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Drug overdose deaths rose above 70,000 in 2017, a record high and an increase of almost 10 percent from the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Young adults and teens have been hit hardest by the opioid epidemic. In fact, death rates among younger adults have risen so much that they have reduced the overall life expectancy for the U.S. population as a whole.

Many experts believe that with limited non-opioid medication options, the need for new alternatives is more important than ever. “We’re in the middle of a huge movement in CBD research, but the Mount Sinai study is not the first,” said Dr. Danesh Alam, medical director of behavioral health at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital, who was not involved in the study. “We’ve seen results like this from studies done in the heroin population in 2015-16. There are many chemicals found in marijuana including CBD that need to be studied further, but the restrictions on marijuana research have set us back.”

Alam notes that conducting research in the field of addiction increases the challenge of finding pharmacological solutions to addiction.

“Heroin addiction is challenging to study because we can’t bring in 100 recovering patients to our clinics, so we often have to look at the disease’s symptoms which occur in three phases: the intoxication phase, the dependence phase, and the relapse phase,” Alam said. “CBD may have a role in helping in all three, but we don’t know for sure. We have so much to learn about its role in anxiety and addiction in general.”

CBD, the component of marijuana that does not get people high, has an inhibitory effect and therefore an anti-anxiety effect, Alam added.

As the popularity of CBD grows and more research is done, its role in helping to curb addiction may become a more realistic alternative.

“We’re too slow to address addiction in our society. When the flu comes up and the measles comes up, we have so many people trying to help. But we don’t have the same kind of urgency with addiction,” Hurd told NBC News.

“A successful nonopioid medication would add significantly to the existing addiction medication toolbox to help reduce the growing death toll and enormous health care costs.”

Previous studies in animals suggest that it might help with anxiety, pain, and inflammation. Even further, recent studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that in states where people could legally use marijuana, the number of filled opioid prescriptions dropped significantly, and there were lower rates of opioid overdose and death, compared with states without legal cannabis.

This growing body of research adds to be an increasingly popular belief in the scientific community that CBD may have broad medicinal value in the fields of pain management, addiction medicine, and neurology.

“In addition to epilepsy one thing that’s been replicated over and over is anxiety,” Hurd said. “I don’t think this is just drug-induced anxiety; I think it’s anxiety in general.”

Hurd’s team plans to conduct longer, larger trials as well as human imaging studies to see if CBD use can decrease the rate of relapse long-term.

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