Alabama: New Laws For Doctors Prescribing Medical Marijuana

A press release by the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners & Medical Licensure Commission states a list of new rules regarding how and which patients physicians can recommend medical marijuana to.

The release contains draft rules and regulations while also including other measures that require physicians to undergo training if they would like to certify patients for Alabama’s medical cannabis program. The program was signed into law in May by Gov. Kay Ivey.

The new rules do contain far more patients and conditions eligible for medical cannabis, and the training is also a huge leap forward since many physicians don’t have the proper knowledge of medical cannabis and how it should be administered.

The new draft rules also state that physicians can recommend medical marijuana as a treatment for the following list of conditions when other medical treatments or therapies have failed:

• Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
• Cancer-related cachexia, nausea or vomiting, weight loss, or chronic pain
• Crohn’s Disease
• Depression
• Epilepsy or a condition causing seizures
• HIV/AIDS-related nausea or weight loss
• Panic disorder
• Parkinson’s disease
• Persistent nausea that is not significantly responsive to traditional treatment, except for nausea related to pregnancy, cannabis-induced cyclical vomiting syndrome, or cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
• Sickle Cell Anemia
• Spasticity associated with a motor neuron disease, including Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)
• Spasticity associated with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) or a spinal cord injury
• A terminal illness
• Tourette’s Syndrome
• A condition causing chronic or intractable pain in which conventional intervention and opiate therapy is contraindicated or has proved ineffective

This gives thousands if not millions of people more options to look towards medical cannabis as a treatment they can rely on. The Alabama State Board of Medical Examiners will be accepting comments from the public regarding the new set of draft rules up until January 4, 2022.

According to the same press release noted above, the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission is also working to create its own list of regulations and rules regarding cultivation, manufacturing, and dispensary licensing, which is great news in itself.

We’re more than happy to hear that reliable medical cannabis will be in the hands of many who are eligible, and we can only hope that it will soon be given recreationally by some sort of miracle. Until then, we’ll continue to monitor just how effective and useful the new set of draft rules will be to those with the conditions noted above.