Research paperThe effect of medical cannabis laws on juvenile cannabis use
Section snippets
Background
Because of its purported medicinal value (Clark, 2000, Kramer, 2015, Lynch and Ware, 2015, Watson et al., 2000), both the nationwide and worldwide popularity of legalizing cannabis for medical purposes has reached epic proportions. A 2010 Gallup poll found that approximately 70% of Americans are in favor of allowing doctors to prescribe cannabis to mitigate pain (Mendes, 2010), whereas a survey of 1446 physicians from 72 countries revealed that 76% of the physicians supported the use of
Methodological problems with prior research
Although certainly informative, much of the prior research examining the effect of medical cannabis legislation on attitudes toward cannabis use and on recreational cannabis use is problematic for a number of reasons making any conclusions tentative at best. Methodological problems include small and unrepresentative samples, an overreliance on cross-sectional data, inappropriate statistical methodology, and a general failure to investigate the possibility that medical cannabis laws increase
Data and methods
We analyze data for juveniles from 2002 to 2011 for the 50 U.S. states, which constituent political entities that share sovereignty with the United States federal government. Juveniles are defined as persons, 12–17 years of age. The data, which encompass five measurement periods calibrated in two-year intervals (2002–2003, 2004–2005, 2006–2007, 2008–2009, and 2010–2011), are derived from two different sources. These two sources include the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and Progcon.com.
Results
Fig. 1 shows the percent of cannabis use among juveniles in the 16 medical cannabis states before and after they passed a medical cannabis law. This figure also depicts the percent of juvenile cannabis use for the remaining states that did not pass a medical cannabis law during the observation period. A visual inspection of Fig. 1 reveals that juvenile cannabis use was consistently higher in states that passed, or that would eventually pass a medical cannabis law than and in states that did not
Conclusion
Several prior studies link medical cannabis laws to amplified levels of cannabis use among juveniles and our analysis finds further credible evidence to support this research. The strong effect of the medical cannabis law variable persists even after controlling for a variety of potential rival causal factors. Such a finding supports opponents of medical cannabis laws who often argue that these laws lead to an intensification of recreational cannabis use among juveniles. That said we find no
Conflict of interest
There are no conflicts of interest associated with this publication.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions for improving this manuscript.
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