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The morphine group came in with a pain score of about 35, and on the fifth day, it decreased to 24 - a 33 percent reduction. The oxycodone group came in with an average pain score of about 44, and it reduced to 34 - a drop of 20 percent. Overall, patients showed a significant decrease in their pain.
"This preliminary study seems to imply that people may be able to get away perhaps taking lower doses of the opiates for longer periods of time if taken in conjunction with cannabis," Abrams said.
Opiates are very strong powerful pain medicines that can be highly addictive. They also can be deadly since opiates sometimes suppress the respiratory system.
As a cancer doctor, Abrams was motivated to find safe and effective treatments for chronic pain. Patients in the cannabis-opiates study experienced no major side effects such as nausea, vomiting or loss of appetite.
"What we need to do now is look at pain as the primary endpoint of a larger trial," he said. "Particularly I would be interested in looking at the effect of different strains of cannabis."
For instance, Delta 9 THC is the main psychoactive component of cannabis but cannabis contains about 70 other similar compounds with different effects. One of those is cannabidiol, or CBD. It appears to be very effective against pain and inflammation without creating the "high" created by THC.
"I think it would be interesting to do a larger study comparing high THC versus high CBD cannabis strains in association with opiates in patients with chronic pain and perhaps even having a placebo as a control," Abrams said. "That would be the next step."
Source: UCSF