DENVER — People living in states with legalized medical marijuana are more likely to use and abuse cannabis than people living in states where pot remains completely illegal, says a new study that cautions policymakers.
Sixty-four percent of Americans now live in states permitting medical marijuana use for a variety of conditions, from chronic pain to PTSD. That includes the newest state, West Virginia, which approved a legalization plan on April 19. An estimated 205 million Americans can now seek a recommendation from a doctor to use marijuana despite it remaining illegal at the federal level.
The study, published online Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry, says marijuana use by people without a doctor’s note increased in states with medical marijuana laws from 2001-2013, as did the number of people considered to have a marijuana use disorder. While most people who use marijuana suffer no ill effects from casual use, heavy users can become dependent, and some people can experience psychosis, according to emergency room doctors and drug treatment experts.
“If you increase the prevalence of users, you are going to increase the prevalence of people who have adverse consequences,” said lead author Deborah Hasin, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Surprisingly, Hasin said, medical marijuana laws seem to have had no effect on teenage marijuana use, a common fear among legalization opponents. The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of the National Institutes of Health.Marijuana can help some patients, but doctors say more research needed
“This researcher seems to be intent on showing some increase in marijuana use disorders, and yet every other researcher has come up with the exact opposite conclusion,” said Mason Tvert of the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project. “This research is contradicted by years of data and every other study that’s been done on this subject.”
Tvert said the data Hasin’s team used are based on a survey standard that essentially considers any kind of regular marijuana use to be “abuse” and suggested that 80% of Americans would be considered alcoholics if the same standard was applied to alcohol.
Hasin made headlines in 2015 with a controversial and widely criticized study concluding that marijuana use disorders had doubled from 2001 to 2013, despite other studies showing no significant change.
credit:usatoday.com
