The effects of medical marijuana laws on illegal marijuana use

Yu-Wei Chu

No 18822, Working Paper Series from Victoria University of Wellington, School of Economics and Finance

Abstract: Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have passed laws that allow individuals to use marijuana for medical purposes. There is an ongoing heated policy debate over whether these laws have increased marijuana use among non-patients. In this paper, I address that question empirically by studying marijuana possession arrests in cities from 1988 to 2008. I estimate fixed effects models with city-specific time trends that can condition on unobserved heterogeneities across cities in both their levels and trends. I find that these laws increase marijuana arrests among adult males by about 15–20%. These results are further validated by findings from data on treatment admissions to rehabilitation facilities: marijuana treatments increased by 10–20% after the passage of medical marijuana laws.

Keywords: Marijuana; Medical marijuana laws; Illegal drug use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ir.wgtn.ac.nz/handle/123456789/18822

Related works:
Journal Article: The effects of medical marijuana laws on illegal marijuana use (2014)
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:vuw:vuwecf:18822

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Victoria University of Wellington, School of Economics and Finance Alice Fong, Administrator, School of Economics and Finance, Victoria Business School, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600 Wellington, New Zealand. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Library Technology Services ().