More than 60,000 Americans are expected to die this year from drug overdoses as powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl-laced heroin cause drug-related deaths to skyrocket. So far, the Trump administration’s boldest proposal to combat the epidemic has been revising DOJ rules to allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty in some drug cases.
With that in mind, the results of a recent study published this week might be of interest: The study, published by an independent team of researchers in JAMA Internal Medicine, is the latest to suggest that expanding medical marijuana could help lower rates of opioid abuse, NPR reported.
Medical marijuana appears to have put a dent in the opioid abuse epidemic, according to two studies published Monday.
The research suggests that some people turn to marijuana as a way to treat their pain, and by so doing, avoid more dangerous addictive drugs. The findings are the latest to lend support to the idea that some people are willing to substitute marijuana for opioids and other prescription drugs.
Many people end up abusing opioid drugs such as oxycodone and heroin after starting off with a legitimate prescription for pain. The authors argue that people who avoid that first prescription are less likely to end up as part of the opioid epidemic.
“We do know that cannabis is much less risky than opiates, as far as likelihood of dependency,” says W. David Bradford, a professor of public policy at the University of Georgia. “And certainly there’s no mortality risk” from the drug itself.
As the study reports, many opioid abusers first encounter the drug as a prescribed treatment for pain, after a surgery or due to a chronic condition or some other circumstance. According to the scientists, by presribing medical marijuana for pain, instead of opioids, the rate of opioid dependence will fall. The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine believes there’s some evidence that cannabis can effectively treat pain – at least in some conditions.
The researchers used data from Medicare, which mostly covers people over the age of 65 (and was the most convenient set of data to work with, being freely available), and found a 14% drop in opioid prescriptions in states that allow easy access to medical marijuana.
In terms of the number of pills made available by doctors, the reduction was quite significant.
They estimate that these dispensary programs reduced the number of opioid prescriptions by 3.7 million daily doses. States that allowed homegrown marijuana for medical use saw an estimated 1.8 million fewer pills dispensed per day. To put that in perspective, from 2010 to 2015 Medicare recipients received an average of 23 million daily doses of opioids, the researchers say.
Because opioid use nationwide was rising during the study period, their estimate of reduced uses reflects a slowing of the increase, rather than an actual decline in opioid use in these states, Bradford says.
To be sure, the dataset used in the study merely shows a correlation between the two; the researchers did’t have enough information to examine the relationship with greater scrutiny. Still, their report suggests that expanding medical marijuana should lead to a nationwide reduction in prescriptions for opioids.
A different study at the University of Kentucky recently came to a similar conclusion regarding the relationship between medical marijuana and opioids. One of the researchers noted that expanding access to marijuana doesn’t have some risks.
Hefei Wen at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health was lead author on another study in the same journal that reached similar conclusions. Wen, with Jason Hockenberry at Emory University, used Medicaid data. Medicaid is primarily a health insurance program for low-income people.
The authors write that laws that permit both medical marijuana and recreational marijuana for adults “have the potential to reduce opioid prescribing for Medicaid enrollees, a segment of population with disproportionately high risk for chronic pain, opioid use disorder and opioid overdose. Nevertheless, marijuana liberalization alone cannot solve the opioid epidemic.”
Bradford agrees that medical marijuana laws could have a role to play. “But it is not without risks,” he says. “Like any drug in our FDA-approved pharmacopeia, it can be misused. There’s no question about it. So I hope nobody reading our study will say ‘Oh, great, the answer to the opiate problem is just put cannabis in everybody’s medicine chest and we are good to go.’ We are certainly not saying that.”
To prove that medical marijuana really can replace opioids as a viable pain-management option, the authors of the study said researchers will need to follow and examine individuals to see how marijuana affects them.
Like most other developed countries, the US’s rapidly aging population will soon be needing massive quantities of pain medication, which makes finding a viable pain-management substitute for opioids all the more urgent.
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