Philadelphia is quickly becoming a focal point in the nation’s fight for marijuana reform, with most of the attention on the city directed at Philadelphia’s new district attorney, Larry Krasner, who is championing a radical reform agenda aimed at transforming criminal justice. But Philly is also home to the Lambert Center for the Study of Medicinal Cannabis and Hemp, one of the country’s leading medical cannabis research centers.
Last week, the Lambert Center made major medical cannabis news when it announced a new initiative for patients suffering from chronic diseases — and, if the initiative succeeds, it will produce the largest database of medical marijuana health outcomes to date.
Pioneering Medical Cannabis Research Center Launches Trailblazing Patient Initiative
On Thursday, Thomas Jefferson University issued a press release announcing that the university’s Lambert Center for the Study of Medicinal Cannabis and Hemp had partnered with ioVita, a digital health startup, to launch a new initiative called mmj.org.
The mmj.org initiative is the first of its kind: its goals are to further the scientific understanding of medical cannabis by collecting information directly from patients and caregivers. To do so, it’s establishing a voluntary medical cannabis patient registry; once enrolled, patients who use medical cannabis can self-report on their health outcomes.
The Lambert center hopes to enroll at least 100,000 patients in the mmj.org registry. That would make it the largest single database of patient health outcomes in the United States.
The registry will be an indispensable resource not just for patients and caregivers, but also for researchers, since longitudinal studies gather data about individuals or groups over a long period of time — and in the field of medical cannabis research, they are scarce.
“We are launching