"Dr. Sanjay Gupta To Jeff Sessions - Medical Marijuana Could Save Many Addicted To Opioids" Dr. Sanjay Gupta

There is longstanding evidence that cannabis helps chemotherapy-induced symptoms in cancer patients, and those symptoms are very similar to opioid withdrawal. In fact, for some patients, cannabis is the only agent that subdues nausea while increasing appetite. When someone is addicted to opioids, they are often described as having a brain disease. Yasmin Hurd, PhD, director of the center for addictive disorders at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai showed what this looks like in autopsy specimens of those who had overdosed on opioids. Within the prefrontal cortex of the brain, she found damage to the glutamatergic system, which makes it difficult for neural signals to be transmitted. This is an area of the brain responsible for judgment, decision-making, learning and memory. Dr. Hurd started to look to other substances to help and settled on nonpsychoactive cannabidiol or CBD, one of the primary components in cannabis. Dr. Hurd and her team discovered that CBD actually helped “restructure and normalize” the brain at the “cellular level, at the molecular level.” It was CBD that healed the glutamatergic system and improved the workings of the brain’s frontal lobes.

-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

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