Patients with Access to Legal Medical Cannabis Are More Likely to Quit Opioids | Hacker News Reader

Patients with Access to Legal Medical Cannabis Are More Likely to Quit Opioids

journals.plos.org

141 pointsdpflan32 comments

I am allergic to marijuana, but I fully support the legalization of medical marijuana.

I was on steroids for my condition. Steroids are really hard on the body. My first two attempts to quit landed me back on additional medication. One involved an ER visit and a week in bed. Doctors never told me I needed to taper off, nor provided other support for helping me get off the steroids. Trying to quit was creating potentially life threatening crises for me. Doctors were not proactively helpful to me in escaping this trap that kept me on the steroids because trying to quit was threatening to kill me.

An internet friend told me I needed to taper off, that going cold turkey was too hard on the body. A different internet friend told me to take guaifenesin, the active ingredient in Mucinex. Over time, internet friends helped me sort out that generics were tolerated better by me because they lack the blue dye and the time release stuff. They are also cheaper. One internet friend hand-packed pills for me as a Christmas gift to make sure I could get this drug with zero additives and in a lower dose than you can purchase OTC.

This not only helped me get off the steroids, it helped me get off of multiple other prescription drugs over a period of several years. Addicts are not people who lack self discipline. They are people who need practical help to get free of the prison of their drugs. Our current approach frequently helps to actively make it harder or impossible for them to do that.

Most doctors completely suck at helping patients effectively get off drugs. They are in the business of prescribing drugs and surgeries and can be shockingly oblivious to relatively cheap, simple solutions that can provide a patient with stepped down intervention so trying to quit isn't akin to hurling yourself off a cliff.

And then we blame the addict for failing to get to the other side on their own. We have to stop this.

i am curious what your allergy is to mj? have you tried other forms of it like edibles or the higher in CBD tinctures or products? or if edibles weren't an option have you tried vaping or smoking? Not saying you should try it but I am curious how your allergy manifested and what you actually tried before you came to that conclusion.

Yeah, I would wonder what effect THC distillate with added terps would have. And the allergy - is it a food allergy, to cannabis protein or seed protein, or to pollen?

My allergies are not really all that pertinent to the point I am making other than to emphasize that I have no plans to consume marijuana myself, so my position has no ulterior motive wrt me wanting access to marijuana personally. So I have to wonder why on earth that is getting questioned. I have concluded no good will come of me cooperating with answering intrusive personal questions that aren't really even pertinent to the discussion.

How is our responding to the first thing you stated in your comment intrusive or not relevant?

It is intrusive because people are asking for additional details about me. It isn't relevant because it really has nothing to do with the process of managing drug withdrawal.

Have you heard of Kratom?

I have, but I don't know much about it, so I am unclear what relevance that has to the discussion. My hand wavy understanding is that a) people sometimes use it to try to break addiction and b) this sometimes goes very bad places. (Correct me if I am wrong.)

My understanding is that marijuana does not have a big downside, so it strikes me as a better thing to pursue here.

Portugual is the definitive case-study and justification for decriminalizing all drugs. The War on Drugs prohibition is, and always will be, a failure that just makes prisons, arms suppliers and politicians rich while doing little to reduce drug abuse and also destroys the lives of millions of people and their families.

One is "legal", but has to be put into pills in labs. The other is illegal, but you can grow it yourself at home. Guess which is which and why.

Most pharmaceutical companies should be sued/closed for endangering the public, extremely profiting from bogus patents at the expense of the public and so much more.

That’s just never going to happen; it would take a revolution to make it possible.

Canabis as a short term harm reduction tool may be good or useful for some people, but there may be danger in the long term, especially wrt overdosing if/when opioid relapse occurs. Also, the sample size of 37 & heavily weighted toward self selected back-pain sufferers is concerning. Also the quality of life survey does not appear to be one that is normed. Overall I would agree with their conclusion. I'm interested in larger studies, especially longer term. Edit: laRger

Not sure what you mean about the danger of opioid relapse.

I had esophageal cancer and they prescribed me as much hydrocodone syrup as I wanted. Quarts of it. It was a godsend for the pain, but a huge bitch to quit afterwards.

Had they instead limited the quantity, and supplemented with cannaboids, maybe it would have been easier to taper off.

The current system, at least for me, encourages the patient to make up reasons to keep getting the opiates.

I succeeded eventually by begging benzodiazepines from friends to help me taper off the hydrocodone.

Some kind of pre plan to deal with it would have been so much better. It's as if the doctors have no idea what happens when they cut that supply off.

The danger of the relapse is that a person often returns to the same dose as when they last used. Their body is no longer able to handle that high dose and they OD.

How is that different than with any other method of quitting opioids? It's not specific to marijuana at all, so it's not a fair criticism.

I've known several individuals (and they have known significantly more, themselves) for whom legal cannabis was able to help them break opioid addiction.

I know this study is about chronic pain, but it's (anecdotally, I admit) helpful even without physical pain. And it's worth considering that legalizing cannabis can help these populations get some of the help they need -- and get on drugs that won't kill them, put them in the hospital, or cost them so much money they'll commit horrible crimes to get their fix.

> I'm interested in lager studies, especially longer term.

I am also interested in lager studies

> but there may be danger in the long term, especially wrt overdosing if/when opioid relapse occurs

The alternative would be to never stop using. I don't get the logic behind this reason.

The study lasted for 21 months. If, as an example, people in the MCP decided that after 2 years, they would try the same dose as what they left off at, it could be too high for them or laced with something new to their bodies( like Fentanyl ) and could OD/kill them.

My mother in law fits this group - long time opioid user due to chronic pain from lupus and various complications. Recently went on medical marijuana and dropped her opioid usage way down. There were other ancillary benefits too, less anxiety being a major one.

Kratom has been (somewhat silently to the mainstream) been helping many break free of opioid dependence. It also has helped many who are in chronic pain and can't get access to good lain relievers, or are allergic to them.

Edit: r/kratom can be a good start. It also is in need of support as the FDA is currently trying to regulate it.

I spent most of today in the hospital because of a lingering blood clot issue due to a weightlifting injury, exacerbated by some long distance traveling last week that involved long periods of just sitting. I woke up with extreme pain and swelling, and knew I immediately needed to go to the ER and miss my flight :(.

Long story short, the pain was intense enough that I acquiesced and agreed to some hydromorphone. I've never had opioids in my life, and after this experience will likely refuse them from now on. The "high" was immediate (since taken intravenously) and was fairly intense. I can see how people so easily get addicted to this stuff. If medical cannabis is a decent substitute (I know that's not the point of this paper) it seems like a thing we should explore.

The main problem here is that weed is classified as a schedule 1 drug, meaning you'd have to declassify it.

No politician wants to be seen as being soft on crime or drugs.

Just like I think that living restriction distances for sex offenders (you can't live within 100 feet of schools) are bad, but nobody will come out in support.

I dunno, we have plenty of politicians supporting legalization now. We even have one state where legalization was done via legislature.

Also, interestingly, this is a very easy process, if we can get a president elected who is of that persuasion. The reason being, Congress vested DEA with the executive authority to reschedule drugs. So, in theory, the president could just direct them to do so. Congress can override and reinstate it, of course - but voting to re-criminalize it after it was legalized would also be a politically dangerous move.

Nobody? http://www.oregonvoices.org/

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