{"id":42775,"date":"2017-08-29T05:49:15","date_gmt":"2017-08-29T05:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theaegisalliance.com\/home2\/theaegis\/WP\/?p=42775"},"modified":"2026-08-26T07:13:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T14:13:21","slug":"first-of-its-kind-study-proves-opioid-addiction-can-be-cured-with-cannabis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaegisalliance.com\/fr\/2017\/08\/29\/une-etude-inedite-prouve-que-la-dependance-aux-opioides-peut-etre-guerie-grace-au-cannabis\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Cannabis Help Treat Opioid Addiction? The CBD Science Behind the Craving Breakthrough"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the opioid epidemic grinds on, many of those claiming to seek \u00ab\u00a0solutions\u00a0\u00bb have largely sidelined one of the most promising avenues of research: medical cannabis. When the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA) was being debated in 2016, amendments to study medical cannabis were stripped out before the bill became law.<\/p>\n

That happened despite mounting evidence pointing the other way. A clinical study<\/a> found that vaporized cannabis eased neuropathic pain, and even the federal government’s own National Institutes of Health acknowledged<\/a> that medical marijuana products may play a role in reducing the use of opioids needed to manage pain.<\/p>\n

A growing body of research has linked cannabis access to lower opioid use. Several analyses found that opioid-related harms declined<\/a> in states with legal cannabis, and survey work reported that a large share of cannabis patients<\/a> cut back on or stopped using prescription pills. A widely cited 2017 study<\/a> reported that opioid dependence and overdoses fell in states with medical cannabis programs.<\/p>\n

In January 2017, the National Academies of Sciences<\/a> published a sweeping review of the scientific literature and concluded that one of the most strongly supported uses of cannabis is the treatment of chronic pain \u2014 the very condition that so often serves as the on-ramp to opioid dependence. Yet much of this evidence was ignored by policymakers, while critics have pointed to the role pharmaceutical companies played in fueling the opioid crisis<\/a> in the first place.<\/p>\n

The CBD Breakthrough: How Cannabis Targets Craving<\/h3>\n

The most striking development came from the lab of Dr. Yasmin Hurd, director of the Addiction Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Building on years of preclinical research<\/a> showing that cannabidiol (CBD) reduced heroin-seeking behavior in animals, Hurd’s team ran a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial in people with heroin use disorder. The results were published on May 21, 2019, in the American Journal of Psychiatry.<\/p>\n

In the trial, drug-abstinent participants who had a history of heroin use were given either 400 mg of CBD, 800 mg of CBD, or a placebo. Compared with placebo, CBD significantly reduced both the craving and the anxiety triggered by drug-related cues \u2014 the environmental triggers most strongly tied to relapse. Strikingly, the effect lasted up to seven days after the final dose. CBD also lowered measurable physiological stress responses, reducing elevated heart rate and salivary cortisol levels, and the study reported no serious adverse effects.<\/p>\n

Crucially, CBD does not produce the intoxicating \u00ab\u00a0high\u00a0\u00bb associated with THC, the other major active compound in cannabis. That makes it far harder for prohibitionists to attack on the grounds of impairment, and it can even be extracted from hemp. Because purified CBD is non-intoxicating, CBD-based medicines have gained acceptance even in historically prohibitionist states, where they are used to treat children with intractable epilepsy \u2014 the same active ingredient was approved by the FDA in the medication Epidiolex.<\/p>\n

It is worth being precise about what the science shows. Hurd and her colleagues framed their findings not as a cure but as \u00ab\u00a0significant promise\u00a0\u00bb and \u00ab\u00a0a strong basis for further investigation\u00a0\u00bb of CBD as a treatment option for opioid use disorder. CBD appears to help break the cycle of craving and relapse rather than to instantly erase addiction, and Hurd has since launched larger NIH-funded clinical trials in people with opioid use disorder to test whether those early results hold up at scale.<\/p>\n

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