Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren vogebam here. After five plus years of deep researching potential medicinal uses for cannabis, Sanjay Gupta, neurosurgeon, professor at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, and most famously medical correspondent for cable news giant CNN, has settled firmly
on this conclusion. We'd works, and not for everybody, but for a lot of people it can ease pain, reduce inflammation, and for many who struggle with opioid addictions, it can help them kick their habits by tamping down the nausea, insomnia, and other symptoms that characterize opioid withdrawal. Very possibly, cannabis may help heal brain damage caused by opioids too. Gupta has not always believed this. He wrote a piece for Time Magazine in two thousand nine outlining his opposition to
the legalization of pot even for medicinal use. His turnabouts since then has made him an unlikely ally of the pro can this crowd and put him publicly at odds with a government that still places cannabis in the same class of drugs as heroin. And LSD Dr Sanjay Gupta, CNN star practicing brain surgeon and medical marijuana advocate. Who would thunk it? Gupta says, I don't really know that I see this as being an advocate. I think for me, it was not advocacy journalism as much as it was
evidenced based journalism that hopefully spoke truth to power. Gupta's about face on cannabis, or maybe it's better described as a slow, steady, deeply thought out awakening, is grounded in years of journalistic research highlighted in the CNN documentary Weed. The fourth installment of the series Weed four Pot Versus Pills, examined the use of medical cannabis who help solve America's
addiction to opioids. It's a crisis crying for answers. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, more than a hundred and fifteen Americans die every day from opioid overdose, usually prescription painkillers, heroin, or synthetic opioids Like to Know. One study puts the economic burden of the epidemic at
more than seventy eight billion dollars a year. At least part of the solution to combating the opioid crisis to a growing number of researchers and doctors, including Gupta, is cannabis, a long stigmatized drug used recreationally and therapeutically. Those researchers and doctors are just beginning to unlock what happens when pot hits the brain and how that can help break an addiction to opioids. Opiates block the transmission of pain signals to the brain, and they can be very good
at it. The problem is that the drugs are highly addictive, users need more and more to get the same relief, making them extremely dangerous. They can, Gupta explains, in weed four actually turn off the body's natural instinct to breathe, leading to tens of thousands of deaths a year. Gupta says, opiates tend to cause this disruption in an area of
the brain around these glutamate receptors. I liken it to having two big cities, New York in Chicago, and you need to send these signals back and forth, fire air planes to these two cities, and suddenly all the transportation is down once hooked on opiates, and that can happen as quickly as in a couple of weeks addiction is very difficult to break, possibly because of the damage the drugs do in a certain area of the brain, the
prefrontal cortex. Gupta explains that part of the brain is sort of a judgment area where you start to learn things. Some of the wisdom that has come out recently is that even if you stop taking the opiates, you don't necessarily heal that part of the brain. You're still at risk of relapsing in some ways. The brain is not able to remember the negative impact of the opiates. Cannabis, like opiates, also blocks pain signals, Gupta says, but it
also reduces inflammation that can lead to further pain. And the real advantage of cannabis for opioid addicts, Gupta says, and here he points out the groundbreaking research of Dr Yasmin Heard, the director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai in New York. Maybe that the cannabidiol or c b D compound in the plant can fix the receptors damaged in the brain from opioid use and can make communication in the brain whole again. Gupta says. The idea that cb D can heal the deceased brain of an
addict was the real takeaway for me. There's nothing else that we know of that can really do that in the way CBD does. One of the more than four hundred chemical compounds in the cannabis plant, c b D is used often for medicinal purposes in children for diseases like epilepsy, and is legal even in seventeen of the most cannabis opposed states. CBD does not contain the psychoactive part of the plant, known as th HC that produces
the high of cannabis use. The pro cannabis crowd points out that no one has ever overdosed on cannabis or CBD, making it infinitely more preferable to other addiction breaking therapies that use opiates like sobox zone or methadone to wean addicts off stronger opiates like heroin. Still, cannabis use is not without its dangers, especially for younger people with developing brains. Gupta says cannabis can be addictive and the psychoactive part of the plant can hair a motor function and judgment.
Despite cannabis negatives, the biggest hurdle that we'd advocates face is clear the plant remains a federally regulated Schedule one drug. Though many states have legalized CBD and have approved cannabis for medicinal uses, and some have even ocated for recreational or otherwise personal use, it is still illegal on the federal level. Many in the current presidential administration seem hell
bent on keeping it that way. The nation's top drug enforcement official, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has spoken out forcefully against the legalization of cannabis and seems defiant in his opposition to the work of Mount Sinise Herd and others. Sessions apparent reluctance to look at the potential good of cannabis is not unusual. Many people still see cannabis as a gateway too harder drugs, a theory that's been debated for years, debunked by some and revived by others through
the work of Herd and many others. Though it's becoming much more difficult to blindly accept the old way of looking at cannabis, Good to stands as one of the more public examples of someone who has accepted new evidence, and he's glad to share his findings with the powerful. In April, he wrote an open letter to Sessions after
Sessions repeatedly turned down Gupta's requests for interviews. Research by Herd and others, including University of California, San Diego and entusiologist Mark Wallace, who has been looking at cannabis as an alternative pain reliever for more than twenty years, continues, even though studying the medicinal uses of cannabis is difficult because of its status as a Schedule one drug. Gupta says, I think it's one of those situations where everybody who
is responsible in this whole discussion wants more data. The situation I think we find ourselves in is there isn't a real mechanism by which to obtain that data given the regulations right now around medicinal marijuana. The debate on how to research cannabis, or even if we should study
it continues too, though a showdown may be coming. In June, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a CBD based drug, a pity elect for the treatment of epilepsy, that puts the ft A in a strange position a federal agency giving the go ahead to a cannabis derived drug even as it remains illegal on the federal level. Researchers and proponents like Gupta, hope that this will push the government
to reschedule cannabis as a less dangerous drug. Rescheduling would make research easier and perhaps someday unlock more federally approved uses for a plant that may yet play a major part in bettering even saving thousands of American lives from opioid addiction. Gupta said, over the next year, my guess is We're going to see a significant transformation with regard
to medical marijuana in this country. We're seeing something that I've never seen before in my medical life, an entirely new class of medications that could be used to treat a wide variety of things. Today's episode was written by
John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang. To hear more about the history of cannabis in the United States, including why I'm largely calling it cannabis and not marijuana, check out the episode of my other show food Stuff, called the Fully Baked Episode on Cannabis Edibles, featuring an interview
with Becca Grim of Dope Girls. This is where I'm supposed to remind you to contain yourself in brain Stuff themed t shirts from our online shop at t public dot com slash Brainstuff and of course, for more on this and lots of other fully baked topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com.