Medical cannabis dispensary availability improved self-reported mental health among older adults in New York

Coleman Drake, Dylan Nagy, Matthew D. Eisenberg and David Slusky

Economics Letters, 2025, vol. 250, issue C

Abstract: Evidence regarding cannabis legalization's effects on mental health remains mixed, despite both rapid increases in cannabis use and an ongoing mental health crisis in the United States. We use granular geographic data to estimate medical cannabis dispensary availability's effects on self-reported mental health in New York state from 2011 through 2021 using a two-stage difference-in-differences approach to minimize bias introduced from the staggered opening of dispensaries. We find that medical cannabis availability reduced past-month self-reported poor mental health days by nearly 15 %—3.77 percentage points—among adults 65 and above. Our findings also rule out that medical cannabis availability had negative effects on having past-month poor mental health days for the adult population overall. These results suggest medical cannabis, where it is geographically available, has positive mental health impacts for older populations.

Keywords: Cannabis; Mental health; Aging; Difference-in-differences; Geospatial; Substance use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 I12 I18 I31 K32 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176525001326
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:250:y:2025:i:c:s0165176525001326

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112295

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().