Study Finds Lower Opioid Deaths in Counties Where Cannabis Is Legal

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• New research found that U.S. counties with more legal cannabis dispensaries had lower rates of opioid-related deaths.
• Opioids are a class of drugs that include heroin, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, and prescription pain relievers such as oxycodone, codeine, and morphine.
• However, because of the way the study was designed, the researchers can’t show that the dispensaries were directly responsible for the lower opioid-related deaths.

U.S. counties with legal cannabis dispensaries had lower numbers of opioid-related deaths between 2014 and 2018, including deaths due to synthetic opioids, finds a study published last week in The BMJ.

During the last year of this study, 46,802 people died of an opioid overdose in the United States. Two-thirds of these deaths were due to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

More recent data suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the opioid crisis in the United States, with synthetic opioid deaths increasing more than 38 percent from June 2019 to May 2020, reports the CDC.

However, experts caution that the new study suffers from the same limitations as other ecological, or population-level, cannabis studies, and the data used for the analysis is already several years old.