The American Academy of Pain Medicine has labeled pain as a "silent epidemic" due to its
staggering costs to society (over $500 billion/year) and widespread prevalence (affects over
100 million Americans)(Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Advancing Pain Research, 2011;
Summers B, 2005). Thus, it is imperative to test and validate cost-effective pain therapies.
To this extent, cannabis is characterized as one of the most promising therapies to treat a
wide spectrum of pain conditions (Andreae et al., 2015; Baker, Pryce, Giovannoni, & Thompson,
2003; Bostwick, 2014; Haroutounian et al., 2016; Shohet, Khlebtovsky, Roizen, Roditi, &
Djaldetti, 2017). However, the clinical applicability of cannabis-based pain therapies has
been limited due to lacking mechanistic characterization in human-focused studies. Of
critical importance, the neural mechanisms supporting cannabis induced pain relief remain
unknown. The primary objective of the proposed pilot study is to identify the brain
mechanisms supporting the direct alleviation of acutely evoked pain through vaporized
cannabis.