NYSAM board members Dr. Melissa Weimer and Dr. Jeffrey Selzer together with Dr. Daniel Schatz, adjunct assistant professor in the departments of Medicine and Population Health at the New York University Langone Health hospital, were recently featured in the opinion section of the Times Union to underscore the importance of evidence-based research for the treatment of opioid use disorder.
From the article:
The push to provide medical cannabis as a singular form of treatment to patients with OUD in New York and other states, such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey, has no demonstrated scientific efficacy. Not only are claims that medical cannabis can help treat addiction unwarranted, a recently released study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that medical cannabis was associated with a 23 percent increase in overdose deaths between 1999 and 2017. This important new study followed patients for a longer time period than earlier research that has been used to argue that availability of medical cannabis reduces opioid overdose rates.
