White House’s Opioid Commission Says Cannabis Consumption Leads to Opioid Abuse
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, chairman of the White House’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, sent a letter dated November 1 to President Donald Trump that denies cannabis’ role in fighting the opioid epidemic. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and many other scientific organizations, however, have rejected the gateway theory that Christie is promoting.
“The Commission acknowledges that there is an active movement to promote the use of marijuana as an alternative medication for chronic pain and as a treatment for opioid addiction,” wrote Christie. “Recent research out of the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse found that marijuana use led to a two-and-a-half times greater chance that the marijuana user would become an opioid user and abuser. The Commission found this very disturbing. There is a lack of sophisticated outcome data on dose, potency, and abuse potential for marijuana. This mirrors the lack of data in the 1990s and early 2000s when opioid prescribing multiplied across health care settings and led to the current epidemic of abuse, misuse and addiction.”
That conflicts with findings published just last week in The American Journal of Public Health. Researchers reported a 6.5 percent decrease in monthly opioid-related deaths after recreational cannabis went on sale in Colorado. This is supported by a study published last April in Drug and Alcohol Dependence that found a 23 percent drop in opioid-related hospitalizations in states with legal medical cannabis. Other studies published in 2014 and 2015 also found a drop in opioid- or heroin-related deaths in states with medical cannabis programs.
The study was cherry-picked by Christie and is an anomaly. In fact, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recently reviewed highlights from over 10,000 peer-reviewed studies since 1999 and found not a single “good or fair-quality systematic review that reported on the association between cannabis use and the initiation of use of opioids.”
President Trump’s executive order last May set up the commission to combat America’s opioid epidemic, but so far, cannabis advocates are not impressed.
