Johns Hopkins Researchers To Follow ‘Nationally Representative Cohort’ Of 10,000 Marijuana Patients In Federally Funded Study – Medical Marijuana Program Connection

A new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University will track 10,000 medical marijuana patients over a year or more in an effort to better understand the efficacy and impacts of cannabis therapy.

Funded with a five-year $10 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the research team will work with federal researchers and the nonprofit Realm of Caring, among others, to collect data around dosing, delivery methods, the chemical composition of products, possible medication interactions and other treatment details.

“Our mission with this research is to understand the health impacts of therapeutic cannabis use,” one of the study’s co-creators, Ryan Vandrey, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a statement. “We hope to provide some starting points for understanding what types of products may or may not be helpful and what types of products may be more risky for use in certain populations or for certain therapeutic purposes.”

“Under the umbrella term of cannabis exist hundreds of products that are all different in very important and significant ways,” he added. “We’re trying to narrow the scope a little bit, find areas of real promise and focus the science on those.”

Despite a notable increase in published research around marijuana in recent years, obstacles to science caused by federal cannabis laws mean clinicians are playing still catch-up in a country where…