It seems like every day, we hear or read something about the opiate/opioid epidemic in the United States. After hearing the statistics, it’s really not surprising.
According to estimates, in 2015, around two million Americans were addicted to prescription pain relieving drugs, a class of drugs that includes opioids/opiates such as morphine, codeine, fentanyl, , and others. About 591,000 more Americans were addicted to heroin that same year. 20,101 people died from overdoses related to prescription pain medications in 2015, while 12,990 Americans died because of heroin overdoses.
Given these numbers, people are desperately searching for treatment solutions to battle such addiction. One potential treatment might seem surprising: marijuana.
Yes, marijuana is a drug as well. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), it’s also a Schedule I drug. In the DEA’s view, a Schedule I drug does not have any “currently accepted medical use” but it does have “a high potential for abuse.”
Proponents of medical marijuana disagree. For example, U.S. states with legal medical marijuana experienced a 25 percent decline drop in deaths due to opioid overdoses, according to a study in JAMA Internal Medicine. Such states also experienced significant drops in Medicare spending, so using medical marijuana might make fiscal as well as medical sense.
Marijuana proponents and researchers both believe that marijuana might help people during the detox and withdrawal stages of addiction recovery. Detox and withdrawal can cause nausea, insomnia, pain, anxiety, and other symptoms, symptoms that marijuana could help relieve. Other patients use marijuana to relieve similar symptoms caused by cancer, chronic pain, and other conditions.
Interestingly enough, users don’t even have to use regular marijuana to receive such benefits. Instead of smoking or consuming it in its natural state, users can use products with cannabidiol, a cannabis compound. This does not make the users feel high or stoned, unlike THC, another compound in marijuana that CAN produce such results.
We don’t really have a lot of scientific evidence to support these claims, though, since marijuana is so restricted under federal laws. Loosening these restrictions can allow researchers to determine if marijuana can help with addiction treatment and other medical conditions.
