Opinion: Easing access to marijuana is not a way to solve the opioid epidemic
Expanding access to medical or recreational marijuana as an alternative to opioids for conditions like chronic pain is a bad idea, especially for America's youths.
The take-home message from research published last week in JAMA Internal Medicine — let’s liberalize access to marijuana as a way to address the raging opioid epidemic — captured the public imagination. We disagree. Supporting medical or recreational marijuana as an alternative to opioids for conditions like chronic pain is a bad idea, especially for America’s youths.
Using state-level data, the authors of the JAMA study evaluated opioid-prescribing trends to Medicaid patients between 2011 and 2016 in states that started to implement medical and adult-use marijuana laws and compared them to rates in the remaining states. Opioid prescribing was about 6 percent lower in states with medical
