Life-saving medical marijuana?

Study: Medical pot might reduce drug overdose deaths

This is really going to piss off Kevin Sabet…

Access to medical marijuana appears to have saved thousands of lives over the past few years by reducing accidental overdose deaths from drugs like Vicodin, Percocet and OxyContin, a new study says.

States with legalized medical marijuana saw, on average, 1,700 fewer deaths a year from prescription drugs than they would have otherwise, says the study led by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Oh, wait. It already has…

Kevin Sabet, director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida College of Medicine, said he has many concerns about how the study’s authors collected and analyzed the data. He said they failed to differentiate between states with strict and lax medical marijuana laws, and didn’t examine emergency-room admission and prescription data, and failed to see what impact methadone clinics might have had. He said it’s hard to believe there was such an across-the-board reduction in predicted deaths.

“In today’s supercharged discussions, it could be easily misunderstood by people,” he said

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21 Responses to Life-saving medical marijuana?

  1. Pingback: Life-saving medical marijuana? – Drug WarRant | Health & Beauty

  2. Shawn says:

    The fact that Marijuana is schedule 1 is absurd. Congress needs to represent the people and remove this herb from any and all current classifications.

  3. Rose! says:

    We all already knew this. My mother died of Lewy Body dementia. All the hard antipsychotic and neruo-transmitter drugs they prescribed her, and told me I had to give her, hastened her death and destroyed her body. I begged them to give her medicinal marijuana, but nooooo.

    Who is counting all the elderly with dementia and other neurological diseases whose lives are shortened by the current crop of pharmaceutical drugs they shell out like candy to these patients? These drugs do nothing but kill.

    The US government is criminal for denying citizens the right to medicinal marijuana. Federalize the right now!

  4. Kitty says:

    I agree with Shawn and Rose. The law has no right to regulate the propagation and use of the finest herb known to mankind. Access to this freely growing plant is our birthright as citizens of the world.

  5. claygooding says:

    It is spreading in the media much better but even more important than that it is spreading by kinfolk,,every family has someone they know that uses MMJ and can see it’s working,,especially in the treatment of depression and in competition with pharmaceutical mood elevators and more every day as a pain treatment,arthritis and even Alzheimer/dementia medicine and it is working.
    How long before grandchildren are taking cookies too grandma’s house instead of getting them there.

  6. Pricknick says:

    I’ll try to keep it simple.

    Sabet= Freeloader.

  7. DonDig says:

    .
    What’s to mis-understand?

  8. Kevin throws a few irrelevant facts in, then makes the listener feel as though he understands what everyone else misunderstands.

    What a con. He obviously had no good comeback so he took the bs route.

  9. Servetus says:

    Few understand the pressures Sabet is under to stay the course of marijuana prohibition. Kevin can’t say anything good about marijuana because he might be shunned by his religion, Baha’i.

    Baha’i’s Iranian founder despised marijuana’s effect, probably because cannabis is superior to anything offered by Baha’i. Shunning takes place by subjecting the shunned to strange phone calls in the middle of the night, and by sending circulars and mailers that arrive in the person’s mailbox with nothing in them.

    • allan says:

      probably because cannabis is superior to anything offered by Baha’i

      Ouch! *bows to Servetus*

      cannabis is superior to most of the religions I’ve encountered, there are a couple it compliments quite well…

  10. DdC says:

    The Sabeteur SAM’s Rehabilitation Asylums losing business to free Nature… Don’t fight it Drug Worriers, You’re BUSTED! Up against the wall mfers!
    https://www.facebook.com/222DdC/posts/10152520379397326
    Always nice when official Science catches up…

  11. Freeman says:

    Sebat: He said it’s hard to believe there was such an across-the-board reduction in predicted deaths.

    “In today’s supercharged discussions, it could be easily misunderstood by people,” he said

    Yeah, he finds data that goes against his opinion “hard to believe”, is confused by that, so he assumes it’s simply “misunderstood by people”.

    Sullum has a good article on the study.

    Notably, Bachhuber et al. found that state policies aimed at preventing nonmedical use of opioids, such as prescription monitoring programs, were not associated with lower overdose rates. “If the relationship between medical cannabis laws and opioid analgesic overdose mortality is substantiated in further work,” they write, “enactment of laws to allow for use of medical cannabis may be advocated as part of a comprehensive package of policies to reduce the population risk of opioid analgesics.”

    Won’t THAT harsh Sebat’s mellow!

  12. Francis says:

    So the passage of medical marijuana laws appears to be associated with a 9% reduction in traffic fatalities, a 5% reduction in the suicide rate among the general population (and a nearly 10% reduction among young men), and now we learn, an estimated 1,700 fewer deaths a year from prescription drug overdose? Exactly how much more blood do the dwindling supporters of cannabis prohibition want on their hands before this nonsense comes to its inevitable end?

  13. dancapo says:

    How much you wanna bet if the data showed the opposite result he wouldn’t be calling for caution in interpreting it.

  14. darkcycle says:

    “In today’s supercharged discussions it could be easily be misunderstood by people.”
    Kevin should know a little bit about that, half his job has been misrepresenting other people’s research.

  15. primus says:

    What he really means is that …it could easily be understood by people in a way that is different from how I want them to understand it.

  16. Duncan20903 says:

    .
    .

    Francis’ Law is immutable.

    I do find it amusing when I notice just how quickly the prohibitionist parasites and their sycophants can regurgitate “nanny nanny boo boo…correlation does not prove causation” when they don’t like an event.

    • Francis says:

      Francis’ Law is immutable.

      It didn’t occur to me that this is an example of Francis’ Law. But I guess it is, because according to the drug warriors, greater availability of cannabis “should” be leading more people through the treacherous “gateway” to hardcore drug addiction and eventual death.

      By the way, I was just reading some more about the study, and it sounds like the link is much more than a trivial one:

      The study reveals that states with legal medical marijuana had a 24.8 percent lower annual average painkiller overdose death rate than states without those laws. It also shows that in the years following the legalization of medical cannabis, the association was stronger over time — in the first year of legalizing medical cannabis, painkiller overdose deaths were nearly 20 percent lower in states with the laws than without, and nearly 34 percent lower five years later, on average.

  17. Common Science says:

    It’s almost not fair he is so dependant on so much comfort food these days. But for someone obviously eager for a burden and other difficulties in the face of objective science – Kevin, you are such an animal.

    http://tinyurl.com/mnvmzvp

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