Can marijuana help cure the opioid crisis?



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The idea that legal cannabis can help cope with the opioid crisis has generated a lot of hope and excitement.

Opioid abuse has declined in recent years, as cannabis use has increased, as many states have liberalized their marijuana laws.

On the basis of recent research, some advocates have promoted this link, claiming that easier access to marijuana reduces opioid consumption and, as a result, overdose deaths.

A new study calls for caution. Sometimes appearances – or statistics – can be misleading.

It is plausible that marijuana can help reduce pain. Systematic reviews show that certain compounds in marijuana or cannabinoids produced by synthesis do so, at least under certain conditions. For example, some people who might otherwise look for opioid analgesics might use marijuana for medical purposes.

None of this proves that the liberalization of marijuana causes reduction in opioid-related mortality, as pointed out by the authors of the 2014 JAMA study.

Correlation does not mean causality, of course. A particular challenge in interpreting correlations in the social sciences has its own name – the The ecological error. It is the erroneous conclusion that the relations observed at the broader level (such as the state or the region) are necessarily also at the individual level.

"Relationships may be strengthened, weakened, or even reversed when you move from the individual to the global level," said Mark Glickman, Senior Lecturer in Statistics at Harvard. This was documented in a classic article in 1950 and underlies many erroneous conclusions of the research.

A new study has resumed the analysis published by JAMA with more data. His findings cast doubt on the idea that marijuana for medical purposes helps reduce the number of opioid deaths – at least as far as we can judge with state-level data.

Between 2010 – the latest year of analysis in the JAMA study – and 2017, 32 more states have legalized marijuana for medical purposes, and eight legalized recreational uses. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) re-evaluated the relationship between these laws and opioid deaths using the same approach as the JAMA study, but by extending the years of analysis until 2017.

Over the years analyzed in the JAMA study, from 1999 to 2010, the new P.N.A.S. study results in similar results: the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes was associated with a reduction in the number of overdose deaths from opioid analgesics. But in a thorough analysis until 2017, the results were reversed – the laws are associated with 23% increase in the dead.

This does not necessarily mean that the laws have saved lives first and then, in later years, contributed to fatal overdoses.

"If there is a relationship between cannabis use for medical purposes and opioid overdose at the individual level, this type of study may not reveal it," said epidemiologist Chelsea L. Shover, lead author of PNAS study and a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford School of Medicine.

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