The increased availability of marijuana is keeping people away from opioids.

The opioid crisis is at an all-time high, but with several states now legalizing cannabis, studies are showing that many people are using opioids less and deferring to marijuana more.

Although it’s been dubbed as a “gateway drug” for many years, more researchers are discovering the many benefits of the cannabis plant, including stress-relief and easing a plethora of mental health issues. The Journal of Health Economics conducted one such study and found that after analyzing a dataset of over 1.5 billion individual opioid prescriptions between 2008 and 2011, “recreational and medical access cannabis laws reduce the number of morphine milligram equivalents prescribes each year by 11.8 and 4.2, respectively. These laws also reduce the total days supply of opioids prescribed, the total number of patients receiving opioids, and the probability a provider prescribes any opioids net of any offsetting effects.”

Opioid addiction generally starts from a doctor’s prescription for any number of different ailments. But when the prescription runs out, the addiction still lingers. This leaves many people wandering after the street version of these drugs, which is typically heroin.

The study mentions, “policies that reduce opioid prescriptions without leading individuals to substitute more dangerous drugs may be preferable to policies that simply restrict opioid prescriptions.”

This is where researchers believe the role of cannabis can serve as an enormous benefit. The authors of the study, Benjamin McMichael, Lawrence Van Horn, and W. Kip Viscusi add, “Cannabis access laws could be a useful tool in battling the prescription opioid epidemic.”