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States Allowing Medical Marijuana Have Fewer Painkiller Deaths
An anonymous reader writes: Narcotic painkillers aren't one of the biggest killers in the U.S., but overdoses do claim over 15,000 lives per year and send hundreds of thousands to the emergency room. Because of this, it's interesting that a new study (abstract) has found states that allow the use of medical marijuana have seen a dramatic reduction in opioid overdose fatalities. "Previous studies hint at why marijuana use might help reduce reliance on opioid painkillers. Many drugs with abuse potential such as nicotine and opiates, as well as marijuana, pump up the brain's dopamine levels, which can induce feelings of euphoria. The biological reasons that people might use marijuana instead of opioids aren't exactly clear, because marijuana doesn't replace the pain relief of opiates. However, it does seem to distract from the pain by making it less bothersome." This research comes at a time when the country is furiously debating the costs and benefits of marijuana use, and opponents of the idea are paying researchers to paint it in an unfavorable light.
You mean the War on Drugs was a complete waste of time and money and ruined millions of peoples' lives for no reason, while funneling billions of dollars a year to ruthless criminal warlords in South America?
At least that seems to be US drug policy
A common painkiller will kill you and a schedule 1 dangerous drug has medical benefits and cannot kill you regardless of dosage
As far as the legal painkiller goes, Acetaminophen can destroy your liver and most NSAIDs increase your risk of stroke
Opioids are the biggest culprit tho, what with their tendency to suppress breathing and cause death with relatively small doses. Add in the tendency to cause physical addiction and long term illegal use of stolen pharmaceuticals or heroin
Are we living in crazy town, or is the will of the people finally being heard?
How many choking deaths from people getting the munchies?
First mistake, opoids are not painkillers, they're brain killers. They do not affect the pain, they merely mess you up so bad you no longer care if anything hurts.
I'm in constant pain, 24/7, and tried the opoid "painkillers". They also killed my life, I was so brain dead I could accomplish only the bare minimum hygienic tasks.
I got off the opoids (a significant achievement) and started smoking pot to deal with the pain. Sure, it hurts more now, but the pot allows me to deal with it.
And since I live in a State that has not even legalized medical pot due to all the damn liars about the so called "dangers" I'm an Anonymous Coward.
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Its business and lobbying. As soon as the meidical marijuana industry puts money into lobbying things will get a lot better for patients.
warlords in South America? Don't forget the pharmaceutical industry, and all those other industries that benefit from prohibiting a natural competitor that needs little cultivation because it basically grows like ... well, weed.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
If pot becomes legal in all states, I hope there are warnings on the marijana cigarettes like there are on tobacco cigarettes.
Is that as likely to cause cancer? It does seem like smoking anything is a bad idea, but perhaps tobacco has something that makes it more likely to develop issues...
However there's also another way to get MJ into your system, edibles. If you were using it for medical purposes a medicinal brownie seems like a more appealing application than does smoking...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, for many people it's more effective than opiates. I know literally dozens of medical cannabis users who have given up opiate pain killers completely and replaced them with medical cannabis. But it's important to experiment with different strains and find what works for you; all cannabis is not created equal.
Personally, I use Kush and Afghanistan strains and crosses for migraines. Over the years I've tried literally hundreds of strains, and looked into their breeding history, and came to the conclusion that it was Kush and Afghanistan strains that are the most effective for my migraines.
Where an opiate pain killer will dull the pain of a migraine, the proper strain will completely eliminate all migraine symptoms for me within 5-10 minutes of consuming a half gram dose. Triptans, on the other hand, only work half the time and take half an hour to have any effect, if any. Opiates only dull pain and actually make the nausea of a migraine worse because they upset my stomach. Add in the addictive nature of opiates, and I think you can understand why I'd much rather use medical cannabis than prescription opiates for what ails me.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This study has been misreported nearly everywhere. The study didn't find states with legalized medical marijuana had fewer deaths than non-legal states. Legalized states continually had more deaths per capita, and both groups had dramatic increased in opiate OD deaths over the period covered by the study. The researchers found OD death rates in legalized states increased ~25% less than expected.
I don't have access to the full study, but this chart included in this Washington Post article shows both groups OD death rate increase dramatically over time. It's interesting to note the change from 2009-2010, which significantly narrowed the gap between the groups. Prior to that year both groups seemed to be on similar trend lines. That said, groups moved from the illegal to legalized group over the course of the study and I'm not sure if or how the chart was adjusted for those changes.
Tobacco plants pull some very nasty minerals out of soil, such as Strontium-90 and Cadmium. There have been studies done to see whether that effect can be exploited as a means of remediation for contaminated soil. Regardless of those results, the plants themselves are high in heavy metals; the kind of stuff that is no good in your lungs.
I don't think so. The JAMA article http://archinte.jamanetwork.co... does look at longitudinal effects but the 25% figure comes from comparing states with and without. From the abstract:
States with medical cannabis laws had a 24.8% lower mean annual opioid overdose mortality rate (95% CI, 37.5% to 9.5%; P=.003) compared with states without medical cannabis laws.
The common way to statistically analyse the effect of one variable is to model as many variables as the data allows and run a regression to isolate the effect of the target variable.
It may be that there are other problems with the study (e.g. correlations between the variables assumed to be independent) but this isn't one of them.
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
For those that don't smoke...
It relieves pain not because it reduces the pain... but because it allows you to more easily focus on something else. If you're watching a movie for example, it's very easy to get lost in the movie and forget entirely about your bad back, or whatever. It's been used in mediation and religious ceremonies for thousands of years for that very reason.
Along those same lines, if you were abusing Oxy, it would likely help you forget you lost your buzz and make it less likely you'd go for your next hit. I'm not sure on that though, I don't do real drugs.
There's times I think that the "anti opiate" forces would be against anything that made pain sufferers feel better. It's like there's some kind of morality subtext that's really "pro pain" and opposed to feeling better (unless of course it was due to praying to Jesus).
Regardless of the reasons one way or the other, nobody has the right to prohibit its possession and use.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”