"Last Look: Marijuana To Fight Opioid Epidemic?" - Fareed Zakaria
91 Americans die from an opioid overdose every day, that’s one death every 15 minutes. Since 1999, the number of opioid overdose deaths in this country has more than quadrupled, according to the latest CDC data. There is a surprising tool emerging that may help fight the battle, but President Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is not going to like this tool. The tool is recreational marijuana. A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health found a correlation between recreational marijuana legalization in Colorado and a reversal of the upward trend in opioid overdose deaths. Yasmin Hurd, PhD, professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, pharmacology, and systems therapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, chair of Ward-Coleman translational neuroscience and the director of the Center for Addictive Disorders at the Mount Sinai Health System, said that continuing to study the subject and look for such patterns makes a lot of sense. “We have an epidemic, and we have to think differently,” she added.
- Yasmin Hurd, PhD, Professor, Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Pharmacology, Systems Therapeutics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Chair, Ward-Coleman Translational Neuroscience, Director of the Center for Addictive Disorders, Mount Sinai Health System