The Philadelphia Inquirer reports
HARRISBURG — The public could soon know for the first time how many patients use medical marijuana to treat opioid use disorder in Pennsylvania, one of the few states to specifically endorse that treatment option.
Spotlight PA sought that information while reporting on Tyler Cordeiro, a Bucks County man who was wrongly denied addiction treatment funding because of his medical marijuana card. Cordeiro died of an overdose a few weeks later.
After the Department of Health refused to reveal the number — saying that the state’s medical marijuana law “protects patient and caregiver information” — the news organization appealed to the independent agency that settles public records disputes involving the Wolf administration.
The Office of Open Records this month ruled in favor of Spotlight PA and ordered the Health Department to disclose how many patients are certified for cannabis under each of the state’s 23 qualifying conditions.
In making the decision, the office rejected an argument from the Wolf administration that releasing the numbers would violate the confidentiality rules of the state’s 2016 medical marijuana law. At one point, attorneys for the Department of Health suggested that disclosing the information could lead to a criminal charge against an employee.
Yet, the director of the Office of Medical Marijuana, John J. Collins, had previously released similar information, including the number of people certified to use marijuana because of an anxiety diagnosis, and never faced any known consequences. In that instance, a spokesperson for the department later said the director responded “appropriately” to a question from a board member.
While Spotlight PA’s appeal was pending, the Office of Open Records ruled in favor of another news organization, CNHI, that requested information on how many medical marijuana patients live in each of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.
“Finding the requested aggregated data to be confidential would lead to an absurd result,” Kyle Applegate, chief counsel for the office, wrote in a July 15 final order.
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Spotlight PA also requested written policies or procedures describing how the agency tracks the use of its medical marijuana program. The Health Department claimed it did not have such information, but the Office of Open Records found the agency failed to prove that.
