Bipartisan Pennsylvania senators have introduced a bill that would allow terminally ill patients to use of medical marijuana in hospitals.
Similar to a law previously enacted in California, the Pennsylvania legislation from Sen. John Kane (D) and 17 bipartisan cosponsors aims to ensure that cannabis patients with severe illnesses such as cancer retain access to regulated products as an alternative treatment option.
“Hospitals are incredible places where patients receive top notch care,” Kane wrote in a cosponsorship memo in August. “They need guidance and legal protections to provide terminally ill patients with options to manage pain, while providing settings that support family and friends who are saying goodbye to a loved one.”
The policy that’s being proposed in the bill filed on Friday is known as “Ryan’s law,” a reference to Ryan Bartell, a cancer patient who inspired the legislation.
“During his treatments in California the hospital provided him with opioid medications that caused him to be sedated and unable to interact with family and friends,” Kane said. “Ryan and his family wanted to ensure that his remaining days could be filled with visits from his loved ones. So, Ryan moved to a hospital in the State of Washington where he used medical marijuana to manage his pain effectively and allow him to stay awake and alert to spend time with family and friends during hospital visits.”
“Ryan’s law would allow terminally ill patients to use non-smoking forms of medical marijuana in Pennsylvania hospitals,” he said. “Right now, the use of medical marijuana in hospitals is a gray area due to marijuana being a Scheduled I Narcotic, while also being legal for medicinal purposes in Pennsylvania.”
The four-page bill would amend the state’s existing medical cannabis law to make it so terminally ill patients can use non-smokeable marijuana products at hospitals, create storage requirements for the medicine and require health facilities to develop guidelines about the regulated use of cannabis for qualifying patients.
It also stipulates that a “health care facility is not required to provide a patient with a recommendation to use medical marijuana in compliance with this act or include medical marijuana in a patient’s discharge plan.”
Additionally, the measure says that, if the federal government initiates enforcement actions against a hospital regarding the cannabis policy or issues rules expressly prohibiting the medical marijuana allowance, the health facility is empowered to suspend the practice.
However, the proposed law “shall not be construed to permit a health care facility to prohibit patient use of medical marijuana due solely to the fact that cannabis is a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act or other Federal constraints on the use of medical marijuana that were in existence prior to the effective date of this paragraph,” it says.
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