“Is marijuana a secret weapon against opioid epidemic?”
Important sentences: “According to research from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Maron explains, the majority of people who use marijuana do not go on to use harder drugs. Meanwhile, nearly half of young people who inject heroin first abused prescription opioids. University of Georgia public policy professor W. David Bradford has studied how legal medical marijuana impacts prescription use by enrollees of Medicare, the federal health insurance program for seniors and the disabled. “What we found … was significant reductions in prescription use, most notably among pain medications, and the largest plurality of those would be opiates,” he says.”
