The impact of cannabis and cigarette use on health

Jenny Williams and Christopher Skeels

No 969, Department of Economics - Working Papers Series from The University of Melbourne

Abstract: Chronic daily cannabis use has been shown to have long term harmful health effects, which in turn is expected to reduce labour market productivity. The evidence is less clear on the health impact of less frequent consumption, which is the more typical mode of use, and previous empirical studies fail to find robust evidence of an adverse impact of these modes of use on labour market productivity. This paper attempts to shed some light on this issue by directly estimating the impact of cannabis consumption in the past week and past year on health status using information on prime age individuals living in Australia. We find that cannabis use does reduce self-assessed health status, with the effect of weekly use being of a similar magnitude as smoking cigarettes daily. Moreover, we find evidence of a dose-response relationship in the health impact of cannabis use, with annual use having roughly half the impact of weekly use.

Keywords: self-assessed health; cannabis; cigarettes; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2006
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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