Dr. Shover, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University worked with fellow researchers Corey Davis, Sanford Gordon, and Keith Humphreys to buck a cannabis industry pearl of conventional wisdom; the oft-cited, often-sloganeered study by Marcus Bachhuber that found a positive correlation between medical cannabis states and a decrease in opioid overdose deaths from 1999-2010.
Cannabis advocates have a science problem, or, perhaps, an anti-science one; a cognitive dissonance on par with climate-change deniers, anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, and the folks who think Jesus rode on dinosaurs.
In a somewhat uniquely American way, opioid use disorder has become a marketing boon for the emerging cannabis industry. Advocates and industrialists alike have focus-grouped America’s deadliest epidemic into a modern-day Pepsi Challenge; a double-blind, peer-reviewed taste test where four-out-of-five addicts prefer medical marijuana.
Brandon A. Dorfman 