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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?
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.
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.
Opiates and opioids work on several subtypes of opioid receptors, which are present in locations besides the brain. The mu-opioid receptions in the brain are responsible for the sense of euphoria the drugs produce, but those receptors, along with kappa- and delta- variants, modulate nociception (pain sense). If opioids didn't actually work directly on pain then intrathecal morphine wouldn't work as well as it does.
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 --
I'm in the US and have been a daily potsmoker for the last 8 years (barring a few months break). I have never seen tobacco mixed into a joint, not once... it seems to be a European thing. Now, there is the practice of using cigar wraps to roll a "blunt", and sometimes those cigar wraps are made from tobacco pulp, so that could be seen as mixing tobacco with marijuana. I prefer not to smoke blunts, either.
Scraping the crystals (technically trichromes) off cannabis is how hashish is made. Dissolving it into a solvent, then evaporating the solvent, gives liquid hash oil (also called honey oil, dabs, wax). Dabs are becoming more prevalent within the past few years as they are theoretically healthier, having a better ratio of plant material to THC. A recent issue of High Times featured a method of extracting hash oil using drinking-grade ethanol, instead of butane which was the formerly used process. Not only is it less likely to explode, it also placates people who are arbitrarily afraid of "chemicals", so I see dabs gaining massive popularity within the next few years.