When he found himself smoking heroin in a bush outside a gas station at 10 am five years ago, Conrad knew he’d hit bottom. The Vancouver-based woodworker decided it was time to tackle his heroin and coke addictions. He chose to go cold turkey.

While he spent a week detoxing in his apartment, Conrad (not his real name) found relief from the excruciating physical pain of withdrawal symptoms by smoking pot. It helped with the puking and nausea.

“Detox feels like you’re dying. It helped a lot.”

Conrad’s been off the hard stuff ever since but has continued smoking weed. Unlike heroin and cocaine, he can take it or leave it.

“I’m able to smoke every day, one joint after work, and then if I want to I’m able to stop without having any sort of withdrawal or serious cravings.”

The physical need for marijuana isn’t there like it is with heroin, he says.

Marijuana was long considered a “gateway” to more powerful drugs – a theory that’s since been largely debunked. Instead, some researchers and medical experts are now suggesting it may be an effective substitute for crack, cocaine, opioids and possibly even alcohol.

M-J Milloy, assistant professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia, is in the early stages of a study examining the theory. His work focuses on drug users living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

He admits that the idea that cannabis may be a “getaway” safe substitute for riskier drugs is new. Researchers are still gathering evidence.

But, he says, “anecdotally, we have heard from people that cannabis can be part of their self-medication strategy when they want to control their use of drugs.”

Harold Altvater, an anaesthesiologist and founder of a Massachusetts-based medical marijuana clinic, says about 5 per cent of his patients, approximately 50 people, have used cannabis as a bridge to decrease their opioid use. Altvater says marijuana doesn’t have the stigma associated with opioid substitutes like methadone or require the same monitoring as drugs like naloxone, another prescription medication used to treat opioid addiction.

“It’s easy for people to accept cannabis as a form of therapy because most people are familiar with it,” he says. “Sometimes you can’t find your next dose of whatever your opioid is, but you’ll have pot and you find you’re able to get through withdrawal just a little bit better.”

Dr. Gary Witman, executive medical director of a chain of medical marijuana clinics across Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maryland, says he’s successfully prescribed some 450 patients medical marijuana (both smokables and edibles) as a pathway off drugs like Percocet and Vicodin.

“No one has ever died from a marijuana addiction,” he says. However, he doesn’t expect research soon into pot’s effectiveness as a substitute for harder drugs since it’s still classified as a Schedule 1 drug, along with LSD and heroin.

Experts in the field agree that more research would be beneficial. An article published in the International Journal of Drugs in 2015, for example, pointed to the potential therapeutic benefits of cannabinoids for users “coping with crack-cocaine-related problems, including withdrawal and cravings, impulsivity and paranoia.”

The article goes on to say that “cannabinoid therapeutics offer further benefits: [they are] available in multiple formulations, are low in adverse risk potential and may easily be offered in community-based settings, which may add to their feasibility as interventions for predominantly marginalized crack cocaine user populations.”

“It’s increasingly clear to many in the health field that cannabis has benefits,” says Milloy. “What we need is more research to flesh out exactly what these are.”

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