Marijuana May Alleviate America’s Opioid Crisis, New Study Suggests

In 2014, more than 14,000 people ― nearly 40 per day ― died from overdoses of prescribed opiates.

Access to medical marijuana may be cutting down on the overall use of opioids, including prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet, new research suggests. 

In a study, researchers from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health analyzed traffic fatality data from 1999-2013 for 18 U.S states. They found that most states that passed medical marijuana laws saw an overall reduction in fatal crashes involving drivers who tested positive for opioids.

“We would expect the adverse consequences of opioid use to decrease over time in states where medical marijuana use is legal, asindividuals substitute marijuana for opioids in the treatment of severe or chronic pain,” lead author June H. Kim, a doctoral student at Mailman, said in a statement.

The study, published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health, is among the first to look at the link between state medical marijuana laws and opioid use. Medical marijuana laws, the authors concluded, are “associated with reductions in opioid positivity among 21- to 40-year-old fatally injured drivers and may reduce opioid use and overdose.”

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The United States is currently facing an epidemic of opioid painkiller abuse. Since 1999, opioid prescriptions and sales have quadrupled in the United States, a boom that the CDC said has “helped create and fuel” the current opioid abuse crisis. In 2014 alone, more than 14,000 people ― nearly 40 per day ― died from overdoses of prescribed opiates.

The Columbia study adds to a growing body of evidence showing cannabis can be an effective, alternative treatment for pain relief.

A 2014 study, for example, found that states with medical marijuanahad fewer prescription painkiller overdose deaths than those without. And in July, researchers documented that states with medical marijuana saw a drop in prescription drugs, saving an estimated $165.2 million in Medicare costs.

In March, federal health officials issued new guidelines for opioid prescriptions in an effort to curb the crisis, urging doctors to largely avoid prescribing highly addictive painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin when treating patients for chronic pain.

But the Drug Enforcement Administration has stopped short of embracing alternative painkillers, recently declining to loosen restrictions on marijuana and announcing plans to criminalize kratom, an herbal supplement that many say is effective at treating chronic pain and fighting opioid addiction.

At the state level, however, the tide is turning. Twenty-five U.S. stateshave legalized medical marijuana. Four of those, plus the District of Columbia, have also legalized recreational use of the substance.

“As states with these laws move toward legalizing marijuana more broadly for recreational purposes, future studies are needed to assess the impact these laws may have on opioid use,” Kim said in a statement. 

Article Resources:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Marijuana Extract May Help Some Children With Epilepsy, Study Finds

A strain of high-cannabidiol marijuana is used to create extracts used in experimental epilepsy treatments.

Parents of children with severe epilepsy have reported incredible recoveries when their children were given cannabidiol, a derivative of marijuana. The drug, a non-psychoactive compound that occurs naturally in cannabis, has been marketed with epithets like Charlotte's Web and Haleigh's Hope.

But those parents were taking a risk; there has been no clinical data on cannabidiol's safety or efficacy as an anti-epileptic. This week, doctors are presenting the first studies trying to figure out if cannabidiol actually works. They say the studies' results are promising, but with a grain of salt.

The largest study being presented at the American Epilepsy Society meeting in Philadelphia this week was started in 2014 with 313 children from 16 different epilepsy centers around the country. Over the course of the three-month trial, 16 percent of the participants withdrew because the cannabidiol was either ineffective or had adverse side-effects, says Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist at the New York University Langone Medical Center and lead author on the study.

But for the 261 patients that continued taking cannabidiol, the number of convulsive seizures, called grand mal or tonic-clonic seizures, went down by about half on average. Devinsky says that some children continued to experience benefits on cannabidiol after the trial ended. "In the subsequent periods, which are very encouraging, 9 percent of all patients and 13 percent of those with Dravet Syndrome epilepsy were seizure-free. Many have never been seizure-free before," he says. It's one of several papers on cannabidiol being presented this week at the American Epilepsy Society meeting in Philadelphia.

Twenty-five of those patients were followed for a yearlong study also presented at the meeting. Some of those patients did better, but one ended up doing worse. "A drug can induce an increase in seizures," says Dr. Maria Roberta Cilio, a pediatric neurologist at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital who led that study. This happened with one of her patients. "For one particular child, the more the dose of [cannabidiol] was increasing, that increase was paralleled with an increase in seizure frequency," she says.

Some patients in Devinsky's trial also did worse while on cannabidiol, but he thinks there's no way to tell if it was because of the drug or something else. He says we won't know until a full clinical trial has run its course. Without that, the perceived effects of the drug might be a placebo effect or it could be some other confounding factor that hasn't been caught in the study. What's more, a few hundred patients isn't a lot of patients, and doctors still need to see what will happen when a patient is on cannabidiol for more than a few months.

Epilepsy can be one of the most difficult syndromes to treat. About a third of patients have an intractable form of epilepsy. It's common for children and adults with treatment-resistant epilepsy to exhaust the list of anti-seizure medications to little or no effect.

Jaren Hansen is a 7-year-old boy with Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, a form of treatment-resistant epilepsy. When he was 2, he started having seizures. His doctors diagnosed him with epilepsy and started him on one anti-seizure medication. Then they added another, and then another.

Article Resources:http://www.npr.org/