Cannabis has always been in a debate with both those in favor or against using weeds giving a number of reasons for their belief. There is a big fraternity of people that are against it and as such when it is getting legalized in many US states they advocate that it will lead to more crime or the free availability of weeds will lead to more teenagers take up cannabis use and will eventually start using harder drugs.

A new study on opioid abuse has emerged, which indicates that in those states where medical marijuana is legalized, fewer people are hospitalized for opioid abuse as compared to other states where it is banned. This study, which took into account hospital discharges from 1997 to 2014, was published last weekend in a journal called Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

Looking into the data for 17 long years, they came to a conclusion that there was no surge in hospitalization due to cannabis in states where medical marijuana was permitted. In fact, in such states the hospitalizations caused by opioid dependence dropped by 23 percent. Also, the hospitalizations due to opioid overdoses saw a drop of 11% in such states.

Those states, which had actual dispensaries in operation, hospitalizations due to opioid dependence and opioid overdoses came down by 13 and 11 percent respectively.

This study is given by Yuyan Shi, who works at the University of California at San Diego as an assistant professor of family medicine and public health. Speaking about his findings he said, “It is still premature to advocate medical marijuana legalization as a strategy to curb the POR abuse and overdose epidemic, but the policymakers should take into consideration these positive unintended consequences while legalizing medical marijuana. The findings presented in this study merit further investigations especially those to understand the causal pathways.”

A similar inference was made in the Journal of Psychopharmacology by David Nutt and Ruth Weissenborn. They also concluded that in UK alcohol was twice as harmful as cannabis to the users.

The debate is on among the Republican lawmakers on the issue of legalizing it for recreational use. Many Republicans have voiced their concerns against it, including Jeff Session, the U.S. Attorney General and John Kasich, the Ohio Governor. It’s still to be seen if this recent study changes their minds.