This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

It is hard to keep a clear head when drugs are involved. Even just talking about the uses and abuses of different substances can make one dizzy.

Members of the Utah House, to their credit, are trying to keep their wits about them as they properly consider what to do about two of the most talked-about drugs in America today: marijuana and opioids.

The House passed a pair of officially unrelated bills the other day that are major steps in the right direction, though neither claims to be the ultimate answer.

With HB130, which sailed through the House on a 70-2 vote, lawmakers decided that they were not ready to open the gates to even the medical uses of cannabis before anyone has done anything like the kind of medical research that usually accompanies the introduction of a new drug. They also decided that they were unwilling to wait, perhaps forever, for the federal government to end its decades-long blockade of such research.

So, for this one substance, a substance that has convinced so many people of its uses for so many otherwise intractable ailments that state after state has moved to legalize it, House members voted to start Utah on its own research project.

The bill is sponsored by Rep. Brad Daw, R-Orem. It would allow Utah researchers, most likely from such institutions as the University of Utah and the Huntsman Cancer Institute, to acquire cannabinoid products, administer them to volunteers and properly measure their effectiveness and side-effects.

In the short-run, the only patients to benefit from the measure would be the few who participate in the studies. But that's a start. And, with luck, it would give the Legislature the confidence to take the next step and allow the medical use of marijuana generally in Utah.

Of course, the shelves of Utah pharmacies are overflowing with substances that have gone through the whole long and expensive clinical trials and FDA review process. And that did not stop one of them, a class of drugs known as opioids, from becoming one of the major public health threats of our time.

That's why the House also passed, by a similarly lopsided 73-1 margin, HB 90. That bill would implicitly state the problem of the opioid epidemic raging through the state and encourage health insurance providers — the real rulers of the health care universe — to develop rules for doctors and clinics that prescribe the super pain-killers.

The idea is to steer doctors, especially those who do not specialize in pain management, away from prescribing heavy-duty, addictive and too-often deadly opioids for minor injuries, as well as being proactive in preventing even those patients who would benefit from such pharmacological firepower from getting hooked. Or from moving on to heroin when the opioids either run out or lose their effectiveness.

Other states are trying mandatory restrictions, and Utah, which is more heavily hit by the opioid abuse epidemic than most states, would move in that direction, too, if the Legislature weren't so averse to such edicts.

If we get lucky, very lucky, Utah scientists will be about their marijuana research quickly enough to find that, indeed, it eases the pain and suffering of many ailments. Especially the chronic pain for which addictive and possibly fatal opioids are now the only legal alternative.

If that is the case, then we can show the well-dressed marketers of opioids the door and stop letting Big Pharma unfairly paint advocates for cannabis as no more than me and Julio down by the schoolyard.