you need a good dose of the meds I am suppose to be taking… Then and only then you would understand…
I never expect a politician to do a fact check, but a doctor should. Dr. Gogek’s post is disliked by all so far for good reason. It is largely comprised of his opinion and desire to sell his book. I have included the actual numbers on 8th, 10th, and 12th graders consumption of marijuana in the last 30 days over the last 40 years. http://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/46_appendix1.pdf
What you’ll clearly see is that teen use is not spiraling out of control and is very similar in numbers over the last 25 years and actually much lower than 1990 when there were no medical cannabis states. I’m 47 and marijuana was as easy to get when I was 16 as it is today. He also mentions the availabilty of prescription cannabinoids like Marinol and Cessamet as being safer options. The problem is they have not shown any of the promise or results that Charlotte’s Web or other cannabinoids derived from the actual plant, and not in a laboratory, have shown. It is also worth noting that most cannabinoids have little to no THC for a lot of the conditions he cites, so the quote about being high all the time really does not apply. The most blatant disregard comes from the one factual based part of his post, most patients are for chronic pain. This is true, however what is also true is that these patients can go to a pain clinic and see a doctor and get a prescription for oxycontin, percocet, vicodin, etc… All of which cause overdose deaths every year and do far more damage to internal organs, whereas marijuana has never caused even one overdose death. Dr. Gogek should also know that the American Medical Association is made up of far more non-doctors than doctors. The purpose of the organization is to keep doctors from being sued, so they will not be stepping out in favor of something controversial. And we must also mention that the only organization that objected and appealed to the government to reconsider making marijuana a schedule I drug 40+ years ago was the American Medical Association. We need education of the public and legislators, and sensibility, not politicians like Mr. Baker and doctors like Mr. Gogek who clearly have a big pharmaceutical or personal bias. The legislature is put into place to support the wants and needs of the public. I’d say 85% is a very strong number. It is time to do what Pennsylvanians want. And that is for doctors just to have the option to prescribe medical cannabis as an option where they see fit.
Ed Gogek, you are hysterical shrill.
As shown by four separate peer-reviewed studies published in respected journals, legalizing medical cannabis has not increased cannabis usage in teens:
“This study did not find increases in adolescent marijuana use related to legalization of medical marijuana.”
Choo et al. The Impact of State Medical Marijuana Legislation on Adolescent Marijuana Use. Journal of Adolescent Health. 2014.
“Our results suggest that, in the states assessed here, MMLs have not measurably affected adolescent marijuana use in the first few years after their enactment.”
Lynne-Landsman et al. Effects of state medical marijuana laws on adolescent marijuana use. Am J Public Health. 2013.
“We find limited evidence of causal effects of MMLs on measures of reported marijuana use.”
Harper et al. Do medical marijuana laws increase marijuana use? Replication study and extension. Ann Epidemiol. 2012.
“Our results are not consistent with the hypothesis that the legalization of medical marijuana caused an increase in the use of marijuana and other substances among high school students.”
Anderson et al. Medical Marijuana Laws and Teen Marijuana Use. IZA 2012.
https://www.change.org/p/matthew-baker-resign-from-the-pa-state-senate?recruiter=60880814&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=autopublish&utm_term=mob-xs-no_src-reason_msg&fb_ref=Default
I am extremely bummed with his reaction and ignorant, selfish mindset.
He has no idea how people are suffering.
We (I have epilepsy) and many many others who are suffering with pain. Cancer patients who are looking for pain relief without the pharmaceutical companies making money on people’s illnesses.
The children who are suffering from the pain of diseases. Cancer. Patient who are in chronic pain.
You are very stubborn and stupid. You need to go!!!!
One day you or a family will be diagnosed with something so horrible and you would rather watch them suffer or suffer yourself and I hope you are denied help. Oh! That’s right you would get the best care from your pharmaceutical companies.
I wish you much pain and suffering some day.
Or watch your family suffer with pain and aging.
Shame on you for bringing politics in this desion.
Do you not realize this would help with the money being brought in for taxes.
Oh! That’s right you have no need to worry about money. You receive private funds yourself from pharmaceutical companies.
You are a poor excuse for a human being!!!!!!!!!!