Death rates from overdoses on prescription painkillers or heroin and other illicit drugs appear to be an average of 24.8 percent lower in states with medical marijuana laws than in states without the laws.
Now, it's hard to say just what the observations mean; prescription painkillers like oxycontin are way expensive and also way addictive for some folks ( personally, I still have a bunch left over from a surgery a year ago, and I can't see how anybody could be come addicted to it; I hated it. Took it for two days and decided "screw this - if I have pain, I'll either deal with it or crack open a bottle of scotch."). But the incontrovertible fact is that some folks manage to become hooked on them, and for a lot of those people, heroin's a cheaper substitute that's easier to acquire.
So that makes the "medical pot" stats that much more interesting, because here in Oregon, "medical pot" is way more expensive than prescription painkillers - which means that heroin should still be the preferred option for addicts. One possible explanation for this might be that with the availability of "medical pot", people who might become addicted to oxy never do, because they have access to weed instead; effectively, the cycle from oxy addict to heroin addict (and many of the associated overdose deaths from both substances) is short-circuited. That's just my guess; at present, the 25% lower death rate remains unexplained.
