Answer Addiction

Tag: cannabis

  • In Recovery, on Suboxone, and in the Weed Business

    In Recovery, on Suboxone, and in the Weed Business

    In print and online, I preached cannabis. In life, I practiced therapy and Suboxone.

    I had a few days left on my Suboxone script when I interviewed Justin “Bong King.” He was a professional bong-racer and self-described champion of the competitive smoking circuit. An affable guy, nonetheless his was an image of American cannabis long past, pushed aside by marketing grads and stay-at-home moms who sold branded CBD and touted the benefits of micro-dosing. 

    But Justin drew a crowd, and an entourage to boot. And his natural talent for hitting the fastest gram of weed would corner me into compromising my recovery.

    Throughout my career as a cannabis journalist, I’ve kept silent about my sobriety. Finding freelance gigs is hard enough without the added burden of having to be that guy. Besides, if I learned anything from active addiction, it was how to lie at my job.

    Covering Cannabis Events and Lying About My Sobriety

    But as time passed, I felt withdrawn and disconnected. My recovery had no place in the cannabis industry. Moreover, medication-assisted treatment (MAT) seemed anathema to its goals, according to experts and the news. Rep. Matt Gaetz openly questioned whether buprenorphine and methadone are “a more effective offramp [to opioid use disorder] than medical cannabis.” CNN announced that CBD cures heroin addiction. And the editors of Leafly figured out how to combat the opioid crisis with medical cannabis two years prior.

    After 20 years, recovery had finally become routine. As a cannabis journalist; as an editor in chief — so had my lies.

    Some lies were easy. Weekly therapy appointments usually coincided with editorial meetings or deadlines. I worked from home, my boss was lax, and anyway, I kept hours around the clock. Monthly visits to my psych and 30-day Suboxone refills upped the number of undisclosed appointments I logged, but still, no one seemed to care.

    On assignment was a different story. I covered cannabis expos or dispensary openings — events where the drug laws were lax and the supply was liberal. At a hotel in Hell’s Kitchen, I spent three nights alone avoiding networking galas and after-parties hosted by music moguls turned industry entrepreneurs. In the world’s largest dispensary off the Las Vegas strip, I dodged more questions than I asked when leaving empty-handed. With hand waves and head shakes and less-than-assertive no’s, I passed over pot by lying about my sobriety.

    But face to face with Justin “Bong King,” there was nowhere to hide — no hotel room to run to, no door from which to make a quick exit. There was a crowd around us, boxing us in as he finished his gram smoking demonstration. I shook his hand and stumbled over my words as I signed off the segment on camera.

    It was either a contact high or placebo effect, or maybe just panic anticipating the piss test I would take in the next few days.

    Intensive Outpatient: 12 Steps and Scoring Drugs

    When I had about two months left in my treatment program, I walked out of group for good. It was an intensive outpatient program; a six-month IOP run by Philly’s NHS that championed the Big Book and 90 days. For a minute it worked, but it’s drug rehab mired in a puritan past. The 12 steps are great, but they shouldn’t be a front-line defense.

    Besides, all I did there was make friends and score drugs. Thirty addicts in a room is an excellent opportunity to network and learn.

    By Easter Sunday that year, I felt broken. I was in a dirty motel on Route 1, hopped up on Benzedrex cottons and a $60 baggie of hex-en I purchased online from China. After 20 years of addiction, I had no drug of choice, save for anything that made me high.

    My wife and kids back home slept together in one bed, a little less worried than the last time I disappeared. I was out of work and estranged from everyone. My best friend joined AA and realized I was one of his people, places, and things.

    All I had was my family, and I was losing them too.

    One lie allowed my addictions to grow without the worry of what would happen tomorrow. It’s the lie I told myself when I stole my ex-wife’s Dilaudid two days after her shoulder surgery. It’s the lie that made me laugh when I snorted enough Adderall to make my nose blue. And it’s the same lie that made me indignant when my ex-girlfriend’s brother became angry that I was a sloppy drunk in front of his small children.

    On the Monday after Easter, I drove home before sunrise. It was dark and muggy and difficult to see through my tears and dilated pupils. When I got home, I faced my wife and children and ended the lie that had followed me through two decades of addiction.

    “I can’t stop,” I whispered. That week, I discussed MAT options with my doctor. I’ve been in recovery since that day.

    Cannabis as the Magic Bullet for the Opioid Crisis?

    Tyler Sash won the Super Bowl in his rookie year with the New York Giants. At the time, he didn’t know he only had a few years left to live. A sixth-round draft pick out of Iowa, he overdosed on a combination of methadone and hydrocodone at the age of 27.

    “[He] asked if he could smoke marijuana for his pain like the other players,” recalled his one-time girlfriend, former Miss Iowa and reality-show contestant Jessica VerSteeg. I interviewed VerSteeg when she was promoting a new blockchain-bitcoin something-or-other product in the cannabis space. She recounted Sash’s tragic tale during our interview, explaining how it became the backbone of her business.

    “I wanted to change the way that other people saw cannabis,” she said.

    VerSteeg’s article drew in readers, as did most CEO and celebrity interviews. Her story reminded me of how lonely my secrecy about my recovery had become. I often wished I could reach out and say that I understood. There are millions of people with substance use disorders, and we’re all so alone.

    But like most of the executive class in the cannabis industry, her hot take on opioids ended up being bullshit. Conventional wisdom in the cannabis industry had run somewhat amok on this topic, and it forced me, I felt, into compromising everything.

    There was the DEA agent who was so disgusted with opioids that he became a cannabis executive. Without irony, he told me that more research would prove the plant’s medicinal value. The head of an “innovation accelerator” in my city held a conference on the role of medical cannabis in the opioid crisis. He quoted research showing that states with medical cannabis laws have lower rates of opioid overdose deaths. Cannabis, they were convinced, would solve the opioid epidemic.

    But Where’s the Evidence?

    “Morphine, when it was introduced, was promised to cure what they called alcoholism at the time,” Dr. Keith Humphreys told me. A professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, he’s also worked at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under Presidents Bush and Obama. “Then, people got addicted to morphine, and cocaine was introduced.”

    He continued: “In general, there’s been this enthusiasm of if we just add a different class of addictive drug on top then that will drive the other addictions out. Generally, what happens is we get more addiction to that drug, and we still have the original problem.”

    I spoke with Dr. Humphreys after reading his research on cannabis laws and opioid overdose mortality rates. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he found the correlation to be spurious at best. It’s alarming — though not unsurprising — to see the industry ignore his findings. Several states, including Pennsylvania, where I live, approved opioid use disorder as a qualifying condition for medical cannabis.

    “I couldn’t recommend something medically without clinical trials, well-controlled by credible groups [and] checked for safety,” Dr. Humphreys said. He explained that in the case of cannabis, there was little more than these state-level correlational studies. “None of that has been done.”

    “I’m amazed and disappointed that we don’t care more about people who are addicted to heroin [and other] opioids, that we would wave through something like [medical cannabis] without making sure that it will help people, not hurt them,” he continued, noting that cannabis has shown no efficacy as either a replacement for or an adjunct to any MAT therapy.

    Listening to Dr. Humphreys made me realize how little I stand up for what I believe. Sometimes, when you’re an addict and you lie so much, you lose any sense of truth.

    Tyler Sash’s family asked Jessica VerSteeg to stop using his name to promote her business. According to a report in the Des Moines Register, they didn’t want his name associated with drugs anymore, neither opioids nor marijuana. VerSteeg refused, repeating the story she told me to several news outlets.

    For two years, I wrote about and reported on the emerging cannabis industry while hiding my ongoing recovery. In print and online, I preached cannabis while practicing therapy and Suboxone.

    Even in recovery, you can still have regrets.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Mexico May Legalize Marijuana by Fall of 2019

    Mexico May Legalize Marijuana by Fall of 2019

    Polls currently show that 80% of the public in Mexico support legalization efforts.

    Mexico may join a growing list of countries with full legalized access to marijuana when lawmakers convene in May to draft a regulation bill that may take effect in late 2019.

    A key committee member of the country’s Senate Justice Committee, which has been tasked with reworking existing marijuana laws in the wake of the 2018 Supreme Court decision to strike down a ban on cannabis consumption, was quoted in a newsletter posted by the Senate that the committee will use an upcoming recess in May to finalize the bill prior to the Supreme Court’s deadline of October 2019.

    Polls currently show that 80% of the public in Mexico support legalization efforts.

    Senate Justice Committee chairman Ramon Menchaca Salazar said that his group will “take advantage of the recess period,” which takes place May 1 to May 30, to finalize legislation, and has already met with Mexico’s attorney general to discuss the proposed bill.

    “Canada already decriminalized, and marijuana is decriminalized in several states of the United States,” said former senator Olga Sanchez Cordero, who now serves as Mexico’s interior minister. “What are we thinking? We are going to try to move forward.”

    Mexico legalized medical marijuana in 2017, but broad legalization efforts were stymied until the Supreme Court decision, which was the fifth such ruling against the recreational pot ban since 2015. Five amparos, or federal injunctions, must be successfully filed before national law can be changed in Mexico, and the Supreme Court ruled on the fifth and final such effort on October 31, 2018, which declared the ban unconstitutional.

    Marijuana Moment stated that the Senate Health Commission held a hearing on marijuana law reform earlier this month, where lawmakers testified about the realities of regulating such a market. Among the benefits cited were improvements to public health through improvements to production and distribution of cannabis. Regulation could also help curb the violence which, according to legalization supporters, claimed more than 230,000 lives in the country’s fight against drug cartels.

    Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, who serves as executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, issued a press release which stated that “Mexico will demonstrate regional leadership and take an important step towards reforming the misguided policies that have caused such devastating harm in recent decades.”

    As the Motley Fool noted, legalization in Mexico could make the country the largest marijuana market in the world. Population numbers currently hover around 132 million – more than triple that of Canada, which in 2018, reported that one in six adults used marijuana.

    The Motley Fool also noted that if a similar number of adults in Mexico bought legal cannabis, the country could not only pass sales figures in Canada but also California, the fifth largest economy in the world.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Fewer Employers Screening For Marijuana Use

    Fewer Employers Screening For Marijuana Use

    Employers are less willing to limit their pool of qualified applicants by screening for personal marijuana use.

    As marijuana becomes legal in more places, fewer employers are screening potential applicants for cannabis use.

    “We’ve seen that companies have to adapt with what happens with legislation within the country,” Lauren Lewis, a recruiter in Buffalo, New York, told WKBW News.

    According to WKBW’s report, about 21 percent of the U.S. workforce uses cannabis regularly, defined as once or twice per month. That means that employers who disqualify people who use the drug can really reduce their pool of applicants.

    “You can limit yourself from a lot of potential employees by not allowing it,” Lewis said.

    While employers are more likely to disregard cannabis use outside of work hours, being intoxicated on the job is still unacceptable. However, certain industries take a harder line toward any cannabis use. Federal contractors and the federal government, for example, are required to maintain a cannabis-free workplace.

    Certain jobs, like those in which people are operating heavy machinery, may be more likely to care about cannabis use, Lewis said. “Because they have really need their cognitive function to perform the position,” she added.

    “Really a lot of companies are really walking a thin line. There is still a lot of gray area regarding marijuana use in the workplace and drug testing for it,” Lewis said.

    This is especially complicated when a person is using medical marijuana. People who use medical cannabis have argued that denying them for a job or firing them over use violates the Americans With Disabilities Act.

    In New Jersey a judge recently ruled that employers cannot fire people who test positive for medical marijuana. “The sweeping effect is you can no longer say, ‘You (tested) positive — you are outta here,’” Maxine Neuhauser, an employment expert, told NJ.com.

    The ruling shows that the issue of cannabis use is not black and white, even though marijuana remains entirely illegal at the federal level.

    “There had been a general belief that since marijuana is illegal under federal law, employers would not have to accommodate its use by employees, even if they had a prescription for it and using it legally under state law,” Neuhauser said. “This appellate case very strongly came down in the opposite direction following the lead of other states confronted with the same issue.”

    Lewis said that employers are realizing they need to have a more in-depth conversation about cannabis.

    “We have to make sure they are aware and start thinking about thinking a little more open mindedly,” she said.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Marijuana as Harm Reduction: Chip Z'Nuff on the Medical Promise of Cannabis

    Marijuana as Harm Reduction: Chip Z'Nuff on the Medical Promise of Cannabis

    The movement was a pro-pot culture crusade—a coming out for stoners in the entertainment industry that had everything to do with harm reduction principles.

    The first time I grasped harm reduction for drug addicts (the idea that abstinence isn’t feasible for everyone so we’d better find a way to reduce mortality and damage), I was 35 and sharing a joint with two other writers—a decades-clean speed freak and a 12-stepping alcoholic. As for me? Everything, but heroin and pharmaceutical amphetamines have caught me the hardest (knock on wood that they’re never dethroned). Mid-joint, one of them asked me if I thought other people smoked as much as us.

    Not unless they’re avoiding something else, I said. Puff puff pass.

    The first time I experienced harm reduction, though, I was 19 and playing fly-on-the-wall in a rock star’s dining room. It was 1994 on the Irish south side of Chicago. I’d moved into a teenage crash pad where rumor was Enuff Z’nuff—a late eighties Chicago scene staple gone national; a band whose glam exterior lumped them in with acts like Poison and Skid Row while their vibe and melodies telegraphed Cheap Trick and Beatles—lived on the corner. After several weeks of reconnaissance to ferret out exactly where they lived, I was sent to ask them—the rock star strangers—for beer.

    They turned out to be Chip Z’nuff, singer, bassist, and original founding member of the band. He answered through an open screen door in his signature rasp: Well I don’t really like alcohol. It’s not good for you, but do you want to get stoned?

    Today, when I remind him of the exchange, he laughs a little.

    “Good,” he says, “I must have been in a good place then.”

    It’s been 25 years since I saw Chip Z’nuff and I’m a card-carrying medical cannabis patient now, a chronically sad trauma survivor with years of hard drug abuse and sobriety behind me. Spurts of hyper-sexual behavior and paranoia keep my psychiatrist and I discussing a secondary bipolar diagnosis, but we’re also not convinced I’m not just an analytical exhibitionist. All I had before was the trauma.

    I’ve come to talk with Chip about weed and advocacy, his stance on medicinal usage of marijuana.

    Illinois’ medical cannabis pilot program is in a growth phase. On his way out, Governor Bruce Rauner opened up access to include those Illinois residents who have been prescribed opioid medications, and new Governor J.B. Pritzker campaigned in no small way on the promise of bringing recreational marijuana to the Land of Lincoln.

    It’s a sunny Friday afternoon in Blue Island, still on Chicago’s south side but with a Hispanic flavor. Hilly in places, it sits on a channel of the Calumet River. Appropriately, a calumet is a North American peace pipe.

    “I’m a Cannabis Cup judge for High Times Magazine,” Chip says. We’re talking at his kitchen table about his longstanding, loud but peaceful weed advocacy. “They would always pick celebrities—musicians, rockstars, whatever you want to call it—and we’d fly over to Amsterdam and judge the marijuana in the different coffee shops. Whoever had the best shops and best pot would win. So I would go out there, and I did it with a bunch of different guys—Anthrax, Sebastian Bach, Patti Smith, a lot of cool artists—wanting to be a part of the movement because it was so powerful.”

    The movement was a pro-pot culture crusade—a coming out for stoners in the entertainment industry that had everything to do with harm reduction principles.

    “I got signed when I was about 25. My manager at the time was a guy named Herbie Herbert. He used to manage Journey, Roxette, Mr. Big, Steve Miller—bands that were all successful and sold millions of records. He used to tell me about growing up around the marijuana industry. He came from San Francisco and said that a lot of the artists were switching from alcohol and cocaine to pot, because it was easier on you. [The artists] seemed to feel better, were giving better shows and it wasn’t taking a toll on their bodies. Then I started reading up on pot and [Herbie] started teaching me about the medicinal stuff, the difference between CBD and THC. The guy was a genius. A six-trick pony. So I started studying up on it. [Medical cannabis] was a wave of the future that my manager knew about 20 years before it happened.”

    The current zeitgeist and loosening laws have everything to do with those years. The nineties, in turn, had been a response to the previous decade. Reagan’s drug war propaganda failed to differentiate between cocaine and cannabis—it was all the same enemy in the ads—but the crack epidemic made it clear that some drugs take a heavier toll on users than others. The public rejected the false equivalence. While celebrities rated weed in Amsterdam, Dazed and Confused announced Hollywood’s new stance on pot, hip hop culture flowed into the mainstream, and the leader of the free world quipped that he “didn’t inhale” live on television.

    In 1994, I was an undiagnosed ball of anxiety. I was a Lollapalooza Kid—a subset of Generation X that raved, rocked, and Rainbow Gathered in tandem while digging on Wu-Tang Clan and dancing to Front 242. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment where four, sometimes five of us slept on Tetris-ed floor mattresses in one room. Occasionally a ska band slept over. I was sexually assaulted in that place twice—once by a visitor, once by a roommate—and my only suicide attempt happened there as well.

    This is why I remember so many details of my quick stint (just a few months) as Chip’s neighbor. Because the kind of damage that writes books and overdoses was going down. But sitting at his table at age 43, interviewing my old friend for an article on reducing harm, these aren’t the things I remember.

    I’m recalling peace signs everywhere—it’s a part of their logo—and a Jane’s Addiction poster on one of the walls. Soft light. Warm skunk smoke hanging above everyone’s heads and a white cat with a full tail I used to pet while I watched the stream of strippers, strummers, and random hangers-on getting high. There were no hard drugs there. Just weed. And music.

    Chip’s voice is still raspy, and he’s talking about the medicine in marijuana.

    “Is it for everybody? I’m not so sure it is. I know from personal use and watching people around me, though, that alcoholics who start using it have gotten off of alcohol. That’s a great thing right there. Some people just can’t be on anything because it triggers other stuff. But anybody who’s sick, who has a debilitating illness, I think deserves to have the right to take cannabis.

    “I’ve got a friend of mine and she had MS,” he says. “She’d go through these tremors. She had problems speaking too. One minute she would be talking, then you couldn’t understand anything she was saying, but if she took a couple hits of pot she could speak so eloquently and perfect—it really helped her in a lot of ways. You can get on the internet and take a look at these success stories of people who have gone through terrible, terrible moments medicinally and have found a different way than what the doctors were prescribing to them. They turn their lives around and they owe it to marijuana in some capacity. I see that and go, ‘There’s a reason that God provides this plant for us on the earth. It wasn’t just to look at a beautiful plant.’ Is it for everybody? No. But for most? I say, could be.”

     

    What’s your stance on medical (or recreational) marijuana? Let us know in the comments!

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Drugs That Look Like Children’s Candy Discovered By Georgia Police

    Drugs That Look Like Children’s Candy Discovered By Georgia Police

    The cartoon-shaped pills were molded in the likeness of Homer Simpson, the Minions and Hello Kitty.

    Popular cartoon characters in the form of brightly colored candy are actually hidden receptacles for drugs, says the Hapeville Police Department in Georgia.

    The cartoon-shaped pills were molded in the likeness of iconic cartoon characters like Homer Simpson, Hello Kitty, and the Minions.

    The Hapeville Police Department Cpl. Jason Dyer wrote a Facebook post updating the community on the “major bust,” as reported by The State.

    The bust—conducted by the Hapeville Criminal Investigation Division—included cash, firearms (including a stolen gun), suspected marijuana, pills, cannabis lollipops, and suspected powder cocaine.

    Both the cartoon-shaped, unspecified “pills” and the lollipops were designed to look like children’s candy, prompting the Hapeville police to ask community leaders such as teachers and parents to be on the lookout for suspicious goodies.

    The Facebook post by the Hapeville Police Department prompted a few commenters who felt the police department was wasting its time on what one called, “stripper money,” apparently referring to the piles of dollar bills in the photo. Other citizens were grateful to the police department for its hard work.

    This bust comes a month before Halloween, a time when parents might feel a little paranoid about the candy kids are getting a hold of. Old stories of tampering with Halloween candy might come to mind, but in general, candy tampering has not been a real danger for American children.

    In 2017, a major drug bust in Atlanta included meth lollipops shaped like flowers. While concerns were that drug dealers were targeting children, drug policy expert Bill Piper of the Drug Policy Alliance disagreed.

    “It’s easy for people to fall for this marketing to children because there’s this misconception that drug dealers are standing on the street corner handing out free drugs,” Piper told The Washington Post. “Adults don’t want nasty-tasting stuff either. We especially find in the flavored meth, a lot of that turned out to be flavoring for adults.”

    In addition, drugs that look like candy are easier to move throughout communities.

    That being said, the Channel Islands has a Halloween candy safety tip page on its website that is worth a visit for parents. One tip states that parents should tell their children not to open or consume any non-commercially packaged candies or foods on Halloween night.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Using Marijuana to Treat Opioid Addiction

    Using Marijuana to Treat Opioid Addiction

    When I’m on marijuana, the thought of injecting toxic drugs into my body seems totally unhealthy and unappealing.

    If you believe that medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder (OUD) is wrong because it’s “just substituting one drug for another,” then you’re really not going to like this article. It’s not about one of the three major forms of MAT approved for opioid addiction: buprenorphine, methadone, or naltrexone. It’s about another medication, which does not cause a physical dependency, nor does it contribute to the 175 drug overdose deaths that take place each day in the United States. It has fewer harmful side effects than most other medications, and has even been correlated with a reduction in opioid overdose rates. Nonetheless, it is more controversial than MAT and, in most states, less accessible. In fact, Pennsylvania is the only state that has approved its use for OUD—and only as of May 17, 2018. In New Jersey, it was recently approved to treat chronic pain due to opioid use disorder.

    The medication I’m describing is, of course, marijuana.

    Abstinence-based thinking has dominated the recovery discussion for quite some time. Since Alcoholics Anonymous began in the 1930s, the general public has associated addiction recovery with a discontinuation of all euphoric substances. Historically, that thinking has also extended to medication-assisted treatment, even though MAT is specifically designed not to produce a euphoric high when used as prescribed by people with an already existing opioid tolerance. The bias against MAT is finally beginning to lift; there is now even a 12-step fellowship for people using medications like methadone or buprenorphine. But marijuana, which is definitely capable of producing euphoria, is still under fire as an addiction treatment.

    In addition to the ingrained abstinence-only rule, another reason that most states don’t approve the use of marijuana for OUD is that there is little to no research backing its efficacy. Even in Pennsylvania, the recent addition of OUD to the list of conditions treatable by marijuana is temporary. Depending in part on the results of research performed by several universities throughout the state, OUD could lose its medical marijuana status in the future. And other states that have tried to add it have failed, including Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New Mexico. It’s not that any research has shown marijuana doesn’t work for OUD. There simply has not been much—if any—full-scale research completed that says it does.

    But street wisdom tells a different story. Jessica Gelay, the policy manager for the Drug Policy Alliance’s New Mexico office, has been fighting to get OUD added as a medical marijuana qualifying condition in New Mexico since 2016. Although she recognizes that research on the topic is far from robust, she believes cannabis has a real potential to help minimize opioid use and the dangers associated with it.

    “Medical cannabis can not only help people get rest [when they’re in withdrawal],” says Gelay, “it can also help reduce nausea, get an appetite, reduce anxiety and cravings…it helps people reduce the craving voice. It helps people gain perspective.” I can relate to Gelay’s sentiment, because that’s exactly what marijuana does for me.

    I am five years into recovery from heroin addiction. I don’t claim the past five years have been completely opioid free, but I no longer meet the criteria for an active opioid use disorder. Total abstinence does not define my recovery. I take one of the approved drugs for OUD, buprenorphine, but as someone who also struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as the result of physical and sexual assault, I experience emotional triggers that buprenorphine doesn’t address, leaving me vulnerable to my old way of self-medicating: heroin. But what does help me through these potentially risky episodes? Marijuana. For me, ingesting marijuana (which I buy legally from my local pot shop in Seattle, Washington) erases my cravings for heroin. It puts me in touch with a part of my emotional core that gets shut down when I am triggered. When I’m on marijuana, the thought of injecting toxic drugs into my body seems totally unhealthy and unappealing—probably the way it seems to someone who doesn’t have an opioid use disorder. It’s not a cure-all, but it stops me from relapsing.

    High Sobriety is a rehabilitation program based out of Philadelphia that provides cannabis-based recovery for addiction, with a focus on addiction to opiates. Founder Joe Schrank, who is also a clinical social worker, says that treatment should be about treating people where they are, and for people with chronic pain or a history of serious drug use, that can often mean providing them a safer alternative—one that Shrank, who does not personally use marijuana, says is not only effective, but even somewhat enjoyable.

    “[Cannabis forms] a great therapeutic alliance from the get-go. Like, we’re here with compassion, we’re not here to punish you, we want to make this as comfortable as we possibly can, and the doctor says you can have this [marijuana]. I think it’s better than the message of ‘you’re a drug addict and you’re a piece of shit and you’re going to puke,’” says Schrank.

    People have been using this method on the streets for years, something I observed during my time in both active addiction and recovery. Anecdotally, marijuana’s efficacy as a withdrawal and recovery aid is said to be attributed to its pain-relieving properties, which help with the aches and pains of coming off an opioid, as well as adding the psychological balm of the high. The difference between opiated versus non-opiated perception is stark, to say the least. The ability to soften the blow of that transition helps some users acclimate to life without opioids. Even if the marijuana use doesn’t remain transitional—if someone who was formerly addicted to heroin continues to use marijuana for the rest of his or her life instead—the risk of fatal overdose, hepatitis C or HIV transmission through drug use, and a host of other complications still go down to zero. Take it from someone who has walked the tenuous line of addiction: that’s a big win.

    Marijuana may also be able to help people get off of opioid-based maintenance medications. Although there is no generalized medical reason why a person should discontinue methadone or buprenorphine, many people decide that they wish to taper off. Sometimes this is due to stigma; friends or family members who insist, wrongly, that people on MAT are not truly sober. Too often, it’s a decision necessitated by finances.

    For Stephanie Bertrand, detoxing from buprenorphine is a way for her to fully end the chapter of her life that included opioid addiction and dependency. Bertrand is a buprenorphine and medical marijuana patient living in Ontario, Canada. She is prescribed buprenorphine/naloxone, which she is currently tapering from, and 60mg monthly of marijuana by the same doctor. She says that marijuana serves a dual purpose in her recovery. It was initially prescribed as an alternative to benzodiazepines, a type of anxiety medicine that can be dangerous, even fatal, when combined with opioids like buprenorphine. The anxiety relief helps her stay sober, she says, because she’d been self-medicating the anxiety during her active addiction. She now also uses a strain that is high in cannabidiol (CBD), the chemical responsible for many of cannabis’ pain relieving properties, to help with the aches and discomfort that come along with her buprenorphine taper. She says the marijuana has gotten her through four 2mg dose drops, and she has four more to go.

    Bertrand would not have the same experience if she were living in the United States. MAT programs in the States tend to disallow marijuana use, even in states where it has been legalized. But studies tell us this shouldn’t really be a concern. Two separate studies, one published in 2002 and the other in 2003, found that MAT patients who used cannabis did not show poorer outcomes than patients who abstained. Although this reasoning alone doesn’t mean marijuana helps with recovery, these findings set the groundwork for future research.

    Do the experiences of people like me and Bertrand represent a viable treatment plan for opioid use disorder? It will likely be a few years before we have the official data. Until then, it’s high time we stop demonizing people in opioid recovery who choose to live a meaningful life that includes marijuana.

    View the original article at thefix.com