Economists discovered that authorized, medical marijuana entry has been linked to elevated opioid-related deaths in a brand new research, opposite to earlier findings.
Medical marijuana legalization was linked to fifteen% to 29% larger charges of opioid-involved fatalities from 1999 to 2019, two economists from the College of Virginia concluded in a brand new paper circulated in early March by the Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis.
The research, which has not but undergone a peer assessment, discovered that the supposed advantages of legalization for lowering opioid overdose deaths had been reversed by simply including a couple of additional years, contradicting what an earlier, extra restricted research printed in 2014 asserted.
“[2019] is probably the most present information that we had out there that we may use for the evaluation,” mentioned Dr. Christopher Ruhm, an economist on the College of Virginia’s Frank Batten Faculty of Management and Public Coverage who co-authored the research. “So, in quite a lot of these research, they weren’t doing something flawed through the use of earlier information. They only had been utilizing the information they’d on the time.”
The oft-cited 2014 research, with over 760 Google Scholar citations as of February 2022, solely had coverage information via 2010 to think about and got here to a really totally different conclusion. Its creator, College of Pennsylvania economist Marcus Bachhuber, discovered that states with medical hashish legal guidelines had a 24.8% decrease annual opioid overdose mortality fee on common in comparison with states with out them.
The 2014 Bachhuber report turned a rallying cry for legalization advocates who pointed to the crucial discovering that “medical hashish legal guidelines are related to considerably decrease state-level opioid overdose mortality charges.” Public well being specialists thought-about authorized entry to marijuana to be a part of a multipronged strategy to addressing rising overdose deaths attributed to opioids.
In July, the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention reported that deadly drug overdoses in 2020 elevated by almost 30% over the earlier yr, reaching an all-time excessive of greater than 93,300. Opioids had been the trigger of most overdose deaths in each state, and deadly overdoses brought on by opioids in Washington, D.C., particularly elevated from 50,963 in 2019 to an estimated 69,710 in 2020.
In the meantime, the working paper out this month took a brand new macro view of marijuana legalization insurance policies’ results on opioid overdose deaths, having the benefit of these additional years to think about. Ruhm and his co-author, Dr. Neil Mathur, additionally a public coverage knowledgeable on the College of Virginia, needed to find out how opioid overdose mitigation insurance policies, similar to “Good Samaritan” legal guidelines, higher entry to overdose-reversing drug naloxone, and improved monitoring of prescribing, would possibly fare when authorized marijuana is launched.
They discovered that empirical outcomes from prior research on the linkage had been “fragile” and didn’t maintain up when extra prolonged evaluation intervals and remedy variables had been thought-about.
“Usually, advocates for a coverage kind of need to assume every little thing’s good and nothing’s dangerous. I believe this notion that marijuana is a possible remedy or substitute for opioid use dysfunction is simply flat flawed. I need to stress I’m not against legalizing marijuana, however perceive that there are potential prices concerned,” Ruhm mentioned.
Within the decade main as much as 2010, 13 states, most of them blue, had legalized medical marijuana. However by the top of 2019, the final yr studied, 33 states had legalized medical marijuana, 29 had medical dispensaries in place, 11 states permitted leisure marijuana, and eight had working retail dispensaries.
This most up-to-date report is just not the primary to seek out that authorized medical marijuana had a deleterious impact on efforts to curb overdoses. For instance, researchers on the Stanford College Faculty of Medication reported in 2019 that making an allowance for the insurance policies spanning 2011 to 2017, states passing a medical hashish regulation skilled a 22.7% enhance in overdose deaths.