Perth, Australia: Chronic pain patients receiving prescribed cannabis extracts significantly reduce their opioid consumption, according to longitudinal data published in the journal Pain Management.
Australian investigators assessed opioid consumption patterns over 12 months in two similar cohorts of chronic pain patients. One group of patients was prescribed cannabis extracts containing standardized quantities of THC and CBD as an adjunctive treatment. (Australian physicians may prescribe cannabis products to patients unresponsive to conventional prescription treatments.) The other group did not receive cannabis therapy.
Patients who received cannabis decreased their average opioid intake to 2.7mg/day after one year of treatment. By contrast, patients who did not receive cannabis consumed an average of 42.3 mg/day of opioids at follow-up.
Patients who consumed cannabinoids were also more likely than controls to experience decreases in depression, anxiety, insomnia, and disability. However, those in the cannabis treatment group were more likely to drop out of the study prior to its completion, indicating that some patients were unable to tolerate the long-term use of cannabis extracts.
The study’s authors concluded: “These findings indicate that the introduction of cannabinoids can produce useful reductions in opioid consumption in real-world settings. … However, this treatment is tolerated by only a subgroup of patients.”
Similarly designed studies in the United States have also reported that cannabis products are associated with substantial reductions in patients’ daily consumption of opioids. Ecological studies from the U.S. and Canada also report significant overall declines in the volume of opioid prescriptions following cannabis legalization.
Full text of the study, “Opioid reduction in patients with chronic non-cancer pain undergoing treatment with medicinal cannabis,” appears in Pain Management. Additional information is available from the NORML Fact Sheet, ‘Relationship Between Marijuana and Opioids.’