A new 5 year study coming out of the University of New Mexico claims that marijuana prevents people from doing hard drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. Hard drugs can be considered drugs such as opioids, cocaine, ecstasy and heroin.
States that have a medical or recreational marijuana program have seen a sharp decline in opioid overdoses and experts in the US believe that cannabis could be the solution to our painkiller epidemic. What do you think?
In fact, in might be the key to discouraging users from progressing to “harder” drugs, such as cocaine and ecstasy, claim scientists at the University of New Mexico.
The five-year-long study involved 125 participants, all of whom were suffering from chronic pain.
83 were taking cannabis as a prescriptive pain mediator, whereas 42 chose to abstain.
They found that 34 per cent of the cannabis users stopped taking their medication, in comparison to just two per cent of the non-smokers, with 98 per cent continuing to take their prescribed drugs.
“Our current opioid epidemic is the leading preventable form of death in the US – killing more people than car accidents and gun violence,” explained lead author and psychology professor Jacob Miguel Vigil.
He explained that painkillers and street heroin typically kill 90 people in the US every day; whereas some studies claim that cannabis consumption has never directly caused a fatality.
However, in 2014, Gemma Moss became the first British woman to die from cannabis toxicity, after she reportedly smoked £60 worth of the drug in one week which led her to die from cardiac arrest.
Whilst now legal in several US states, in the UK, possession of the class B drug could put you in prison for five years whilst selling and producing it could land you 14.
