Adults with chronic pain who participated in New York State’s (NYS) Medical Cannabis Program were significantly less likely to require prescription opioids, according to a new study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine and led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Health System.
“Chronic pain and opioid addiction are two of the most pressing health challenges in the United States,” said Deepika E. Slawek, M.D., M.S., the study’s lead author, associate professor of medicine at Einstein, and an internal medicine and addiction medicine specialist at Montefiore. “Our findings indicate that medical cannabis, when dispensed through a pharmacist-supervised system, can relieve chronic pain while also meaningfully reducing patients’ reliance on prescription opioids. Supervised use of medical cannabis could be an important tool in combating the opioid crisis.”
The study involved 204 adults who were prescribed opioids for chronic pain and were newly certified for medical cannabis between September 2018 and July 2023. Participants were tracked for 18 months, with data on both their cannabis and opioid use collected from the New York State Prescription Monitoring Program.