"Is marijuana a secret weapon against the opioid epidemic?"

Regular readers may already be tired of posts here exploring whether marijuana reform may be an important element of modern responses to the modern opioid epidemic.  But until that epidemic is over, I am going to keep posting on this topic.  And the title of this post is the headline of this PRI article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday. Here are excerpts:

“Really, if we stopped medical marijuana programs that are now in place in 29 states and Washington, DC … the science suggests we would worsen the opioid epidemic,” says Dina Fine Maron, a medicine and health editor at Scientific American, who wrote a recent story on the subject.

She explains that states with medical marijuana programs have fewer opioid overdose-related deaths than states without medical marijuana — 25 percent fewer, according to a 2014 study cited in her article. “The reality is that the literature right now suggests that if anyone is using an opioid — whether it be a prescription painkiller or something like heroin — a prescription painkiller is more likely [than marijuana] to lead to drug abuse,” she says, “because it’s more addictive and obviously can be more lethal.”...

University of Georgia public policy professor W. David Bradford has studied how legal medical marijuana impacts prescription use by enrollees of Medicare, the federal health insurance program for seniors and the disabled. “What we found … was significant reductions in prescription use, most notably among pain medications, and the largest plurality of those would be opiates,” he says.

Then he researched the effect on enrollees in Medicaid, the federal-state program that helps the poor and people with disabilities pay for health care. “We redid the study for Medicaid just this past month in Health Affairs and, again, found large reductions in the use of prescription pain medications when states turned on medical cannabis laws.”...

Legal medical marijuana isn’t a silver bullet for the complex US opiate crisis, Bradford says. But while dozens of people in the US die each day from opioids, there has never been a fatal overdose documented from marijuana alone. “The National [Academies] of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine just this past January issued a comprehensive report where they said there is conclusive evidence that cannabis can be effective at managing pain,” he says. “So, to the extent we can divert people from initially starting on opiates through legitimate prescriptions, we divert them from the path of abuse and then the path of death,” he adds. “And it does seem that cannabis could be one tool in the arsenal to do that.”

Some prior related posts:

• Given latest opioid death data, should Ohio officials be fast-tracking access to medical marijuana?
• "The Case for Pot in the Age of Opioids: Legalizing medical marijuana could save lives that may otherwise be lost to opioid addiction."
• "Can medical marijuana be used to treat heroin addiction?"
• "Elizabeth Warren Urges CDC To Consider Cannabis To Solve Opioid Epidemic"
• Yet another study suggests link between medical marijuana availability and decreased opioid use
• "Could medical marijuana solve Ohio's opioid problem?"
• "Legalize marijuana and reduce deaths from drug abuse"
• "Obama’s Opioid Offensive Again Ignores the Cannabis Solution"