“Cannabis Substitution Therapy”: Can Cannabis Ease Opioid Withdrawal?

published on September 5, 2024 by Mattha Busby in Talking Drugs

Rosie Rurka had a reputation as the frontline drugs worker who brought people back from the dead with naloxone after they had overdosed at the beginning of British Columbia’s overdose crisis. Now, she is better known for supplying people addicted to opioids with high-dose cannabis edibles, in a “cannabis substitution” approach.

“People need something to get over the hump in the post-acute withdrawal stage,” says Rurka, herself a former intravenous user on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. “When we only have other opioids like suboxone and methadone as replacement drugs, we’ve got a problem. We know cannabis is not addictive in the sense that you’re going to be dopesick without it. You can eat a high dose cannabis cookie and get through the withdrawal.”

Rurka, who lives in Surrey, just outside Vancouver and works for a non-profit as an addictions specialist, started baking the cookies in December 2022. She was inspired by cannabis activist Neil Magnuson, who in the mid-2000s trekked across Canada calling for legalisation. Magnuson later helped people get off methamphetamine and heroin with his Cannabis Substitution Project out of his unlicensed dispensary, The Healing Wave, where products were sold at a fraction of the prices elsewhere…