Cannabis's primary benefit for chronic pain is by altering the emotional interpretation of the sensation.

“what it does seem to do is it seems to strip away the affective component of pain to some degree and so what I have consistently heard from chronic pain patients when they use cannabis is they say yeah my Pain's still there but now the Pain's background noise so I can sleep at night and just being able to sleep I think is actually providing a huge amount of the benefit to that Community um but it's the day-to-day like they're able to function with the pain because it doesn't um they don't become focused on it the same way because they're able to kind of push it to the background that seems to be the main ability of cannabis”