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VOL.31, NO.9
Coming around to cannabis
Reaching a decision With his interest piqued, Mintz looked into the law, medical literature and spoke
PHOTO COURTESY OF MATTHEW MINTZ, M.D.
By Margaret Foster Dr. Matthew Mintz wasn’t an early proponent of medical uses for cannabis (the scientific name for the plant more commonly known as marijuana). In fact, he said, “I was a little skeptical.” Mintz, a board-certified internist and Washingtonian “Top Doctor,” attended George Washington University medical school and then practiced medicine while serving on its faculty for the next two decades. During that time, he also did research and published articles on diabetes, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and obesity. In 2017, he decided to open his own concierge practice in Bethesda, Md. While getting his new office up and running, he noticed a medical cannabis dispensary was opening in the same medical office building. “That intrigued me,” he said. “I lived in Maryland forever, but wasn’t paying attention to the [medical marijuana] legislation.” While federal law continues to consider cannabis an illegal “Schedule 1” drug, 33 states — including the District of Columbia and Maryland — now permit its sale and possession for medicinal and/or recreational use. The Maryland legislature had first voted to legalize medical marijuana in 2012, but five years passed before it became available at state-licensed facilities called dispensaries. Under Maryland’s law, medical marijuana may be recommended to patients with any severe condition in which other medical treatments have been ineffective, as long as the symptoms “reasonably can be expected to be relieved” by marijuana. Since Dec. 1, 2017, the Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission (MMCC) has licensed nearly 50 physicians and hundreds of other healthcare providers to certify patients as eligible and make recommendations. And today, there are more than 80 dispensaries around the state, 29 of which are in Howard County and Baltimore, where patients can pick up a wide variety of products.
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Dr. Matthew Mintz, a board-certified internist and former member of the faculty of the George Washington University School of Medicine, certifies some of the patients in his concierge practice for medical marijuana use. He has found many can benefit from the appropriate treatment.
with fellow physicians. Eventually, he decided to become certified to recommend cannabis to appropriate patients and see for himself how it worked. Some of Mintz’s early patients had metastatic cancer and were suffering debilitating pain and severe anxiety. They had tried “everything under the sun” for the symptoms, he said, and come up short. After he certified them for daily doses of pills, liquids or topical creams containing cannabis, he said, “I realized very quickly” how effective the products were at relieving their pain and anxiety. “While I continued to certify patients, I really dove into the research, took some
courses, researched on my own and talked to a lot of people,” he said. “Studying the research and seeing the results of patients, I’ve become convinced that medical cannabis is a useful therapeutic agent.” Mintz now speaks around the area, giving presentations describing the active substances in the cannabis plant, THC — which induces the characteristic “high” of marijuana — and cannabidiol or CBD — which does not. CBD oil, especially a version derived from the hemp plant (which is legal and has low levels of THC), is now found in See DR. MINTZ, page 18
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