Study Finds Medical Marijuana Doesn’t Lower Opioid Overdose Rates
Marijuana has been put forward as something of a ‘wonder’ solution for many ailments. Many people have even suggested that marijuana has merit as a ‘substitute’ for opioids as a means of curbing opioid dependency. Now it seems that medically-prescribed marijuana does nothing to help those suffering from the misery of reliance upon opioids from avoiding a drug overdose.
Findings have been published by the National Academy of Sciences. The results are in contrast to a similar study undertaken in 2014, which gave evidence that states that had legalized medical marijuana by 2010 had seen a 1-in-4 drop in the opioid overdose death rate compared to states that had not legalized it.
Evidence Suggests That The 2014 Figures Were Not All That They Seemed to Be
However, it now seems that this 25 percent drop was little more than a coincidence. In this new report, which extends the study to states that had legalized medical marijuana by 2017, the difference between opioid overdoes in ‘legal’ states and ‘non-legal’ states was insignificant.
“It would be wonderful if it worked, but it doesn’t seem like it does,” said Chelsea Shover, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University and leading author of the report. “A lot of people treated it [the 2014 study] as evidence that medical cannabis could reverse the opioid crisis. But does that really hold up over time? In short, what we found was no.”
With More Data in Hand, the 2017 Figures Give a Truer Reflection of the Success of Medical Marijuana in Preventing Opioid Overdoses
Damningly, the figures calculated in 2017 completely reversed the evidence contained in the 2014 report, stating that medical marijuana is an effective tool in the battle against opioid overdoses. By 2017, opioid overdose rates in states where medical marijuana had been legalized was 23 percent higher than in states where medical marijuana was still illegal.
The battle to find an effective way of helping curb the USA’s opioid crisis goes on. In 2017, 47,600 people in the United States died of an opioid-related overdose. That’s around 130 people each and every day.
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