Marijuana Over Opioids
Here I am on a Monday sore as hell because I walked ten miles on Saturday and played soccer, basketball, and some new form of pickle ball tennis hybrid. I haven’t been this sore in a long time and I understand that correlation doesn’t mean causation, but anecdotally this is the sorest I’ve been after a workout. I get that my body is also getting older and recovery time is not the same.
With that being said lets do a small dive into why marijuana is better than opioids. first lets talk about addiction. From personal experience using Marijuana daily for almost two years. I’ve been able to stop very easily with no repercussions. I stopped for a month earlier this year and stopping again right now. Honestly I feel as though I’m way more addicted to caffeine than to marijuana as the couple of time I stopped drinking caffeine I started to get headaches. In most cases with all drugs, in order to keep getting that buzz you once had you have to do more and more. This leads me to my next segment overdosing.
Okay so let’s talk overdose. We have reported overdose deaths with caffeine and a study about them as well here . It shows about 92 deaths from caffeine over many years and many studies. This drug has been legal for years as it should, billions of people use caffeine everyday, it seems like a small risk people are willing to take for the drug. “Opioids were involved in 80,411 overdose deaths in 2021 (75.4% of all drug overdose deaths). CDC”. Using Google and Bing the only article I found on an overdose his this one from a coroner in Louisiana here’s the article . I don’t believe that THC was the sole reason for this women dying, but even if you want to say that it seems like caffeine has killed more people than THC. I’m a very big advocate for us doing more studies on the matter, and the University of Mississippi is one of the few pharmacy schools that has been allowed to study this for years, and I believe this is beginning to open up more as marijuana becomes more main stream.
We need more studies on marijuana so we can start verifying things and backing them up with real studies. One study we can start to look at is recovery time marijuana vs opioids. 52% of NFL players have reported to have a prescription to an opioid during there career. This seems like a good place to start, first allowing them the option of marijuana would be a great start. This can than be rolled into studies where the control group are the people who use the opioids. This can also be pushed down to the college level in football as well. Giving athletes the options between taking opioids or marijuana and seeing how there muscles recover after working out would be an interesting both from a scientific stand point and a performance stand point. It would even make sense for college’s to be at the forefront of a lot of these studies as they already have the infrastructure needed in sports, research, and a lot of them have pharmacy schools or medical schools which is what is needed. I’m not saying that marijuana should completely replace opioids as I believe they still have a part to play, they probably have good qualities as well but we’ve overused them.
Which brings me to our last point, we should be careful with marijuana; we need to study it to find out where the real placement of it should be, is it closer to something like caffeine or is it closer to cigarettes. The elephant in the room being lung cancer, this could be mitigated by using gummies instead but these are real things we need to be able to study. This is also why I think it should be lead by universities and not private industry. Look what studies from private industry has done to us in the past. We can look at the cigarette companies; we can look at oil companies and climate change. At the end of the day we need studies, and studies to back up those studies from other parties who don’t have inherent biases. It’s a longer road than most people want to admit, but legalizing marijuana federally could help us fight off the opioid epidemic. It’s the best way to fight off the opioid crisis and slow down opioid deaths and addiction.