Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

Recent years have seen an increase in the adoption of cannabis-based medicines and chronic pain has emerged as the most prominent condition treated. Further, cannabis is increasingly being used as a substitute for drugs with less desirable side-effect profiles. Indeed, research suggests that nearly a third of patients substitute cannabis for opioid-based pain medications and although cannabis-based therapies have been shown to be modestly effective in the treatment of chronic pain across several randomized-controlled trials, the extent to which frequent cannabis use (CU) influences sensitivity to acute pain has not been systematically examined. Such a determination is clinically relevant given hypersensitivity to pain associated with prolonged use of other analgesics such as opioids and reports of increased pain sensitivity to experimentally induced pain during acute cannabis intoxication. However, previous studies have examined pain sensitivity with cannabis users pre-and-post cannabis intoxication and findings are equivocal. Determining whether frequent cannabis use leads to a state of hypersensitivity is clinically relevant and an important finding for medical and non-medical users alike. The present study is the first to examine the effect of frequent CU on pain sensitivity and examine potential mechanisms for differences in pain sensitivity between users and non-users of cannabis.