As the opioid crisis reaches a zenith in the USA a new University of Michigan study has just revealed that many pot patients are replacing their pharmaceutical drugs with weed. The research showed that a whopping 44 percent of medical marijuana users were able to stop taking a pharmaceutical drug or use one less often.
The two researchers, Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and co-author of the study Jessica Kruger, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Buffalo surveyed 450 adult attendees of an annual event advocating for cannabis law reform held at the university of Michigan each year. And just so ya know medical cannabis use became legal in Michigan back in 2008.
The researchers goal? To gauge the attitude towards the use of medical cannabis among marijuana partients and the mainstream health care system—which the researchers defined as either a doctor or hospital, .
Out of the 450 activists attending the event 392 completed the survey about pot use and pharmaceuticals. Seventy eight percent said that they used cannabis to treat a medical or health condition and 42 percent of those surveyed had stopped using prescription drugs altogether and have replaced them with cannabis. Thirty eight percent reported that they had reduced their use of prescription medications.
“This study advances knowledge in the evidence-based approach to harm reduction and benefit promotion regarding medical cannabis,” said Kruger, in the researched published in the current issue of Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. “Given the growing use of cannabis for medical purposes and the widespread use for recreation purposes despite criminalization, the current public health framework focusing primarily on cannabis abstinence appears obsolete.”
According to the study participants involved were mostly men—clocking in at 58 percent. Two percent listed their gender as other. Their ages ranged from 18 to 71 with a mean age of 29. Most of the group reported that they preferred to smoke flower (95%) to any other method of consumption including concentrates and edibles. And 47 percent of participants reported that they scored their pot from medical marijuana dispensaries whlie40 percent said that they received their weed directly from someone who grew it.
Not surprisingly 30% of the respondents revealed that they were using weed without the knowledge of their healthcare provider to treat things like pain, back problems, depression, and headaches. That’s probably because they had more trust in marijuana’s effectiveness and it’s lack of terrible side effects than they did in deadly pharmaceutical drugs.
Have you used pot to kick a prescription pill habit? Let us know in the comments section below, please.
Leave a Reply