Putting medical marijuana to the test

“The public consumption of cannabis has already far outpaced our scientific understanding,” said Chen, director of the Cannabis Research Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We really desperately need to catch up.”

To that end, the initiative, one of the first academic programs in the world dedicated to the study of cannabis, is hoping to conduct a high-quality study using opioid patients.

Edythe London, a distinguished professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the UCLA school of medicine, said she has designed the study to test different combinations of THC, the principal psychoactive component of marijuana, and cannabidiol, an anti-inflammatory component that does not get the user “high.”

Source: Amid opioid crisis, researchers aim to put medical marijuana to test