Legalizing medical cannabis appears to significantly lessen monetary payments from opioid manufacturers to doctors who specialize in pain, according to recently published research, with authors finding “evidence that this decrease is due to medical marijuana becoming available as a substitute” for prescription painkillers.
“We find MML [medical marijuana legalization] leads opioid manufacturers to decrease direct payments to physicians prescribing opioids,” wrote authors, from the University of Florida, University of Southern California and the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. “Our analyses suggest this shift is due to increased adoption of marijuana for pain management, indicating that opioid manufacturers perceive marijuana as a superior substitute and respond by reducing these payments.”
The study was published late last year in the Journal of the American Statistical Association and was partially funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation. It looked at various financial incentives that opioid drugmakers provide to prescribing doctors—such as consulting fees and travel to conferences—and used a novel method of analysis meant to estimate causal effects from observational data.
“Our analysis finds a significant decrease in direct payments from opioid manufacturers to pain medication physicians as an effect of MML passage,” the report says.
Wreetabrata Kar, an assistant professor of marketing in the SUNY Buffalo’s school of management, co-authored the new study.
“Our findings indicate that medical marijuana is increasingly viewed as a substitute for opioids in chronic pain treatment, with the potential to transform pain management practices and help mitigate the opioid crisis that has profoundly affected communities across the U.S.,” the researcher explained in a press release. “The availability of new pain management options can change the financial dynamics between drug companies and health care providers.”
The team’s analysis found that decreases in direct payments from opioid makers to physicians was higher among physicians “practicing in localities with higher white populations, lower affluence, and a larger proportion of working-age residents.”
“Lower income regions tend to have higher rates of chronic pain and opioid misuse, making them key areas for potential substitution with medical marijuana,” Kar said. “Black patients are also less likely to be prescribed opioids for pain, and younger populations may be more open to alternative treatments, which could explain the different impacts of marijuana legalization in these communities.”
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