Cannabis as Medicine

Contribution of Marijuana Legalization to the U.S. Opioid Mortality Epidemic: Individual and Combined Experience of 27 States and District of Columbia Conclusions The marijuana protection hypothesis is not supported by recent U.S. data on opioid mortality trends. Instead, legalizing marijuana appears to have contributed to the nation’s opioid mortality epidemic. View PDF  

Pennsylvania legalized medical marijuana in 2016, and since then its use has skyrocketed.1 The doses of the active ingredients of marijuana — tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) — are not standardized, product concentrations are not regulated, and prescribing practices vary… Neurotoxic effects, ranging from central nervous system (CNS) excitation (anxiety, paranoia, and delirium) to CNS depression,

JAMA Psychiatry. 2019;76(7):762-764. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.0076 Mirroring increases in the general population, the prevalence of past-month marijuana use among pregnant mothers in the United States increased by 75% between 2002 (2.85%) and 2016 (4.98%).1 Although cannabis use has been linked to psychosis, little is known about prenatal exposure.2,3 Unprecedented increases in marijuana use during pregnancy, alongside evidence that cannabis use

Those were the words of Minister of Health Ginette Taylor in November 2017, spoken as the government of Canada began to put together Bill 45, known as The Cannabis Act. Over a year has passed since the enactment of Bill 45 and questions still remain regarding the safety of legal cannabis to our pregnant population,

FOR RELEASE: September 10, 2019 As part of its regular monitoring of health-related advertising claims, the Federal Trade Commission today sent warning letters to three companies that sell oils, tinctures, capsules, “gummies,” and creams containing cannabidiol (CBD), a chemical compound derived from the cannabis plant. The letters warn the companies, which the FTC is not

Currently, there is no widely available or accepted medical literature showing any benefit for pain with dispensary cannabis in common pain conditions. For full article

How to use evidence to say what you want! Conclusion: When a headline sounds too good to be true, it usually is. There’s nothing in this study to suggest that people should start drinking red wine to lose weight. The potential effect of diet on the micro-organisms in the gut is a new and interesting

Insufficient evidence exists for the use of medical cannabis for most conditions for which its use is advocated, but various US state governments recommended it for over 50 medical conditions, Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School found. The lack of evidence was separately confirmed by NICE in the UK.

JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(8):e199456. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.9456  Question  Does the number of pediatric cannabis (marijuana) exposure cases before medical marijuana legalization in Massachusetts differ from the number afterward? Findings:  In this repeated cross-sectional study, there were 218 calls related to cannabis exposure received by the Regional Center for Poison Control and Prevention in Massachusetts, constituting 0.15% of all calls concerning

But a new systematic research review from Mayo Clinic, one of the country’s leading medical centers, warns there’s still a lot to learn about CBD. The big takeaway from the review is that no one knows exactly how effective or safe CBD really is. The researchers argue that more research on humans is needed to confirm