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The Trump administration has been making headlines for taking steps to loosen restrictions around cannabis, including legalizing it for medical use. Now it is beginning an experiment that places cannabis even more squarely into mainstream healthcare: Thousands of Medicare patients soon will be able to get CBD, a nonintoxicating component, for free.

“ONE in FIVE adults used it in the past year, and many say it improved their chronic pain enormously,” President Donald Trump wrote on social media last month in a post cheering the program.

The aim is to gather evidence showing whether CBD can improve patients’ quality of life and, by extension, reduce healthcare costs, administration officials say.

CBD products are already popular with some Medicare-age patients. A 2024 study in Clinical Gerontologist found that 14.3% of patients 65 and older had used them in the past year. Patients usually purchase over-the-counter gummies and tinctures to ease anxiety, insomnia and chemo-related nausea.

“Millions of older adults are already integrating cannabinoid products into their healthcare routines, yet the healthcare system has almost no infrastructure to understand what they are spending, why they are using these products, or whether these expenditures reduce other healthcare costs,” said Sasha Kalcheff-Korn, executive director of Realm of Caring, a nonprofit that conducts research and promotes cannabinoid therapies.

Despite Trump’s ebullient endorsement, many doctors worry about encouraging the use of unapproved supplements to geriatric patients, who typically have multiple medical conditions and already take many medications, some of which could interact with CBD products to detrimental effect. Still, their concerns would be eased somewhat, they say, if patients collaborated with doctors on appropriate dosing, which is another goal of the government initiative.

Only a small subset of Medicare recipients — those who participate in a type of healthcare network called an accountable care organization — will initially be eligible for the benefit.

So far, just five large groups have been approved to offer CBD. By January, CBD will be offered to patients in all 74 ACO groups.

The participating organizations have providers across an array of states, including Oklahoma, Texas, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Arizona. Currently, only patients affiliated with programs in New York and Florida patients have begun receiving CBD products, according to a spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

This article originally appeared in .

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