State Lawmakers Tackle Public Health Issues: Preventing drug overdose deaths, restricting e-cigarettes and making medical marijuana more available

The Brattleboro Retreat, founded in 1834, is a facility for the treatment of mental health disorders and drug addiction. It is located in Bratteboro, Vermont on a site of over 1000 acres on the Retreat Meadows inlet of the West River, Wikimedia Commons

By Christine Vestal, Stateline

Four years into implementing the Affordable Care Act, state politicians turned their attention to other pressing health care issues such as preventing drug overdose deaths, restricting e-cigarettes and making medical marijuana more available.

States also grappled with the question of who should receive a costly and highly effective cure for hepatitis C. A few states also launched programs aimed at controlling two of the costliest chronic conditions — asthma and diabetes. 

And throughout the first half of the year, states still debated the highest-profile questions about the ACA: whether to expand Medicaid and how to improve their insurance exchanges.

Here’s a look at the top public health issues addressed in state legislatures this year:

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Medical Marijuana

Responding in part to new laws in Colorado and Washington state that allow recreational use of marijuana, as well as growing public support for its decriminalization, lawmakers in at least 15 states considered broad medical marijuana measures this year. In addition, 16 state legislatures considered narrower bills, allowing the use of cannabidiol, one of the compounds in marijuana.

California voters ushered in the nation’s first comprehensive medical marijuana law back in 1996, followed by Alaska, Oregon and Washington in 1998, Maine in 1999, and Colorado, Hawaii and Nevada in 2000.

Over the next 13 years, a dozen more states and the District of Columbia enacted measures allowing the use of marijuana to treat conditions such as glaucoma and multiple sclerosis, and the nausea, pain and loss of appetite associated with diseases such as cancer and AIDS.

This year, Maryland and Minnesota enacted new laws, New York’s legislature is considering one and Florida voters will decide in November whether to approve medical marijuana.

If Florida and New York adopt medical marijuana laws, more than half of all Americans will live in states where the substance can be used to treat a wide variety of conditions and symptoms.

A new type of medical marijuana law emerged this year that limits use to one compound found in the plant, cannabidiol or cannabis oil, and restricts its use to epilepsy and a few other conditions. At least 16 GOP-led states have considered bills that would allow cannabidiol use.

So far, Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin have enacted limited medical marijuana laws, and legislatures in Florida, Iowa and Missouri have approved bills that await their governors’ signatures.

Inspired by an August 2013 CNN program featuring a child whose parents claimed her severe seizures were all but eliminated by cannabidiol, these limited laws are not likely to increase access to the plant’s curative benefits because of restrictions on how they are dispensed, said Karen O’Keefe, director of state policies the Marijuana Policy Project, which advocates for decriminalization. But she said they may be the first step toward more effective laws.

Drug Overdoses

Vermont’s Democratic governor Peter Shumlin devoted his entire state-of-the state address in January to a single topic: the rising tide of heroin and prescription drug abuse “in every corner” of Vermont.