Can Cannabis Solve the Opioid Crisis?

Published by Barry Allardyce on 28-March-2019. Category:Experimental

In various countries, pot is becoming legal as it comes with a host of medicinal gains. Doctors have prescribed it for the treatment of some conditions and it works effectively.

Apart from leaving users glad, untroubled and giggling, it also enhances sleep, improves mood, furthers creativity and much more.

While some people will tell you that smoking weed is not harmful to your body or mind and it should be legalized, others have named it the devil’s lettuce. Some folks claim that it extends the user’s odds of suffering from respiratory diseases, causes mental disorders, panic attacks, memory loss reduction of sperm count and beyond.

Since cannabis is still illegal in numerous parts if the world, it has been tough to research on and draw conclusions from the findings. With over 500 chemicals, it’s hard to know why some people are hooked to weed and how it affects their mental health. Some people are still unsure whether pot is harmful or helpful as it is linked to psychic disorders as well as addiction.

With the world in the midst of an opioid epidemic, opioid overdose deaths have risen and people are hunting for new ways to treat. America alone consumes over 80% of the opioid produced across the globe.

Treating opiate dependence is not a joke as opiates hijack the pleasure center of the brain, alter its structure and skyrocket your urge for them. Could cannabis be the answer to easing our reliance on opiates?

A growing number of experts think it could be and that is why in some states medical marijuana is approved for the treatment of opioid addiction.

Those against the idea continue to criticize it claiming that there isn’t enough proof to show that cannabis is effective at treating opiate addiction. The ugly truth is that no controlled trials have been carried out to reveal whether cannabis is useful at treating opioid addictions or not.

Furthermore, they argue that replacing cannabis with the tried and tested opioid addiction treatments like buprenorphine and methadone had its downside as their discontinuation can cause the loss of life. At this point, it won’t make any medical sense to provide cannabis as a therapy for opioid dependence instead of evidence-based medicine.

On the flipside, some data is emerging showing that trading option with cannabis is not a deal with the devil. Medical researchers did a study on 80 opioid addicts with medical marijuana and saw more than two-thirds of them ditching hard drugs. The goal of using pot to treat opioid addiction is to substitute is to get users on a much safer substance.

While not everyone thinks that weed is effective at treating opioid addicts, it’s worth giving a try. Apart from helping them stop addiction, marijuana has also been shown to fight opioid addiction symptoms like cravings and withdrawal symptoms.

Weed is powerful at combating opioid addiction since the marijuana and opioid systems interact at a close level.

For this reason, cannabis is an automatic candidate in the development and use of new medication to cure opioid addiction.

However, the elephant in the room is whether marijuana is also useful in treating those who have been hooked to opioids more than once or experience chronic pain?

While less than a tenth of chronic pain victims become regular opioid users, those who have been addicts have higher odds of experiencing chronic pains than those who have never tried opioids.

Not much research has been carried out on the effectiveness of cannabis getting rid of chronic pain. The area is still green, meaning that it might be next to impossible to save opioid addicts experiencing chronic pain with weed.

Yes, you heard me right! However, it leaves the door open for researchers to explore more and prove their case. You will also require conventional medication to kick your habit.

A multipronged approach is necessary to cure the opioid crisis. Opiate addiction occurs because of numerous reasons and that is why fighting it using assorted means is a must.

It is still not advisable to think that cannabis is the solution to all the aspects of human life. However, you should be hopeful that future researches will dedicate resources and their time to ensure that weed is prescribed to stop opioid addiction. Until research and random trials are done on cannabis and concrete evidence is tabled, it still can’t be used to save opiate addicts.