It appears
that an unsuspected consequence of having medical marijuana available is that
the addict population has been able to run successful empirical experiments on
themselves aimed at ending their real addictions including even alcohol.
From this we
find ample evidence that the protocol can be tailored to the addiction and that
it allows the addiction to be tapered off successfully. It also applies across the spectrum to all
sources of addiction.
I suspect that
marijuana closes out the receptors that support addiction as this has been
attempted with other protocols as well. That
it works with variations of Marijuana is a pleasant surprise and well worth
been formalized under medical management.
Right now it is everyone for himserlf with sound data possibly been
lost.
Addicts
benefit from Vancouver's medicinal marijuana dispensaries
Cannabis
dispensaries offer different strains
of marijuana as treatment for a variety of substance-abuse problems, including
alcoholism, and harder drugs like heroin.
Karuna Health Foundation
president Sacha Canow maintains that a variety of substance-abuse problems,
including alcoholism, can be alleviated with different strains of cannabis.
TRAVIS LUPICK
“I was an addict for at least 20 years. Heroin, cocaine, and
every kind of pill I could,” he told the Georgia Straight at a coffee shop on East Hastings Street. “But it’s been eight years and I
haven’t gone back to hard stuff.”
Asked how he got clean, Alleyne proudly revealed a small tin
case with three large joints inside.
“Ever since the very day that I started marijuana, it took away
my cravings,” he explained. “It became my replacement. Marijuana is like my
methadone.
“It’s a reverse gateway drug!” Alleyne added with a laugh.
Alleyne, a social worker in the Downtown
Eastside, said he sees a lot of people using cannabis to help them deal with
addictions to harder drugs.
A number of cannabis dispensary operators the Georgia Straightmet with for this
story reported the same. Healing Tree on East Hastings and Karuna Health
Foundation on Victoria Drive, for example, both estimated that 15 to 20 percent
of the patients they see are coming in specifically for assistance with
addictions to harmful substances. Those include heroin and other opiates,
cocaine, alcohol, and prescription medications such as the benzodiazepine
family of antidepressants.
At Karuna Health Foundation, the society’s president, Sacha
Canow, told the Georgia
Straight that people are using cannabis as a treatment for
addiction because it helps them manage cravings, minimize withdrawal symptoms, and
alleviate some health problems associated with hard-drug use.
“In most cases, they’re killing an opiate addiction or a
synthetic-opioid addiction, so OxyContin, heroin, Dilaudid, methadone—they are
probably the most common,” he said. “It’s not like we don’t see other
addictions, but those are the most common for Vancouver.”
Canow ran through addictive substances and the corresponding
marijuana strains he recommends for each one.
For alcohol, a depressant, Canow suggested an indica or heavy
kush, and usually in the form of an edible. For cocaine, a stimulant where the
craving is mental, he advised a strong sativa, which isn’t always easy to find,
he cautioned. And for heroin and other opiates, Canow recommended a heavy
indica, heavy kush, or phoenix tears, an oil extract high in cannabidiol (CBD),
a compound understood to have beneficial health effects.
“Basically, what they’re trying to do is medicate themselves so
heavily that by the time the opiate comes out of their body, they don’t feel it
as much,” he said. “You can do that with marijuana, but you’d definitely have
to do it with something potent, like phoenix tears.”
In the Downtown Eastside, the Healing Tree reported that at
least a fifth of its medicinal-marijuana patients are consciously using
cannabis as a substitute for illicit drugs, with many more likely substituting
marijuana unconsciously, and that crack and other stimulants are the most
common drugs their patients are struggling with.
Studies examine cannabis benefits
Marijuana as medicine is still a relatively new concept to
mainstream North America. But much of the academic literature supports
anecdotal reports.
Philippe Lucas, a research affiliate at
the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C., has a natural interest in marijuana
as a tool for harm reduction. In 1995, he was infected with hepatitis
C through tainted
blood he received as a child. Lucas’s doctor advised him to clean up his
lifestyle, and marijuana helped him do that, Lucas said.
“I used cannabis to help deal with the withdrawal effects, mostly of tobacco but also of
alcohol,” he told the Georgia
Straight in a telephone interview. “So my work really dates back to
a personal experience based on the substitution effect.”
According to a forthcoming study Lucas is working on, 86.6
percent of medicinal-marijuana patients surveyed reported using cannabis as a
substitute for at least one other substance. Of that group, the majority—80
percent—said they were using marijuana to get off a prescription drug; 51
percent cited an alcohol addiction; and 32 percent said they were using marijuana in lieu of an
illicit substance such as heroin.
Lucas noted that those
results are consistent with earlier findings hepublished in
October 2013. That study found
similar numbers for marijuana substitution and that respondents were replacing
other drugs with cannabis for three reasons: less withdrawal (67.7 percent), fewer side effects (60.4 percent), and
better symptom management (53.9 percent).
“Cannabis interacts with our endogenous opioid system and, in
terms of dopamine release, the rewards
system,” Lucas
said. “So there are some good biological reasons why cannabis may be an
effective substitute, particularly with pharmaceutical opiates.”
Studies aimed at more specific areas of inquiry are bearing
similar results.
Dr. Jillian
Scavone and colleagues at Thomas Jefferson University sought to better
understand perceived negative impacts of marijuana use on patients enrolled in
methadone maintenance treatment (MMT). What they found, according to a May 2013 paper published by the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry,
is that marijuana could actually be beneficial to methadone users, decreasing
opiate-withdrawal symptoms in MMT patients.
“The present findings may point to novel interventions to be employyed
during treatment for opiate dependence that specifically target
cannabinoid-opioid system interactions,” the report concludes.
Researchers have also
begun exploring how cannabis can assist with addictions to stimulants such as
cocaine and amphetamines. According to a September 2013
paper coauthored by
Université de Montréal clinical researcher Stéphanie Olière,
“Cannabinoids modulate brain reward
systems closely
involved in stimulants addiction, and provide further evidence that the
cannabinoid system could be explored as a potential drug discovery target for
treating addiction across different classes of stimulants.”
Health Canada shirks research
Canada’s Conservative government has made clear it does not
share the private sector’s enthusiasm for marijuana’s potential health
applications.
“Dried marijuana is not
an approved drug or medicine in Canada,” reads a prominent statement on Health
Canada’s website. “The Government of Canada does not endorse the use of
marijuana, but the courts have required reasonable access to a legal source of
marijuana when authorized by a physician.”
Neither Health Canada nor the Canadian Institute for Health
Research made representatives available for interviews on
the topic of medicinal marijuana.
Terry Roycroft, the president of
Vancouver’s Medicinal Cannabis Resource Centre, told the Georgia Straight that the
government is showing more interest in research than it once did but that
private organizations are definitely leading the way.
“We’re hoping that what we’re doing with our own funding is
going to open up doors for additional [government] funding,” he said.
Roycroft revealed that MCRCI recently hired an addiction
specialist and noted that 90 percent of the patients she sees are using
marijuana to help alleviate addictions and related health conditions.
“When you use cannabis, it reacts with your opioid receptors in
conjunction with your endocannabinoid receptors, and what that does is it
allows them to function about 40 percent more effectively,” Roycroft said.
“People are doing this, slowly increasing the use of cannabis and decreasing
the use of the narcotic, to a point where they no longer need the narcotic.”
If the government’s attitudes toward research into the health benefits of medicinal marijuana are changing, that shift isn’t
happening fast enough for everybody.
In 2013, Adolfo
Gonzalez, research coordinator and manager at Eden Medicinal Society,
conducted a small-scale feasibility
study with Dr. Paul Hornby that explored cannabis as
a treatment for addiction to methadone, a synthetic opioid that some doctors
argue is more addictive than heroin.
The results were promising, and Gonzalez has been trying to take
the project to a clinical-trial phase ever since. But he said he hasn’t been
able to receive approval from academic partners’ ethics boards, a problem he
maintains is symptomatic of the government’s lack of support and organizations’
reluctance to look at marijuana as medicine.
“Health Canada is allowing private entrepreneurs to conduct the
studies, but Health Canada itself does not fund or support studies at all,”
Gonzalez said.
In the meantime, he continued, Eden has an ongoing “opiate
substitution assistance program”, which provides patients with
laboratory-manufactured cannabis pills, like those used in the 2013 experiment.
“Those proved to be quite effective for people,” he said, adding
that the program has become so popular it’s now a primary service provided by
Eden’s East Hastings and East Pender Street locations.
“In the Downtown Eastside, pain and addiction are interrelated,
and people are self-medicating with street medications or buying other people’s
over-the-counter drugs,” Gonzalez said. “Marijuana reduces the cravings and it
gets rid of the pain at the same time.”
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