THE GOOD OIL?
Earlier this year, the International Association for the Study of Pain published a review of the evidence for cannabis as a treatment. It concluded that although “basic science advances are promising”, high-quality clinical evidence is still scant. “More research is required to elucidate the benefits and harms of therapeutic use of cannabis and cannabinoids for the treatment of pain.”
That’s why Pharmac doesn’t subsidise cannabis medicines and Medsafe has not approved any since 2010. But there’s another way of looking at it, highlighted in two surveys of thousands of medicinal-cannabis users (almost all of whom were doing so illegally) under the auspices of Otago and Massey universities respectively. Many of those patients reported something striking: that cannabis allowed them to substantially reduce or end their use of onerous prescription medication and their quality of life improved as a result.
In the Massey survey, published last year, the class of prescription medication most often stopped as a result of cannabis use was gabapentinoids: pregabalin and gabapentin. The class in which use was most often reduced was opioids, with 95% of those using them reporting a reduction as a consequence of using cannabis. In the Otago survey, 30% of patients stopped their opioids entirely.
A large Canadian study published this year found similar results: medicinal-cannabis treatment had little effect on low-level chronic users of opioid painkillers, but consumption by the heaviest users fell dramatically. Another, followed hundreds of chronic-pain patients after enrolment at cannabis clinics: the number using opioids halved and general health scores, including anxiety and depression, improved.
