Legal Marijuana Strip Club

In this Feb. 10, 2016 photo, marijuana sits on a scale next to one-gram containers designed to look like shotgun shells, at Smoking Gun Apothecary, the new marijuana dispensary, in Glendale, Colo., a home rule municipality just outside downtown Denver. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

(AP)

BOSTON - Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, an avowed opponent of legalizing marijuana, has said passage of a ballot question allowing the substance to be used recreationally would "threaten to reverse our progress combating the growing opioid epidemic."



Baker, a Republican, has joined with top Democrats like Boston Mayor Marty Walsh in a bipartisan effort to oppose the potential November ballot question, in part through a committee called a Campaign for a Safe and Healthy Massachusetts.



But the state's Department of Public Health does not appear to have put a big emphasis on marijuana use as part of its fight against the opioid crisis.



Monica Bharel, appointed by Baker in 2015 as the commissioner of the department, didn't bring up marijuana use in a recent television appearance centered on the opioid crisis and prescription drug abuse.



And in the recommendations of the governor's opioid working group issued last year, marijuana is mentioned once, in a graph based on a 2012 national survey on parent/teen conversations about substance misuse. The recommendations used the graph to show that "parents generally do not discuss the dangers of prescription pain relievers with their teens."



Dr. Kevin Hill, an addiction psychiatrist, has been a critic of the ballot question, and said there are "many reasons to be cautious about legalization of recreational marijuana."



"Exacerbation of the opioid epidemic would not be at the top of my list," he said in an email.

A Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll of likely voters from Suffolk University released this week showed 46 percent opposing the ballot question, and 43 percent supporting the question. Eleven percent are undecided.

Bharel, the public health commissioner, said her department stands by the statements Gov. Baker has made, and notes that at the department, they focus on educating and preventing marijuana use because of potential effects on the developing brains of young children.

The state's Bureau of Substance Abuse Services also handles a variety of substance abuses, she said.



The proposed ballot question, put together by the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, would allow adults 21 years and older to possess, use, distribute and cultivate marijuana. The question would also set up a commission to regulate the substance.



Massachusetts voters approved the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana in 2008, and they OK'd marijuana for medical use in 2012. The state now has six medical marijuana dispensaries, though marijuana is still illegal at the federal level.

Medical marijuana program projected to end 2016 fiscal year in the black



The Department of Public Health oversees the medical marijuana program, and Bharel said it's highly regulated and tested. "Under the medical marijuana regulations, we are ensuring patients who are determined to need are using it in a safe, high-quality way," she said.

Hill said there is "definitely a possibility" that medical marijuana may reduce the need to use opioids for chronic pain.

He pointed to Ohio, where lawmakers also have been battling an opioid epidemic.

Rep. Ryan Smith, an Ohio Republican, told Cleveland.com, "The thought is we're treating pain right now with various addictive opiates so if there's an opportunity to treat them with something else that's less addictive, why not?"

The Cleveland.com story noted a recent University of Michigan study that claimed medical marijuana patients, seeking to control chronic pain, saw a 64 percent drop in use of opioids.

Opponents of the proposed ballot question in Massachusetts have said the legalization of recreational marijuana will lead to the creation of an industry on par with "Big Tobacco."

"We are in the midst of an addiction crisis, and now is not the time to create an industry whose business model is predicated on promoting and selling another harmful, addictive drug in Massachusetts," said Corey Welford, a spokesman for the Campaign for a Safe and Healthy Massachusetts. "It makes no sense."

The Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol has decried any effort to link the ongoing opioid crisis with marijuana.

"We need to be honest with our kids -- heroin kills, marijuana does not," Jim Borghesani, a campaign spokesman, said in a statement in April. "There is no more evidence that using marijuana leads to heroin than there is that riding a tricycle leads to joining the Hells Angels."