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After Marijuana Legalization Did Opioid Overdose Go Down?
By: Road2HardCoreIron Date: June 3, 2022, 6:25 am
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After Marijuana Legalization Did Opioid Overdoses Go Up, Stay
the Same, or Go Down?
May 2022
What happened in states after medical marijuana laws were
passed? Did opioid overdoses go up, stay the same, or go down?
Millions of people in the United States have been diagnosed with
an opioid use disorder, and more than 80 Americans die each day
from opioid overdose. Where is this coming from? Most “new
heroin users started out misusing opioid prescription
painkillers.” This is important because more than 200 million
opioid painkiller prescriptions are still written every year.
Did you catch that number? Two hundred million prescriptions
every year, “a number closely approximating the entire adult
population in the United States.” That’s incredible.
“‘When you see something like the opioid addiction crisis
blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing
we should be doing is encouraging people’ to smoke cannabis,
[White House Spokesperson Sean] Spicer told reporters.” But, if
opioid addiction starts with people taking prescription pain
pills, maybe cannabis would reduce the problem by offering a
substitute painkiller. Alternatively, maybe cannabis would act
like a “gateway” drug or “stepping stone” to harder drugs,
potentially making the opioid epidemic worse, as I discuss in my
video Marijuana Legalization and the Opioid Epidemic.
Well, first, does cannabis work? “Is it a truly effective drug
for pain that is arbitrarily stigmatized by many and
criminalized by the federal government? Or is it without any
medical utility, its advocates hiding behind a screen of
misplaced (or deliberately misleading) compassion for the ill?”
The official position of the American Medical Association is
that marijuana “has no scientifically proven, currently accepted
medical use for preventing or treating any disease,” but what
does the science say?
“Despite the widespread use of opioids, 50% – 80% of advanced
cancer patients die with unmet pain-relief needs.” So, adding
cannabis may help. Indeed, double-blind, placebo-controlled
clinical trials have found that cannabis compounds do produce
pain relief, “equivalent to moderate doses of codeine,” an
opioid used to treat mild to moderate pain, but if you’re dying
from cancer, don’t you want the good stuff? Why not just crank
up the morphine?
If you wanted, you could put someone in coma and erase all their
pain, but there’s a very real problem with such high doses of
opiates: Here you are, at the end of life, surrounded by loved
ones, but you’re so doped up you can’t even say goodbye. This is
where cannabis may help. It may allow patients to drop down the
opiate dose a bit without compromising pain control.
That’s what many report, anyway. If you look at New England, for
example, which can be thought of as ground zero for the opioid
epidemic, in just one year, “there were enough opioids dispensed
from Maine pharmacies in 2014 to supply every person in the
state with a 16-day supply.” What are they doing up there?
Among the New Englanders surveyed who were on opioids, however,
most claimed “they reduced their [opioid] use since they started
MC,” medical cannabis. Some also reduced their use of
antidepressants, alcohol, anti-anxiety medications, migraine
meds, and sleeping pills. Forty percent said they were able to
reduce their opioid use “a lot,” as you can see at 3:16 in my
video.
Cannabis use may even reduce the use of crack cocaine. It may
seem strange to give drugs to drug addicts, but if people even
make a partial switch from more to less harmful drugs, overall
harm may be reduced. So, what happened after medical marijuana
laws were passed? Did opioid overdoses go up, stay the same, or
go down?
They went down.
“Medical cannabis laws are associated with significantly lower
state-level opioid overdose mortality rates,” about a 25 percent
lower rate of overdose deaths. “The striking implication is that
medical marijuana laws…may represent a promising approach for
stemming” the opioid overdose epidemic. “If true, this finding
upsets the applecart of conventional wisdom regarding the public
health implications of marijuana legalization and medicinal
usefulness.” On the one hand, we have the AMA saying cannabis
isn’t medically helpful, but, on the other hand, if people are
getting enough benefit using it so they can cut down on their
prescriptions, then obviously something is going on.
What about other prescription drugs? As you can see at 4:37 in
my video, once medical marijuana laws were passed, fewer people
were filling prescriptions—and not only fewer prescriptions for
painkillers, but fewer prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs,
antidepressants, anti-nausea drugs, antipsychotics, anti-seizure
drugs, and sleeping pills. If all states adopted medical
marijuana laws, that could save around half a billion dollars a
year. But, the half-billion dollars taxpayers would save, is the
half-billion bucks drug companies would lose, so it’s no wonder
Big Pharma is freaking out. Why do you think pharmaceutical
corporations, including the makers of OxyContin and Vicodin,
were major sponsors of the marijuana prohibition lobby, trying
to stop legalization? “Other major sponsors of marijuana
prohibition were the beer industry, police unions, and the
private prison industry.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
More than 200 million opioid painkiller prescriptions are
written annually despite the diagnosis of millions in the United
States with an opioid use disorder and more than 80 Americans
dying every day from opioid overdose.
Might cannabis act as a gateway to harder drugs, like opioids,
or might it reduce opioid addiction by offering a substitute
painkiller to prescription pills?
The American Medical Association’s official position is that
marijuana “has no scientifically proven, currently accepted
medical use for preventing or treating any disease,” but studies
have found that cannabis compounds produce pain relief
“equivalent to moderate doses of codeine,” an opioid used to
treat mild to moderate pain.
At the end of life, cannabis may allow patients to reduce opiate
doses without compromising pain relief such that they may not be
in such a drug-induced stupor that they cannot say goodbye.
Most New Englanders taking opioids claimed they reduced their
opioid use after starting medical cannabis, and some also
reduced use of alcohol, antidepressants, sleeping pills, and
anti-anxiety and migraine medications. Cannabis may also reduce
use of crack cocaine.
After medical marijuana laws were passed, opioid overdoses went
down, about a 25 percent lower rate of opioid overdose deaths,
and fewer people were filling prescriptions—not only for
painkillers, but also for anti-anxiety drugs, antidepressants,
anti-nausea drugs, antipsychotics, anti-seizure drugs, and
sleeping pills.
About half a billion dollars would be saved annually if medical
marijuana laws were adopted across the United States, but the
half-billion taxpayers would save is the half-billion drug
companies would lose.
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