\u201cThe opioid epidemic is a huge problem across the country, but also in New England, and we need to find some new, different drugs with less abuse potential,\u201d says Kinsey, who is the director of the School of Nursing\u2019s Center for Advancement in Managing Pain<\/a>.<\/p>\n He is part of a team that has received a five-year, $2.4 million grant from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, an agency under the National Institutes of Health. The rest of his team works out of the Research Triangle Institute<\/a> in Durham, North Carolina.<\/p>\n \u201cPharmacologists consider cannabis a \u2018messy\u2019 drug because it is made up of so many different chemicals,\u201d Kinsey says. \u201cWhat we want to do is figure out if there are chemicals in there with medical benefits that we could extract or use as a starting point to create another type of drug.\u201d<\/p>\n The cannabis plant contains more than 100 different terpenes and cannabinoids, two of which are well-documented and researched: cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). But what about the rest of them? Could they help ease pain without causing people to become addicted?<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very uncharted,\u201d Kinsey says. \u201cThere are some terpenes that people have looked at before that have anti-inflammatory effects, so we\u2019ll use those as guidance and controls.\u201d<\/p>\n The researchers at Research Triangle Institute will assist in narrowing down the long list of terpenes and cannabinoids to ones they think have the potential to ease pain with the least addiction potential, which Kinsey\u2019s lab will test against inflammatory, neuropathic, and visceral pain models.<\/p>\n Because there are so many different chemicals to extract and test, the group is probably going to need the full five years to come to any conclusions. But, if they do, this could be the first step on the long journey toward reducing the use of opioids in our country.<\/p>\n \u201cThe number one way of keeping people from becoming addicted to opioids is to prevent them from ever taking opioids in the first place,\u201d Kinsey says. \u201cWe want to come up with different treatments that are not opioid-based. We could help thousands of people.\u201d<\/p>\n And it all starts with one little plant.<\/p>\n \u201cWe really don\u2019t know exactly what we\u2019ll find or what all the applications will be,\u201d Kinsey admits. \u201cWe\u2019re always looking for \u2018how can we have a benefit without the side effects?\u2019 It\u2019s the lightning in a jar that we\u2019re chasing.\u201d<\/p>\n This study is supported by a National Institutes of Health grant, Proposal No. R01 AT010773-01, from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health; UConn\u2019s Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP)<\/a> is the managing institute for the grant. Please visit nccih.nih.gov<\/a> for more information, and visit kinsey.lab.uconn.edu<\/a> to learn more about Kinsey\u2019s research.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The goal of Steven Kinsey’s grant-funded study is to find new chemicals inside the cannabis plant that could help relieve people’s pain without the risk of addiction or abuse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":163173,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1877,2231,2269,2076,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2217],"class_list":["post-163180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nur","category-health-well-being","category-inchip","category-research","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-11 06:25:18","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163180"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":163181,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163180\/revisions\/163181"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/163173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163180"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=163180"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=163180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/Kinsey-2x3-200x300.jpg\")