Alcohol and opiate abuse and how cannabis can help?

Cannabis can ease both the physical and psychological effects associated with withdrawal from both of these addictive substances. No clinical trials concerning the efficacy of cannabis as a substitute for alcohol are available, apart from the work of Tod Mikuriya in 1970, who describes patients using cannabis to successfully discontinue abusing alcohol.2 (Cannabis as a Pharmacological Harm Reducer 1997–unpublished). Tod Hiro Mikuriya was a psychiatrist and an advocate for the legalization of the use of cannabis for medical purposes, and, quite fittingly, he is regarded as the grandfather of the medical cannabis movement in the United States.

Facts when and how cannabis helped

Cannabis was listed as a treatment for delirium tremens in medical texts of the 1800s.3 There are also 19th-Century references to the use of cannabis as a substitute for opiates. These were among the first documented uses of medical cannabis by European physicians.
It is apparent from reading the old medical texts that many of the new cannabis preparations and methods of administration around today are not discoveries. They are, for the most part, just rediscoveries.
The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that more than 80,0004 annual deaths are attributed to alcohol use alone. Untreated and severe alcohol withdrawal can kill you, mainly due to seizures. Fortunately, these fatalities are almost completely preventable if people are properly weaned off alcohol using gradually decreasing amounts of alcohol itself or medication. In contrast, the CDC does not even have a category for deaths caused by the use of cannabis because there have never been any.