The question of how to fight the rising tide of opioid abuse in Pennsylvania has long stumped public health officials. The results have been predictable: a tidal wave of overdose deaths; a new generation of lives destroyed by addiction; and people left seeking answers to how to stop the drugs’ rampage.

Studies published over the last several weeks might hold the answer — starting with a study published Wednesday by researchers at the University of Georgia.

The study looked at data from Medicare Part D — which provides prescription drugs to patients — from 2010 to 2013, and found that medical marijuana had a “significant” impact on the use of pain drugs in the states where marijuana was a legally acceptable alternative.

Across the board, use of pain meds was down nearly 6 percent if patients had access to a medical marijuana program; at the same time, anxiety medication use was down five percent. The combined result was a reduction of $165.2 million in Medicare spending in the 17 states with medical marijuana programs in 2013, the study found.

David Bradford, a health economist at the University of Georgia and one of the lead authors of the study, stressed that the study doesn’t suggest whether the substitution is a good or bad thing overall.

But it’s difficult to see how substituting medical marijuana for highly-addictive, expensive and deadly prescription opioids like OxyContin could turn into an overall negative. If medical cannabis effectively treats patients’ pain, is properly regulated and responsibly dispensed by medical professionals, what’s the downside?

Critics continue to point out that a lack of organized, clinical trials means we have little more than anecdotal evidence of marijuana’s medical applications, but its apparent effect on the use of opioid painkillers is marked.

A 2014 study by Brendan Saloner, of Johns Hopkins Bloomber School of Public Health, found that opioid overdose mortality rates were 25 percent lower in states with medical marijuana programs.

Saloner’s study, like Bradford’s, stopped short of claiming to show a cause-and-effect relationship between the rise of medical marijuana and falling opioid mortality rates. Even anecdotally, the findings are a nod to the promise and potential of medical marijuana in Pennsylvania.

Coupled with yet another study — this one on how the implementation of prescription drug monitoring programs affects opioid-related overdose deaths — a plan to fight the opioid epidemic appears to be emerging.

The study by researchers at Vanderbilt and the Tennessee Department of Health found that the implementation of a monitoring program was linked to a decrease of 1.12 opioid-related overdose deaths per 100,000 people.

As a state expands its program and monitors more drugs, or institutes stricter reporting standards, the benefits increase dramatically, the study found.

The authors estimated that if every state adopted and enacted a “robust” monitoring program, there would be 600 fewer overdose deaths nationwide this year; that’s saving two lives per day.

The good news is that Pennsylvania has the makings of both these things. Gov. Tom Wolf signed Pennsylvania’s medical marijuana program into law in April, and the state’s much-heralded monitoring program began tracking the dissension of all Schedule II, III, IV and V drugs on June 24.

It’s far too soon to say whether Pennsylvania — with a medical marijuana program not expected to be operational intil late 2017 at the earliest — will be a case-in-point that helps prove the cause-and-effect relationships these studies fall short of finding.

But there’s no longer no answer at all to the question “how do we stop these drugs from killing our loved ones?”