Medical Cannabis vs. The Opioid Crisis
A word from Nativ Segev, Founder & Managing Director of MGC Pharmaceuticals.
I want to talk about something a little bit different than usual. Something that has been a recurring theme in my newsfeed for the past several years:
Prescription opioids and the Opioid Crisis.
Prescription opioid painkillers are all too common and readily available in Australia, and that’s not a good thing. You might have read about the Opioid Crisis going on in the United States, where about 142 people are dying every day from accidental overdoses of prescription opioids – roughly 60,000 people last year. While the numbers aren’t nearly as bad as in the US, Australian’s are still at a huge risk of opioid addiction, ranking in at number 8 among the world’s top users of prescription opiates, with 20,000 doses being prescribed for every 1 million people.
Alex Wodak, the President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation stated: “We doctors and pain specialists made a terrible error in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. We prescribed opiates too readily and at too high a dose to too many people.”
In fact, opiate-based pain medication is a large source of revenue in Australia, and it is definitely time that the government started considering safer alternatives to stop the issues that are plaguing the country.
You might be asking yourself why I am discussing the Opioid Crisis in a blog for a Medical Cannabis company, and the answer is simple. Medical Cannabis is one of the best ways to combat the opioid crisis, not just here in Australia, but across the world.
The Journal of the American Medicine Association (JAMA) published a study that found states that had made Medical Cannabis legal had a 24.8 percent lower average annual opioid overdose death rate compared to states without Medical Cannabis laws.
How are the two connected, you might be asking. Well, research out of the University of Kentucky has shown us that CBD, derived from Medical Cannabis, can significantly suppress chronic inflammatory and neuropathic pain, with no side effects. It’s not addictive and it’s impossible to overdose on.
Opiate painkillers only mask pain and can potentially be very addictive with the body able to build up a tolerance over time. CBD, on the other hand, is an effective anti-inflammatory that won’t lose effectiveness.
Prescribing Medical Cannabis as an alternative to opiates would do a lot to help end the Opioid Crisis across the world. While more research needs to be done before this can be actioned, at MGC Pharma, we stand by our vision of helping to heal the world through the use of Medical Cannabis, and the Opioid Crisis is no exception.