Can Medical Marijuana Help Aging Parents With Dementia?

Carolyn Rosenblatt

For decades, marijuana, even for medical uses, was demonized or questioned.  When states like Colorado legalized it for recreational use, more studies began to determine provable efficacy for its use as a medicine. The Federal government still classifies marijuana the same way it classifies heroin: harmful and with no medical benefits. Now we can see that this is wrong. When states legalized marijuana, referred to as cannabis here, they had an interest in getting data to see what good it could do. Proving efficacy could increase medical marijuana sales, benefit people who might at least find some medical use, and overall would bring tax dollars into the state coffers.

Without funding studies, the Federal government has done very little to demonstrate what good cannabis can do. After all, if the presumption is that it helps nothing, there would be no motivation to determine with scientific data that it does anyone any good. But we have convincing data now about its beneficial use for epilepsy and some data showing good results with use of cannabis for veterans with post traumatic stress. Studies as to how it can help older people, particularly with dementia (Alzheimer's disease being the most common kind of dementia), have been lacking. However, better and newer data is now reported and the results look very promising.

At AgingParents.com, we look constantly at families who have an elder with dementia. The most heart-wrenching stories are those the adult children tell us concerning their aging parent whose dementia-related behavior is out of control. They describe how their loved one becomes aggressive, abusive, gets kicked out of care facilities, and turns into a caregiving nightmare. Even paid caregivers are endangered by the behaviors. It's not the parent's fault--it's the disease. And the medical establishment, still constrained by the Federal government's misplaced drug classification of cannabis, can't prescribe it, and can only recommend its use in states where such use is legal.

Typically care facilities do not allow use of cannabis on the premises, as they receive Medicare (Federal dollars) and Medicaid (Federal, State and county dollars) reimbursement which they cannot endanger. Instead, they "dope 'em up" with heavy tranquilizing and psychotropic medications used for people who have mental illness. We can do better.

Behavior issues can be managed

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Recent research on the medical benefits of cannabis has reached positive conclusions:

 

“The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids: The Current State of Evidence and Recommendations for Research”

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2017. In this systematic review of medical studies, researchers confirm the substantial evidence for cannabis as an effective treatment option for many conditions.