Patients With Anxiety Fuel Pennsylvania’s $1.7 Billion Medical Cannabis Program | Where to order Skittles Moonrock online
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Adding anxiety as a qualifying condition has driven the success of Pennsylvania’s $1.7 billion medical cannabis program, according to a university study published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Pennsylvania cannabis regulators didn’t add anxiety to the state’s list of 24 qualifying conditions until July 2019, roughly 17 months after the first licensed dispensary sales began. It became the most-cited condition the following year, outpacing chronic pain and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to the state’s Department of Health.
Coleman Drake, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Health Policy and Management, University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.University of Pittsburgh
lack of evidence, which is concerning,” he said. “At the same time, cannabis may improve some health outcomes, relative to alternative treatments, depending on the individual and their circumstances.”
Drake said there is more evidence for cannabis as an effective treatment for conditions like chronic pain; however, “red tape and funding scarcity” due to the federal Schedule I classification of cannabis has restricted research and left unknowns.
“The urgency in filling these knowledge gaps is pretty clear, given increases in cannabis use over the past decade, and the large changes in cannabis markets, like those we observed in this study,” Drake said.
Since California first legalized medical cannabis in 1996, support for reform has grown to an all-time high, including 87% of Americans who say cannabis should be either legal for medical and adult-use (54%) or for medical use only (33%), according to a Pew Research Center report from July 8.
While anxiety is the most common qualifying condition in Pennsylvania, most of the now 40 states with medical cannabis programs have yet to add it to their lists. As such, chronic pain was the most common patient-reported qualifying condition (48.4%) in 2022 in the U.S., followed by anxiety (14.2%) and PTSD (13%), according to an April 2024 report that was primarily funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
Also, not all state medical cannabis patient populations follow the same patterns. In New Mexico, for example, 47.5% of patients are enrolled with PTSD as their primary qualification as of June 2025, followed by chronic pain (27.3%) and anxiety (9.3%), according to the state’s Department of Health. New Mexico added anxiety as a qualifying condition in January 2023.
Many other states also include anxiety as a qualifying condition, such as Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Virginia.
Meanwhile, Alabama includes “panic disorder,” and Maine and New York allow certifying physicians to approve patients for medical cannabis for conditions they deem clinically appropriate.
In Pennsylvania, more than 68% of the state’s 440,000-plus qualifying patients in 2024 listed anxiety as a qualifying condition on their certification, according to the Department of Health.
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