Communities With Cannabis Dispensaries Shown To Have Fewer Opiate Overdoses
By John Vibes
A recent study has shown that fewer people die of opiate overdoses in areas where there are plenty of legal cannabis dispensaries. The researchers looked at US mortality rates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) along with US census information and data from Weedmaps.com to determine that opiate overdoses were less common in areas with legal cannabis.
The study was conducted by researchers at the University of California Davis and published last month in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
However, the study’s authors said that more research is needed to confirm their findings because the correlation they documented does not necessarily prove direct causation.
Professor Chelsea Shoveran at the UCLA School of Medicine pointed out that while regional data may help give us a general idea of how communities are being affected by legal cannabis, more data is needed on individuals in the community to determine a direct correlation.
“[The study] can’t tell us at an individual level whether people who use cannabis are using fewer opioids, not starting opioids, or not dying from opioids. If you were to do the same study with current data, you’d find something different because of the way both opioid deaths and cannabis dispensaries have shifted since then,” Shover said.
Similar findings were documented in a previous study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2017, but that was also an environmental study that looked at population data instead of research on specific individuals.
While the results of these studies are not the final word, they do strongly suggest that access to cannabis can reduce the likelihood of a person becoming addicted to opiates. Cannabis and opiates can both be used to treat pain, but these two substances obviously have entirely different side effects and levels of addictiveness. Even prescribed opiate use has been known to cause severe addiction that comes along with physical dependence and withdrawal symptoms, whereas cannabis is known to cause a bit of drowsiness and hunger, but no extreme physical side effects in most cases.
Despite more regions legalizing cannabis for medical and recreational use, lab research is often difficult because scientists are not given access to the resources they need. There is only one farm in the entire United States that is authorized to produce cannabis for research purposes, and scientists often complain that it is difficult to receive samples from them. The farm is located at the University of Mississippi and has been operating since 1968. Last year, the DEA proposed a rule in the Federal Register to allow additional growers to apply for a production license, but progress has been extremely slow.
Although cannabis has been shown to have medical benefits and is considered legal medicine in many parts of the world, it is still listed as a Schedule I substance by the federal government, which means that it is treated like a dangerous and harmful drug with no medical value in the eyes of the law.