There’s no notification yet!
There is evidence the COVID-19 pandemic is contributing to the already deadly and ongoing national public health overdose crisis. This crisis is having a tragic impact on people who use substances, their families, and communities across Canada. People who use substances, such as opioids, cocaine, and methamphetamine, are experiencing a number of increased risks, with several jurisdictions reporting higher rates of fatal overdoses and other harms.
Purpose: On 17 October 2018 recreational cannabis became legal in Canada, thereby increasing access and reducing the stigma associated with its use for pain management. This study assessed total opioid prescribing volumes and expenditures prior to and following cannabis legalization.
Aims
Opioid misuse and overuse have contributed to a widespread overdose crisis and many patients and physicians are considering medical cannabis to support opioid tapering and chronic pain control. Using a five‐step modified Delphi process, we aimed to develop consensus‐based recommendations on: 1) when and how to safely initiate and titrate cannabinoids in the presence of opioids, 2) when and how to safely taper opioids in the presence of cannabinoids and 3) how to monitor patients and evaluate outcomes when treating with opioids and cannabinoids.
Background: The opioid epidemic has spurred investigations for nonopioid options, yet limited research persists on medical marijuana’s (MMJ) efficacy in managing cancer-related symptoms.
Objective: We sought to characterize MMJ’s role on symptomatic relief and opioid consumption in the oncologic population.
While recent research has shown that cannabis access laws can reduce the use of prescription opioids, the effect of these laws on opioid use is not well understood for all dimensions of use and for the general United States population. Analyzing a dataset of over 1.5 billion individual opioid prescriptions between 2011 and 2018, which were aggregated to the individual provider-year level, we find that recreational and medical cannabis access laws reduce the number of morphine milligram equivalents prescribed each year by 11.8 and 4.2 percent, respectively.
The prior medical literature offers little guidance as to how pain relief and side effect manifestation may vary across commonly used and commercially available cannabis product types. We used the largest dataset in the United States of real-time responses to and side effect reporting from patient-directed cannabis consumption sessions for the treatment of pain under naturalistic conditions in order to identify how cannabis affects momentary pain intensity levels and which product characteristics are the best predictors of therapeutic pain relief.
Cannabinoids combined with opioids produce synergistic antinociceptive effects, decreasing the lowest effective antinociceptive opioid dose (i.e., opioid-sparing effects) in laboratory animals. Although pain patients report greater analgesia when cannabis is used with opioids, no placebo-controlled studies have assessed the direct effects of opioids combined with cannabis in humans or the impact of the combination on abuse liability.
Background
Interest in the use of cannabis and cannabinoids to treat chronic non-cancer pain is increasing, because of their potential to reduce opioid dose requirements. We aimed to investigate cannabis use in people living with chronic non-cancer pain who had been prescribed opioids, including their reasons for use and perceived effectiveness of cannabis; associations between amount of cannabis use and pain, mental health, and opioid use; the effect of cannabis use on pain severity and interference over time; and potential opioid-sparing effects of cannabis.
Background: Chronic pain is common in the United States and prescribed opioid analgesics use for noncancer pain has increased dramatically in the past two decades, possibly accounting for the current opioid addiction epidemic. Co-morbid drug use in those prescribed opioid analgesics is common, but there are few data on polysubstance use patterns.
Background
The management of chronic pain is a complex challenge worldwide. Cannabis-based medicines (CBMs) have proven to be efficient in reducing chronic pain, although the topic remains highly controversial in this field.
