Feds roll back ‘confusing’ rules governing addiction funding
HARRISBURG — A federal agency that sends billions of dollars to states to help them respond to the opioid crisis is rolling back part of a policy that caused widespread confusion in Pennsylvania, wrongly preventing at least one person who later died of an overdose from accessing addiction treatment.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has eliminated language that prohibited grant recipients from providing federal funding “to any individual who or organization that provides or permits marijuana use for the purposes of treating substance use or mental disorders.”
The Pennsylvania Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs highlighted the change in a public bulletin on Aug. 2. A spokesperson said the agency had “no insight into what led to the change, but we are happy to see that the updated term no longer includes” the prohibition.
The new guidance eliminates “the more restrictive language that was really confusing,” said
Michele Denk, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of County Drug and Alcohol Administrators.
The federal agency previously told Spotlight PA the language wasn’t supposed to prevent providers from serving people who used cannabis for substance use disorders, as long as those patients were willing to work toward alternatives. Federal money could still pay for addiction treatment, the agency said, but not to purchase cannabis.
But in Pennsylvania, the language was widely interpreted as a ban on spending federal money to treat those who used medical marijuana for that reason.
A recent Spotlight PA investigation found, in at least one case, confusion and a failure by the state to clarify funding rules had serious consequences.
Tyler Cordeiro, a 24year- old Bucks County man, was denied addiction treatment funding through a state program that promises help for all because he had a medical marijuana card, his family said. He died weeks later, in October 2020, from a drug overdose.
Cordeiro’s mother, Susan Ousterman, said her son was not offered any alternative sources of funding for treatment, raising questions about whether some drug and alcohol offices wrongly interpreted the federal policy as a complete ban on helping these patients.
Ms. Ousterman spent months earlier this year reaching out to state officials with concerns about whether local drug and alcohol offices were denying addiction treatment funding to others.
On Wednesday, she told Spotlight PA she’s glad the federal government changed its policy, but she still doesn’t understand why anyone ever interpreted the previous guidance to deny assistance to people seeking addiction treatment.
The conflict centers around Pennsylvania’s medical marijuana program, competing federal and state policies and the state’s system of funding addiction treatment.
Each year, Pennsylvania’s Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs sends a large share of the hundreds of millions of dollars it receives in federal money to a network of 47 county drug and alcohol offices.
That system became more complicated in late 2019. Under former President Donald Trump, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said its grant money “may not be used, directly or indirectly, to purchase, prescribe, or provide marijuana or treatment using marijuana.”