Could medical cannabis help some people living with chronic pain reduce the amount of opioid medication they need? That’s a question worth asking carefully—especially for patients who have spent years trying to manage pain while dealing with the drawbacks of long-term medication.
A study published in Pain Management in 2025 followed patients for a full year and reported striking opioid reductions among those who continued medicinal cannabis treatment. But there is another part of the story that deserves just as much attention: nearly half of the cannabis group did not complete the study.
At Paradise Compassion Club, I believe we should talk about both sides. Patients need the full picture, not just an exciting number pulled from a headline.
What the researchers wanted to find out
The Australian researchers studied 155 people with chronic non-cancer pain who were already receiving opioid medication. One group of 102 patients at a private pain clinic was prescribed medicinal cannabis alongside their opioids. A comparison group of 53 patients at another nearby clinic continued with opioid treatment alone.
The researchers tracked the groups over 12 months, looking at opioid use, disability and sleep. This was a real-world prospective comparison, not a randomized, blinded trial. That distinction matters because the groups were treated at different clinics and could differ in ways that affected their outcomes.
What kind of cannabis did they use?
The medicinal cannabis group received a prescribed oil formulation containing THC and CBD. Treatment generally began at a low daily dose and was adjusted to balance benefit and tolerability. At the 12-month follow-up, the median daily amounts were 15 mg THC and 15 mg CBD.
This was medically supervised use of a particular type of product. It wasn’t a trial of smoking cannabis, and it doesn’t establish a dose that would be appropriate for someone else.
The opioid numbers are hard to ignore
At the beginning of the study, the median daily opioid dose was 40 mg in oral morphine equivalents in both groups. This is a standard way researchers compare the potency of different opioid medicines; it doesn’t mean everyone was taking morphine itself.
At one year, the reported median was approximately 2.7 mg per day in the medicinal cannabis group and 42.3 mg per day in the opioid-only group. The difference was statistically significant in the researchers’ intention-to-treat analysis.
Those figures are remarkable, but they need to be read alongside the number of people who remained in the study. The lower dose should not be presented as something every person who starts medical cannabis can expect.
The part of the study we can’t leave out
Of the 102 patients who started in the medicinal cannabis group, 46 dropped out before the one-year follow-up. Only one of the 53 comparison patients dropped out.
That is a major limitation. The study’s own plain-language summary says about half of those offered cannabis were unable to continue, often because of unpleasant side effects. So the encouraging opioid reductions were not matched by universal tolerability. The results suggest cannabis may help a subgroup of patients—not that it works for everyone.
What about sleep and daily functioning?
Patients in the cannabis group also showed improvements in disability and insomnia measures. That’s important because pain isn’t simply a number. For someone living with it every day, being able to sleep, move around more easily or participate in normal activities can make a meaningful difference.
Still, the study cannot tell us with the same confidence as a randomized trial whether cannabis itself caused all those improvements. Different treatment approaches, expectations and other patient factors may have contributed.
Does this mean patients should stop their opioids?
Absolutely not. The study examined medicinal cannabis alongside existing treatment, under clinical supervision. It is not evidence that suddenly stopping opioids is safe. People who have taken opioids regularly for a long time can experience significant withdrawal symptoms if doses are reduced too quickly, and pain management must account for their individual circumstances.
For patients interested in reducing opioid medication, the right conversation is with their prescribing clinician about whether a carefully monitored, gradual plan makes sense. Nobody should try to reproduce a study’s results by abruptly changing their own medication.
Why I think this study matters
There are people who have lived with chronic pain for years, sometimes decades. They know how complicated it can be to balance relief, side effects, sleep, mobility and quality of life. Research into additional treatment options should matter to all of us.
What interests me most about this study isn’t the idea of cannabis replacing every pain medicine. It’s the possibility that, for some patients, a supervised cannabis treatment might become one part of a broader plan that helps them function better while needing less opioid medication.
That possibility deserves larger, randomized studies and honest reporting about side effects and dropouts. We should neither dismiss it nor oversell it.
The bottom line
This study offers encouraging real-world evidence of an opioid-sparing effect in some patients, together with improvements in sleep and disability. But the high dropout rate and non-randomized design mean we need to be cautious about making sweeping claims.
At Paradise Compassion Club, our approach remains the same: listen to patients, respect the science and share information that helps people make informed decisions with their healthcare professionals.
Paradise Compassion Club
Quality • Care • Community
Read the complete scientific study
Finch, Price, Price, Kent and Drummond, “Opioid reduction in patients with chronic non-cancer pain undergoing treatment with medicinal cannabis,” Pain Management (2025). This free full-text article includes the methods, results, discussion and study limitations.
Educational article only; not personal medical advice.