After two decades of going all-in on opioids, the medical community is now desperately searching for ways to de-escalate their use. What a powerful cabal of pharmaceutical manufacturers convinced doctors was a panacea to cure chronic pain and ease suffering has revealed itself to be the agent of a suffering of another sort: the nationwide devastation and death wrought by an opioid epidemic that killed 47,600 people in the US in 2017 alone.
And so the medical community is on a quest for alternatives, and cannabis continues to demonstrate its potential to be one. In fact, according to an important new study just out in Preventive Medicine, medical marijuana legalization is already helping to reduce opioid prescription rates. And that’s even without the wider medical community accepting it as a non-opioid painkiller alternative. In other words, researchers in Texas found, making medical cannabis legal seems to lower the number of patients prescribed opioids.
Researchers Find Significant Interactions Between Age, Cannabis Laws and Opioid Prescriptions
A just-published study, titled “Association between cannabis laws and opioid prescriptions among privately insured adults in the US,” analyzed how different cannabis laws influenced the rate of opioid prescriptions among adults from different age groups in 2016. Let’s break down its methods and its findings.
Researchers examined the relationships between a few different variables. First, age, breaking it up into five groups, 18-25, 26-35, 36-45, 46-55, and 56-64 years. Second, changes in state cannabis law, whether decriminalization, medical legalization, or adult-use legalization. And third, the pattern and rate of opioid prescriptions, broken down into greater than 30-day and greater than 90-day prescriptions.
Examining how those three variables interact with each other,