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A new study released Tuesday is the latest that suggests that cannabis – or at least one key ingredient of it – could help people with addictions. It was found that people with opioid use disorders had fewer withdrawal symptoms when they took cannabidiol, or CBD, compared to placebo. The CBD also helped them to calm down and reduce their anxiety.
CBD is the part of cannabis that will not make you feel high (it's THC). It is already used to treat certain types of seizures, as a prescription drug approved last year under the name Epidiolex. But there are many other health benefits advertised, such as stress relief or dementia prevention, that have helped to shape a cottage industry around CAD.
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Many of these products and claims will probably not be much more than bunk beds. However, it has been proven that the CBD could contribute to the opioid crisis. Some people regularly use cannabis as a partial substitute for prescription opioid pain relievers to manage their pain – a use that researchers are also beginning to study in the lab. And research elsewhere, including by the authors of this study, has shown that CBD can mitigate the effects of withdrawal and cravings in opioid-dependent animals that are withdrawn from the drug.
The reference method for verifying whether something is really going on as claimed is a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial. This is what the authors of this study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, have attempted to do.
For their trial, they recruited 42 men and women who lived with an opioid consumption disorder, especially heroin, but who did not consume it for the time being. Half of the patients received pills containing CBD (actually, Epidiolex) at random, in two doses, while the others took a placebo. Then, for one week, the volunteers watched three-minute videos containing only neutral images, such as nature sounds, or videos featuring drug accessories, such as syringes or powder sachets meant to look like to heroin. The second series of videos, it was thought, would encourage volunteers to crack drugs and / or be anxious.
The subjects tested received CBD for three days, and they were tested for craving and anxiety symptoms immediately after taking the pill the day after a CBD session and a week later. after the last session. The researchers found that among these scenarios, people on DBC reported on average less need and anxiety than the placebo group, while objective measures like heart rate and cortisol levels in saliva (often used to indicate acute stress) were also lower.
"The study clearly demonstrates that cannabidiol can have a significant effect on some aspects of the opioid consumption disorder," said Gizmodo Ziva Cooper, research director of the Cannabis's Research Cannabis Research Initiative. University of California at Los Angeles and not affiliated with this study. by telephone. "And what's really important is that it's a replica of previous work done by researchers on a much smaller group."
The implications of the study are really great. Several medications are already used to treat opioid use disorders and prevent relapses, especially methadone and buprenorphine, but not everyone can easily access them. Many rehabilitation centers do not even offer them as treatment. This is partly because of the stigma surrounding these two drugs, two opioids. However, this stigma is unfounded because neither of the two should cause unhealthy dependence if used properly under medical supervision, and people who take these medications always experience fewer relapses or fatal opioid overdoses than those who are trying to stop using opioids.
But non-opioid options such as CBD could only make it easier for people to get the treatment they need. And while cannabis and CBD remain legally obscure, the fact that Epidiolex has been used successfully in this study is also important, as it could mean that doctors may one day prescribe it without any hassle because the drug is already approved by the FDA.
The authors stress that their essay is still an "exploratory" study. More research is needed before we can be certain of the potential of the CBD as a drug treatment.
A major limitation, for example, is the length of a week of study. Medications are only part of the usual treatment for people recovering from an opioid-related disorder, along with behavioral counseling. However, if some people only need medication for a short period of time to manage their withdrawal symptoms or withdrawal, many others will require long-term treatment or even their entire lives. Thus, any drug that tries to combat drug addiction should ideally be effective in the long run. CBD is not thought to cause serious side effects (and this was not the case in this study), no matter how long it took, but we do not know anything about its sustained effectiveness.
Cooper also noted that other aspects of opioid use disorder have not been tested by this study, such as the overall risk of relapse. And the volunteers used were relatively stable people, not freshly released heroines who needed the most treatment to manage their cravings. Anyone who would consider using CBD to treat their own opioid use disorder, Cooper added, should also remember that many consumer products simply do not contain the high doses of CBD that found in Epidiolex, neither are tested their safety.
"I do not think people will necessarily see the same effects when taking a lower dose," Cooper said.
That said, there are certainly good reasons to hope.
"An effective non-opioid drug would add considerable value to the array of existing tools for addiction treatment to reduce the growing number of deaths, the huge health care costs and the treatment limitations imposed by drugs." stringent government regulations amid this persistent epidemic of opioids, "said lead author Yasmin Hurd, a professor of neuroscience, psychiatry, pharmacology, and systems therapeutics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in a statement from Mount Sinai.
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