This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, April 6, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

Cannabis holds some promise as a way to address opioid overdoses. What that actually looks like in practice isn't yet clear.

Atrien Wilson Poe is a neuroscientist who studies the ability of cannabis to enhance the pain relieving effects of opioids while

minimizing their dangerous side effects. She's an instructor at the

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. What do we know

about how opioids work? What do we know about how opioids work? It's a complicated

question, but we actually know quite a lot. We've been studying opioids for a very long time.

All of my mentors were, you know, deeply embedded in the opioid field,

both for pain relief and on the addiction side of things.

So we understand opioids quite a lot.

We understand their basic pharmacology,

how they interact with their receptors inside of our body.

We have long-term studies about them. So we do understand quite a lot about them.

When I was out in Seattle not long ago, I saw several billboards throughout the city and I'm paraphrasing here but each of them said to some extent to something to the effect of

states that have legalized marijuana have lower rates of opioid addiction.

How fair is that statement?

Well that's a tricky question.

I don't know if cannabis reduces opioid addiction, but it certainly

appears to reduce opioid overdose. So there are a number of studies that have come out that have shown that in states with

cannabis laws that there are on average 23% fewer ER visits for non-fatal

opioid overdoses and then also there's a really landmark study in 2014,

Bach-Huber that demonstrated that a state with a medical cannabis law on average has a reduction in fatal opioid overdoses by about 25%.

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