Medical Cannabis and Chronic Pain: Patients Reported Relief, Better Function and Less Reliance on Some Medications
A small University of Florida pilot study found that many adults with chronic pain said medical cannabis helped ease their symptoms and improve aspects of daily life. Participants also described using fewer pain or psychiatric medications, but the study measured patients’ perceptions rather than proving that cannabis caused those changes.
The findings came from a 2023 study published in the journal Cannabis. Researchers interviewed 51 adults who had recently begun using medical cannabis for chronic pain. The participants completed an open-ended phone interview after about one month of use as part of a three-month observational pilot study.
Overall, 62.7% of participants described medical cannabis as effective for their condition. More than half said it reduced their chronic pain, while others reported improvements in sleep, mood, anxiety, physical functioning and mobility.
Some participants said cannabis reduced their use of prescription drugs. These reports included lower use of opioids and medications such as Xanax, meloxicam, tramadol and OxyContin. One 51-year-old woman said she no longer needed her walker, had reduced her pain medication from three doses a day to one, and had not taken Xanax in 30 days. Another participant, a 43-year-old woman, said cannabis helped control her pain after years of taking narcotics and other medications.
These accounts were individual reports, not measurements of medication use verified by researchers. The study therefore cannot establish that medical cannabis reduced opioid or benzodiazepine dependence, nor can it show that cannabis was responsible for improvements in pain or functioning.
Participants also described drawbacks. Several said it was difficult to find a product, delivery method or dose that provided relief without unwanted effects. Reported problems included feeling excessively high, stomach discomfort, difficulty using a vaporizer, impaired ability to work and limited relief when pain became severe. Some participants said they had to experiment with different THC-to-CBD ratios, oils, capsules, drops, creams or inhaled products before finding an approach they preferred.
The study’s design limits how broadly its findings can be applied. It involved a small group recruited from medical-cannabis clinics in north-central Florida, and most participants were non-Hispanic White. The interviews took place after roughly one month of treatment, so they do not answer questions about long-term benefits or risks. Because there was no control group and the study relied on self-reported experiences, placebo effects and other explanations could not be ruled out.
The findings also need to be considered alongside larger evidence reviews. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s 2024 living systematic review found that some cannabis products produced small short-term improvements in pain, particularly among people with neuropathic pain, but also increased the risk of dizziness, sedation and nausea. The review concluded that evidence about cannabis’s effect on opioid use was insufficient.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s overview of cannabis and chronic pain likewise says evidence remains limited for most types of chronic pain. It notes that research on whether medical-cannabis policies reduce opioid prescribing or overdose deaths has produced mixed results, and that cannabis has not been established as a treatment for opioid use disorder.
The University of Florida study adds useful detail about how patients experience medical cannabis in everyday life, including both perceived benefits and practical challenges. Its results support further research into dosing, product formulations, safety and longer-term outcomes—but they do not demonstrate that cannabis reliably lowers pain or allows patients to stop taking opioids or psychiatric medications.
