Vancouver: free cannabis to combat opioid overdoses

The Foundation High Hopes of Vancouver offers cannabis to addicts who want to stop taking hard drugs. The clinic opened a year ago as a response to the wave of opioid overdoses ravaging North America. Although illegal, the program has not run into trouble with the authorities, and its results are promising. At the same time, research is corroborating the company's relevance and, in Illinois, cannabis is officially a legal alternative for opioid patients.

The Vancouver program

Sarah Blyth, the program's president, explains that the initiative stems from interviews with opioid users during which she observed the urgent need to provide a solution for these people in distress. «It gives them an alternative to the drugs they buy on the street. It's safe and it can reduce the pain,» explains Sarah. The organizers collected donations from patients enrolled in Health Canada's legal medical cannabis program and from «grey market» dispensaries.

The clinic provides addicts with free or very inexpensive cannabis as well as cannabis and CBD oils to enable them to substitute for opioids. CBD oil is renowned for its anxiolytic, analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties. At the same time, the program offers to test drug samples for the presence of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic analgesic 100 times more potent than morphine, which causes overdoses. According to the organizers, the program has been effective: of the 100 people registered since it began, at least 50 % have reduced their consumption of hard drugs, and 25 % have stopped altogether.

The war on opioids

While cannabis was considered by many to be a gateway drug to hard drugs, here the pattern is reversed: cannabis is a gateway to detoxification. In 2017, 4,000 Canadians died from opioid overdoses. Of these 4,000 deaths, almost a third occurred in British Columbia and 232 in Vancouver alone. The people who resort to these goods are often people who are just looking for pain relief, and who have developed an addiction to opioids as a result of medical prescriptions. Provincial authorities are currently prosecuting 40 pharmaceutical companies for misleading marketing campaigns that presented opioid drugs as less addictive than other painkillers.

In the USA, the scourge of opioids is even more prevalent, and cannabis is increasingly seen as a possible alternative to opioid prescriptions, particularly in states that have legalized medical cannabis. In Illinois, Governor Bruce Rauner has just signed a law extending the medical cannabis program, which previously authorized only certain pathologies, to make it accessible to people on opioid prescriptions.

These initiatives make sense in view of the results of preliminary research conducted by the University of British Columbia. Dr Milloy, in charge of the study, explains: «It seems that cannabis use is a kind of a priori risk reduction strategy for people who are trying to control or change their use of other drugs». The study, soon to be published, suggests that opioid users who smoke cannabis once a day are less likely to overdose. Similar results had already been found with alcohol, a study showed that cannabis could counterbalance or at least limit some of the harmful effects of alcohol consumption. The UBC team will soon be launching clinical trials to back up these findings with scientific evidence.