Colorado Medical Students support Medical Marijuana, but hesitate to recommend

Posted by Sagar Satapathy on January 23, 2017.

University of Colorado School of Medicine students have expressed their support to marijuana legalization for medical use in the state, but showed hesitancy to recommend the drug themselves, according to a new study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine this week.

The study, "Colorado Medical Students' Attitudes and Beliefs about Marijuana," was led by Michael Chan, a recent graduate of the CU Anschutz Medical Campus. It investigated the attitudes of medical students in Colorado, a state that has long been at the forefront of marijuana legal reforms.

Around two-thirds of the students surveyed at the University of Colorado School of Medicine said they support marijuana legalization, and nearly 49 percent felt that marijuana had significant physical health benefits while 37 percent believed it had mental health benefits as well.

However, 29 percent of the students said they would recommend marijuana to in the treatment of conditions approved by the Colorado Medical Marijuana Registry. And, all must all students believe that more research is needed to ascertain what risk could be involved in using marijuana for medical purpose.

"Despite strong support for marijuana legal reform, students expressed hesitancy to recommend it themselves, suggesting that medical students may not believe that there is enough data to safely recommend its use to patients and/or may not feel sufficiently trained to prescribe it," revealed Chan, now a resident at the University of Texas Health Science Center.

Previous studies have shown that opinions vary among physicians about the value of prescribing marijuana. Aiming to get more findings, Chan's team set out to find out what medical students at the University of Colorado School of Medicine thought about medical marijuana use. As many as 236 students out of the total 624 responded the survey.

Notably, medical marijuana has been legalized in Colorado since 2000, but marijuana is still illegal as a schedule 1 substance under the federal law of the U.S.

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