Most Clinicians Back Medical Cannabis Despite Knowledge Gaps

A large majority of U.S. healthcare professionals support medical cannabis and believe it has genuine therapeutic value. The same survey found that their working knowledge of how cannabis behaves in the body is thin, and that most of what they know comes from personal experience and popular media rather than clinical training.

That disconnect is the central finding of a peer-reviewed survey¹ of 879 healthcare professionals published in the Journal of Cannabis Research and led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Released May 29, 2026, the study measures what clinicians believe about cannabis rather than what cannabis does, and the distance between their confidence and their demonstrated knowledge is its most useful result.

Support is broad across every role

The attitudes ran heavily in cannabis’s favor. Eighty-seven percent of respondents endorsed its therapeutic promise, 95% supported legal medical use, and 74% said they were open to recommending it to patients. Eighty-nine percent already had patients who use cannabis, which places most of these clinicians in the position of fielding questions about a substance they were never formally trained to discuss.

The sample was not a cross-section of American medicine. It included mental health professionals (29%), registered nurses (25%), physicians (18%), and advanced practice providers (15%), and skewed female (71%), White (86%), with a mean age of 46. Because the survey was anonymous, web-based, and self-selected, it captures the views of an engaged group of providers rather than a nationally representative snapshot, a standard limitation of this kind of research and one worth keeping in mind before reading the topline numbers as a mandate.

Confidence outran demonstrated knowledge

The study’s load-bearing result is the split between what respondents thought they knew and what they could actually answer. On a five-point scale, clinicians rated their own knowledge highest for cannabis’s risks (4.1), followed by its therapeutic indications (4.0) and its mechanisms of action (3.5). When the same domains were tested with objective knowledge questions, scores fell sharply, ranging from 13% to 64% correct.

Where that knowledge came from is telling. Personal experience (76%) and popular media (73%) were the most commonly cited sources, and fewer than a third of respondents reported any formal clinical training on how to integrate cannabis into practice. The pattern echoes a long-running disconnect between physicians and the patients they treat for chronic pain, where demand has outpaced the evidence base clinicians can draw on.

Respondents’ concerns were concrete: a lack of trained providers (35%), possible patient exploitation (22%), recreational misuse (21%), and the risk of psychosis (20%). Greater openness to clinical use tracked with higher self-rated knowledge, younger age, professional role, and fewer concerns.

A gap that is not closing

The findings line up with earlier work. A 2021 survey of roughly 1,500 U.S. clinicians, including family physicians, internists, nurse practitioners, and oncologists, conducted by investigators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Public Health Service, found that 68.9% believed cannabis had medicinal uses and 26.6% had ever recommended it. In that study, published in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, 60% of clinicians incorrectly identified the legal status of cannabis in their own state.

Five years on, belief in cannabis’s medical value has become more widespread, but the training deficit behind it has not narrowed. The problem is visible at the system level as well: in the U.K., medical cannabis prescribing remains concentrated among a small number of doctors, and providers there have flagged the same shortage of trained prescribers that U.S. respondents now describe. Some companies have begun offering free training to close that prescriber gap.

What the study does and doesn’t show

This is attitudinal and knowledge research, not a test of whether cannabis works. It cannot speak to efficacy, dosing, or safety for any specific condition; it documents what a group of clinicians believe and how well those beliefs align with the evidence. The work was funded through the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research via private philanthropy, and several authors disclosed consulting or advisory relationships with cannabis and pharmaceutical companies, routine disclosures that do not undercut the peer-reviewed findings but belong in any careful reading of them.

The authors’ recommendation follows directly from the data: structured training on cannabis pharmacology, dosing, contraindications, and the legal and ethical questions clinicians face, paired with better systems for monitoring patient use. Reform advocates have made the same point. NORML, which publicized the survey, argued that medical associations and training curricula should “incorporate and embrace cannabis as a mainstream and established therapeutic option for patients.”

Whether that happens will determine if the next survey looks any different. For now, clinical belief in medical cannabis is close to settled; the knowledge to practice it safely is not.

References:

^{1. Kumar, L.; Wang, E.; Mathai, D.S.; Zamarripa, C.A.; Spindle, T.R.; Vandrey, R.; and Garcia-Romeu, A., “Knowledge, attitudes, and concerns about medical cannabis among U.S. healthcare professionals” (2026). Journal of Cannabis Research. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42238-026-00450-8}