When Pot Is Legal, Prescriptions for Pain, Depression, Anxiety and Sleep Drop

By Robert Preidt HealthDay Reporter
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, April 20, 2022 (HealthDay News) — When folks have authorized entry to marijuana, they’re much less prone to take sure pharmaceuticals, new analysis suggests.

U.S. states the place leisure marijuana is authorized have seen massive drops in the usage of pharmaceuticals for ache, despair, anxiousness, sleep, psychosis and seizures, the researchers discovered.

“These outcomes have necessary implications,” mentioned examine co-author Shyam Raman. He is a doctoral scholar within the School of Public Policy at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

“The reductions in drug utilization that we discover may result in important value financial savings for state Medicaid applications. The outcomes additionally point out a chance to scale back the hurt that may include the harmful unwanted side effects related to some pharmaceuticals,” Raman mentioned in a college information launch.

For the examine, the researchers analyzed U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services information collected from all states from 2011 to 2019, when there was a rise in states that allow private marijuana use.

Currently, leisure marijuana use is authorized in 18 states plus Washington, D.C. Thirty-seven states plus Washington, D.C., have legalized medical marijuana.

Most earlier analysis has centered on how medical marijuana impacts prescription drug use or how authorized leisure pot use impacts opioid demand. This is likely one of the first papers to look at the affect of authorized leisure marijuana on prescription drug use, the examine authors famous.

While there’s a constructive side to their findings, the investigators warned that marijuana use carries dangers, pointing to quite a few research that join it with attainable triggering of tension and psychoses equivalent to schizophrenia.

There’s additionally the prospect that individuals who use marijuana to deal with their well being issues could not see their physician as usually, leading to gaps of their main care, the researchers mentioned.

The examine was printed April 15 within the journal Health Economics .

More data

There’s extra on marijuana on the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.

SOURCE: Cornell University, information launch, April 18, 2022