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A new study shoots down the notion that medical marijuana laws can prevent opioid overdose deaths, challenging a favorite talking point of legal pot advocates. Researchers repeated an analysis that sparked excitement years ago. The previous work linked medical marijuana laws to slower than expected increases in state prescription opioid death rates from 1999 to 2010. The original authors speculated patients might be substituting marijuana for painkillers, but they warned against drawing conclusions. (Johnson, 6/10)

Amid the search for solutions to the opioid epidemic, which kills an estimated 130 Americans every day, some argue that increased access to cannabis could reduce this devastating toll. Part of their reasoning? A 2014 paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine reported lower opioid overdose death rates in states with medical marijuana laws. A study published Monday in PNAS contradicts that widely cited paper, raising new questions about whether and how medical marijuana can affect the opioid crisis. (Flaherty, 6/10)

The authors were careful to point out that this finding was only a correlation, an intriguing hint at something that needed further exploration. There was no way to establish whether the availability of medical cannabis in some states protected against overdosing on harder drugs, even if some people used marijuana for pain. Nevertheless, the cannabis industry took up the study to help win passage of medical cannabis laws in more states, even as medical experts expressed skepticism. In a 2018 report, for example, Maryland’s medical marijuana commission found “no credible scientific evidence” that marijuana could treat opioid addiction. (Bernstein, 6/10)

The rate of deaths from opioid overdose increased by 22.7% on average from 1999 to 2017 in states that had legalized medical marijuana, according to the paper published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For the study’s Stanford University authors, the findings suggest that medical-marijuana laws don’t influence the rate of opioid overdoses, and the proportion of the U.S. population that uses medical marijuana, 2.5%, is too small to have a large-scale effect. (Abbott, 6/10)

Legalizing medical marijuana "is not going to be a solution to the opioid overdose crisis," said Shover, a postdoctoral scholar in psychiatry and behavioral sciences. "It would be wonderful if that were true, but the evidence doesn't suggest that it is." Shover and her colleagues reported their findings Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They said it’s unlikely that medical marijuana laws caused first one big effect and then the opposite — any beneficial link was probably coincidental all along. (Johnson, 6/10)

Marijuana has been shown to help ease pain and a few other health problems, yet two-thirds of U.S. states have decided pot should be legal to treat many other conditions with little scientific backing. At least 1.4 million Americans are using marijuana for their health , according to an Associated Press analysis of states that track medical marijuana patients. (Johnson, 6/11)

When states legalize pot for all adults, long-standing medical marijuana programs take a big hit, in some cases losing more than half their registered patients in just a few years, according to a data analysis by The Associated Press. Much of the decline comes from consumers who, ill or not, had medical cards in their states because it was the only way to buy marijuana legally before broad legalization. (Flaccus and Kastinis, 6/11)