Should health insurance cover marijuana? Should it cover vodka? Lucky Strikes? Bacon cheeseburgers?

Like all those substances, marijuana contains pleasure-giving, mind-altering chemicals that the brain desperately wants more and more and more of (especially at today’s ultra-high potencies).

It’s not medicine and never has been. Health insurance, which is supposed to keep people healthy, not promote addiction, should not cover it.

Yes, there are medicines derived from marijuana. Marinol is used to help cancer patients eat. Epidiolex is used to treat people with seizure conditions. These are already covered by health insurance.

However, Ozempic is derived from a chemical found in the saliva of the gila monster. That doesn’t mean letting venomous desert lizards bite you is a legitimate medical treatment.

Indeed, the whole regime of state-level “medical” marijuana programs is based on political decisions, not science. Majorities voted to let doctors recommend (but not prescribe) marijuana for... pretty much anything.

We all want people to have access to real treatment, especially people suffering from severe conditions like chronic pain, significant anxiety or PTSD. The truth is that the best evidence shows that marijuana does nothing to help with those issues and can even make them worse.

Let’s examine the leading claim made by advocates, namely that marijuana helps with chronic pain.

That claim found some backing in a 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences. Sadly, subsequent meta-analyses — and there have been dozens — have not endorsed weed for treating pain. In fact, an alarming study from the American Society of Anesthesiologists shows that weed users experience more pain and use more opioids post-operatively. The drug has the opposite effect from what its advocates and industry pushers claim.

When it comes to mental health issues, the drug fares even worse. It’s intimately linked to increased anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and suicide. Data analysis from Sorbonne researchers showed that adolescents who used the drug had a more than doubled risk of suicide attempts. A massive study from Denmark found that as much as 30 percent of schizophrenia cases in younger men could be attributed to the drug.

Reams of other data show that it plays a significant role in bringing on severe mental illness, up to and including psychosis and schizophrenia. Per federal data, 9% of all veterans who died of suicide in 2022 had cannabis use disorder.

The argument that it is some undiscovered wonder drug lacks merit. Nor does the claim that normalizing — which adding it to insurance formularies would certainly do — will somehow advance the research around it.

It’s already one of the most extensively researched substances in the world, with thousands of studies examining it. How many more could advocates possibly want? Don’t forget that the pharmaceutical industry has been trying to make weed happen as a marquee drug for decades, and it hasn’t because its treatment potential does not seem to be that significant.

Raw weed isn’t medicine. Getting the government and insurance companies to say it isn’t going to change that, but it will get more people hooked, ruin more lives, and wreck public health while fattening the wallets of addiction profiteers.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Kevin A. Sabet is the president and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana. He was a bipartisan drug policy adviser to three presidential administrations. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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