Research presented last week at a major cancer research conference suggests that morphine, which is regularly prescribed to cancer patients to treat pain, may actually spur cancer growth. For the past seven years, the notion that opiates might stimulate cancer growth has slowly been gaining attention in the medical research community, beginning with anecdotal evidence that patients treated with alternative pain maintenance regimes—or those given opiate blockers during treatment—tended to survive longer than patients treated with the routine pain relief medications.