Okay, let me say right up front that a) I know
that headline is provocative, and b) neither I nor anyone can answer
the question with any certainty given what we know and don’t know so
far about Michael Jackson’s death. But the question needs to be asked.
It needs to be asked because suspicions that prescription painkillers may have been involved in Jackson’s death
are strong enough that the federal Drug Enforcement Administration has
been brought into the investigation. And we know that he had a documented history of battling pain and at least some acknowledged problems with prescription painkillers.
We don’t know yet what pain drugs Jackson was on
or what they were prescribed for. But if he was addicted to
prescription painkillers, that addiction almost certainly started with
legitimate and needed treatment for real pain. And that’s where medical
marijuana might have helped.
We know — repeat, we know — that marijuana can be effective against certain types of pain. As The Lancet Neurology
put it a few years ago, “cannabinoids inhibit pain in virtually every
experimental pain paradigm.” We know that human clinical trials such as
this one have found marijuana to be effective, particularly for neuropathic pain.
And there is considerable evidence that
marijuana and cannabinoids can act synergistically with opioid
painkillers, providing better pain relief at lower doses than either
class of drugs by itself. For example animal studies
have reported that such combination therapy avoids the development of
tolerance and allows effective relief with lowered opioid doses —
avoiding the pattern of escalating doses that can lead to addiction and
overdose risk.
And there is evidence that this same effect occurs in people. For example, in a series of cases reported in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management
(which, alas, you can only access by paying for it — sorry!), patients
on morphine and other narcotics were able to cut their doses roughly in
half when smoked marijuana was added to their regimen.
At MPP, we hear similar stories from patients
all the time: Again and again, patients tell us that use of medical
marijuana allows them to cut back or eliminate the heavy doses of
narcotic painkillers they’d been taking, while obtaining equal or
better relief. There is enough science corroborating these accounts
that they deserve to be taken seriously.
We can’t yet say that medical marijuana could have
saved Michael Jackson, and we may never know that for sure. But there
is simply no reasonable doubt that marijuana can help some chronic pain
patients reduce both their suffering and their consumption of addictive
and potentially deadly narcotics. If the U.S. government acknowledged
that reality instead of denying it, lives could be saved — maybe lots
of them.