Medical Marijuana Is An ‘Effective Treatment Option’ For Chronic Pain Patients, Improving Quality Of Life, New Study Shows
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A new study in the journal Pharmacy says that patients with chronic pain who used marijuana for at least one year “exhibited significantly lower healthcare utilization” compared to non-users, reporting fewer visits to urgent care and emergency departments (EDs) as well as a higher quality of life.
Hospitalization rates were also lower among chronic pain patients who used medical marijuana, the report found, though not enough to be statistically significant.
“Exposure [to cannabis] was associated with a 2.0 percentage point reduction in urgent care visits, a 3.2 percentage point reduction in ED visits and fewer unhealthy days per month,” says the report, authored by researchers at the Miami-based cannabis telehealth company Leafwell and George Mason University in Virginia.
“The findings of this study suggest, in line with existing research, that medical cannabis is likely an effective treatment option for patients with chronic pain,” authors wrote. “This underscores the potential for not only [quality of life] gains associated with medical cannabis use, but also positive downstream effects on the healthcare system resulting from treatment.”
“Medical cannabis use was associated with reduced healthcare utilization and improved self-reported [quality of life] among chronic pain patients.”
The self-reported patient data from the study comes from Leafwell, which provides medical marijuana certifications in 36 states.
“The cannabis-exposed group included individuals who had used medical cannabis within the prior year and were seeking recertification of their medical card through Leafwell,” the study explains, “while the unexposed group comprised first-time Leafwell patients who self-reported no cannabis use in the past year.”
In all, the team looked at 5,242 chronic pain patients, including 3,943 with past-year cannabis use and 1,299 who reported no past-year use.
“We looked at a large set of real-world data, where we compared medical cannabis users who we knew used for at least one year and people who had never used cannabis,” lead author Mitchell Doucette explained in an interview with Marijuana Moment. “When we compared those groups, we found that medical cannabis users who had used for at least one year had lower rates of emergency room visits, lower rates of urgent care visits and, importantly, increased quality of life.”
“When we combine those outcomes,” added Doucette, who has a doctorate in health and public policy from Johns Hopkins and is now senior research director at Leafwell, “it suggests that medical cannabis is not only leading to better quality of life for chronic pain patients but, again, potentially better health outcomes.”
Some past studies have looked at quality-of-life changes in medical marijuana patients, while others have looked at healthcare outcomes, he said, “but really this is the first study to kind of connect these two dots.”
That better allows researchers to answer questions such as, “Is that increased quality of life translating into, you know, going to the doctor’s less, going to urgent care less, going to the emergency room less?”
Overall, Doucette said, the picture that’s emerging is that medical marijuana “is a helpful medicinal product for certain groups of people” and that healthcare systems “should try to alleviate access and cost margins for those individuals who it may be too costly of a product for them to access.”
Leafwell is a regular backer of research into medical marijuana, with a number of studies published in recent months.
Earlier this year, for example, a separate study by Doucette and others looked at cannabis as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), finding that medical marijuana—especially non-flower formulations—“represent a cost-effective adjunctive therapy for moderate PTSD under various reimbursement scenarios.”
The findings indicated that given certain assumptions about the efficacy and cost of medical cannabis for PTSD, it would be worthwhile for health insurance providers and other healthcare payors to include coverage of marijuana alongside other standard forms of treatment.
“For the vast majority of types of products, there is pretty solid evidence that medical cannabis is cost-effective,” Doucette told Marijuana Moment at the time, “meaning that…adding these items to [patients’] drug formulary would be advantageous for not only the patient—because of the lowering of the cost—but also advantageous for health insurance.”
That study, published in the journal Clinical Drug Investigation, said products such as edibles, oral solutions and tablets “consistently demonstrated cost-effectiveness” under a standard model of insurers’ willingness to pay.
A separate study by Leafwell published last fall concluded that state-level medical marijuana legalization appeared to significantly reduce health insurance costs. In states with legal medical cannabis, companies paid 3.4 percent less for health insurance premiums compared to where marijuana remained illegal—a savings of about $238 per employee per year.
If all states were to implement medical cannabis programs, that study said, the country could save an estimated $29 billion in health insurance costs annually.
In December, meanwhile, Leafwell authors had a scientific review in the journal Medical Cannabis and Cannabinoids indicating that high-CBD, low-THC cannabis products have the potential to “significantly improve the quality of life” for children with autism and epilepsy. It said the cannabis products also showed “promising results in reducing key symptoms” of other conditions experienced by young people, including cancer—all with mostly “mild, manageable side effects.”
Other research, from authors at DePaul University in Chicago, used Leafwell data to examine what conditions qualify minors for state-legal medical cannabis programs, concluding that younger people enroll in the programs for many of the same reasons that older adults do, including anxiety, PTSD and chronic pain. Other common conditions included insomnia and depression.
Among minor patients—those under 18—cancer and epilepsy were more common reasons for obtaining a medical marijuana recommendation than they were among young adults, ages 18 to 20. Patients in the older age group, meanwhile, were comparatively more likely to cite depression, chronic pain or insomnia as their primary qualifying condition.
While Leafwell has looked at specific conditions, such as PTSD and chronic pain, Doucette said his team’s future research is “a little bit broader,” looking at sleep-related conditions including insomnia, sleep apnea and others.
As for cannabis and chronic pain, meanwhile, a published earlier this year found that more than 8 in 10 patients who used medical marijuana reported it to be a useful tool for pain management.
Published in May in the journal Cureus, the report stemmed from a survey of 129 people who were medical marijuana patients in Pennsylvania between October 2022 and December 2024. It said it “provides important insights into the real-world patterns, perceived efficacy, and cognitive effects of medical cannabis use among individuals with chronic musculoskeletal pain who employ cannabis regularly over extended periods.”
“Over 80 percent of patients who turned to medical cannabis found it effective for managing their pain,” co-author Mohammad Khak, a researcher at the Rothman Opioid Foundation, said in a press release at the time.
Past research has suggested that a variety of cannabinoids—including CBD and others—may help ease pain symptoms. A study published in February, for example, found that marijuana and its cannabinoid components may be useful treatments for various types of chronic pain, in some cases helping to reduce the use of other medications
The paper also said select mixtures of cannabinoids—such as cannabichromene (CBC) and cannabigerol (CBG)—could have other benefits, including minimizing undesirable effects like the psychoactivity of THC.
All told, more than 180 different cannabinoids have now been isolated from the cannabis plant, the report noted, often interacting with different parts of the body. CBD and THC, for example, “have a wide potential for therapeutic effects based on their multiple molecular targets including ion channels, receptors, transporters and enzymes.”
“The two most abundant and studied cannabinoids, THC and CBD, along with an understudied cannabinoid, cannabigerol (CBG), have been shown, in our laboratories, to reduce neuropathic pain in animal models,” authors wrote, recommending that further study “into cannabinoids like THC, CBD and CBG should focus on the optimal therapeutic doses and the effects these cannabinoids can have on the management of chronic neuropathic pain in humans.”
Separate research published earlier this year in the journal Pain found that marijuana was “comparatively more effective than prescription medications” for treating chronic pain after a three-month period, and that many patients reduced their use of opioid painkillers while using cannabis.
The analysis “was able to determine, using causal inference techniques, that use of medical marijuana for chronic pain under medical supervision is at least as effective and potentially more effective in relationship to patients with chronic pain treated by prescription medications (nonopioid or opioid),” said the report, by authors at the University of Pittsburgh, Harvard Medical School and the National Cancer Institute.
A recent federally funded study, meanwhile, found that legalization of marijuana in U.S. states is associated with reduced prescriptions for opioid pain medications among commercially insured adults—indicating a possible substitution effect where patients are choosing to use cannabis instead of prescription drugs to treat pain.
“These results suggest that substitution of cannabis for traditional pain medications increases as the availability of recreational cannabis increases,” authors of that report wrote, noting that there “appears to be a small shift once recreational cannabis becomes legal, but we see stronger results once users can purchase cannabis at recreational dispensaries.”
“Reductions in opioid prescription fills stemming from recreational cannabis legalization may prevent exposure to opioids in patients with pain,” the paper, published in the journal Cannabis, continues, “and lead to decreases in the number of new opioid users, rates of opioid use disorder, and related harms.”
Other recent research also showed a decline in fatal opioid overdoses in jurisdictions where marijuana was legalized for adults. That study found a “consistent negative relationship” between legalization and fatal overdoses, with more significant effects in states that legalized cannabis earlier in the opioid crisis. Authors estimated that recreational marijuana legalization “is associated with a decrease of approximately 3.5 deaths per 100,000 individuals.”
“Our findings suggest that broadening recreational marijuana access could help address the opioid epidemic,” that report said. “Previous research largely indicates that marijuana (primarily for medical use) can reduce opioid prescriptions, and we find it may also successfully reduce overdose deaths.”
“Further, this effect increases with earlier implementation of [recreational marijuana legalization],” it added, “indicating this relationship is relatively consistent over time.”
Another recently published report into prescription opioid use in Utah following the state’s legalization of medical marijuana found that the availability of legal cannabis both reduced opioid use by patients with chronic pain and helped drive down prescription overdose deaths statewide. Overall, results of the study indicated that “cannabis has a substantial role to play in pain management and the reduction of opioid use,” it said.
Yet another study, published in 2023, linked medical marijuana use to lower pain levels and reduced dependence on opioids and other prescription medications. And another, published by the American Medical Association (AMA) last February, found that chronic pain patients who received medical marijuana for longer than a month saw significant reductions in prescribed opioids.
About one in three chronic pain patients reported using cannabis as a treatment option, according to a 2023 AMA-published report. Most of that group said they used cannabis as a substitute for other pain medications, including opioids.
Other research published that year found that letting people buy CBD legally significantly reduced opioid prescription rates, leading to 6.6 percent to 8.1 percent fewer opioid prescriptions.
A 2022 research paper that analyzed Medicaid data on prescription drugs, meanwhile, found that legalizing marijuana for adult use was associated with “significant reductions” in the use of prescription drugs for the treatment of multiple conditions.
A 2023 report linked state-level medical marijuana legalization to reduced opioid payouts to doctors—another datapoint suggesting that patients use cannabis as an alternative to prescription drugs when given legal access.
Researchers in another study, published last year, looked at opioid prescription and mortality rates in Oregon, finding that nearby access to retail marijuana moderately reduced opioid prescriptions, though they observed no corresponding drop in opioid-related deaths.
Other recent research also indicates that cannabis may be an effective substitute for opioids in terms of pain management.
A report published recently in the journal BMJ Open, for instance, compared medical marijuana and opioids for chronic non-cancer pain and found that cannabis “may be similarly effective and result in fewer discontinuations than opioids,” potentially offering comparable relief with a lower likelihood of adverse effects.
Separate research published found that more than half (57 percent) of patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain said cannabis was more effective than other analgesic medications, while 40 percent reported reducing their use of other painkillers since they began using marijuana.
In Minnesota, meanwhile, a state government report this year on chronic pain patients enrolled in the state’s medical marijuana program said recently that participants “are finding a noticeable change in pain relief” within a few months of starting cannabis treatment.
The large-scale study of nearly 10,000 patients also shows that nearly a quarter who were taking other pain relievers reduced the use of those drugs after using medical marijuana.
Another new study on the use of medical marijuana by older patients—age 50 and above—concluded that “cannabis seemed to be a safe and effective treatment” for pain and other conditions.
A separate presentation reviewing research on student athletes’ use of cannabis recently found that marijuana “has demonstrated positive findings as an alternative for pain management among NCAA athletes.”
Yet another study found that 40 percent of military veterans suffering from chronic pain reported using marijuana to treat their symptoms.
Most of them said they use cannabis to deal with pain, mobility and sleep issues, while substantial numbers of veterans also said it helps with PTSD, anxiety and stress. Nearly all participants (98 percent) said healthcare providers should discuss the use of natural products with their patients.
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