FOR ALICE, CANNABIS IS BRIDGE TO CLEAN LIFE

BURIN PENINSULA, N.L. — Alice is 27. She’s been clean for a while now but still remembers being held in a vise grip of addiction she couldn’t escape, until she switched to pot.

The Newfoundland woman, who did not want her real name used, says cannabis has helped break her reliance on powerful opiates.

“At the end of my addiction I was seeking out fentanyl patches because I couldn’t get high anymore,” she told Saltwire Network.

“I’ve been clean now over three and a half years and if I wasn't smoking marijuana for my anxiety I don’t know if I would be sober this long. I give cannabis a lot of credit for saving my life.”

She’s not alone in using cannabis to help overcome an opioid addiction.

The Marystown native points to the Cannabis Substitution Project in Vancouver, started by Neil Magnuson, as a model.

Magnuson said in a telephone interview “the root cause of much of the addiction is pain of course, anxiety depression, lack of sleep, lack of nutrition. Those things are all addressed by cannabis.”

He said edible and concentrated forms of cannabis are more effective in offsetting the use of harder street drugs.

“If you smoke two good grams of cannabis, that third gram isn’t going to get you much higher, he said.

“But in the form of edibles people can find the right dose that works for them, because most of the people that are using those hard drugs are dealing with pretty serious pain, be it emotional or physical.”

Still, edibles aren’t legal yet and for Alice, getting legal cannabis products where she lives is a problem, so she buys from a trusted, but illegal source.

High prices and the scarcity of government-sanctioned pot shops make the black market attractive.

She’s not happy with the quality of government weed, either.

“When I gave it a chance, it was pure trash,” she said. “I paid almost double what I would from my friend for the same amount.”

Magnuson said the key is better price and quality. Otherwise people won’t buy legally or won’t get off the harder drugs.

“There needs to be dispensaries/storefronts that people can go in to, (they) need to have inexpensive, good quality cannabis and they need to have good strong edibles, that’s what has to happen,” he said.

“There needs to be easy access to this to combat this overdose crisis.”