More than 12 years of using the highest quality cannabis - both Indica and Sativa strains - directly contradicts the authors assertions that cannabis - particularly in the form of dried flowers - is an effective alternative pain reliever to opioid analgesics.
In my experience, this is pure nonsense. Even the highest quality cannabis, regardless of it's strain, does little, if anything, to relieve the crippling muscle pain I experience from RSD/CRPS.
In fact if I partake of too much cannabis it will actually trigger a significant worsening of the muscle pain.
I have been on more than a dozen different oral medications.
I have an implanted pain pump for directed delivery of medications into my cerebral spinal fluid - both baclofen, an antispasmodic, and morphine - neither of which provided any benefit.
I have been through several courses of physical therapy.
I have tried multiple alternative therapies including acupuncture, extensive massage therapy, chiropractic, cognitive behavioral therapy, self hypnosis, etc., etc., etc.
The one and only thing that provides any meaningful level of relief from what is literally crippling, daily pain is oral opioid analgesics.
About the only benefit I derive from cannabis usage is in mitigating the sometimes extreme mental agitation from forced inactivity due to the crippling pain response from any type of physical activity.
If cannabis actually worked to any significant degree in relieving my intractable muscle pain I would happily give up opioid analgesics, in any and all forms.
In my opinion this is yet another attempt to justify denying  effective and, if properly used, safe opioid analgesics.
I have been on opioid analgesics for more than 10 out of the last 12 years and, other than the typical - but easily manageable - chronic constipation and some other minor health concerns, opioid analgesics have provided me with far more benefit than harm.
Far better that a person like me be prescribed meaningful, therapeutic doses of opioid analgesics than being forced to needlessly suffer in agony, all too often, to the point of suicide as so many other intractable patients have been forced to do.
Denying therapeutic doses of opioid analgesics to individuals suffering from excruciating, incurable pain to the point where they take their own lives is literally murder.