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| The legal status of marijuana has shifted significantly over the past two decades: 10 states and Washington, DC now allow its recreational use (Illinois will follow in January), while 34 states and the federal capital permit medical cannabis treatment (AFP Photo/Pablo PORCIUNCULA BRUNE) |
Washington (AFP) - States that legalize recreational marijuana see a reduction of at least 20 percent in fatalities linked to opioid overdoses, according to a study published Wednesday that is likely to be welcomed by the cannabis industry.
Opioids
were responsible for 47,600 overdose deaths in the US in 2017, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the crisis was declared a
national emergency by President Donald Trump the same year.
The legal
status of marijuana meanwhile has shifted significantly over the past two
decades: 10 states and Washington, DC now allow its recreational use and
Illinois will follow in January, while 34 states and the federal capital permit
medical cannabis treatment.
By
comparing rates of overdose deaths before and after legalization, and between
states at various points of legalization, the authors of the new paper
published in the journal Economic Inquiry found what they called a "causal
effect that we identify is highly robust" in opioid mortality reduction.
Their
econometric analysis places the reduction in the range of 20 to 35 percent,
with the effect particularly pronounced for deaths caused by synthetic opioids
like fentanyl, the United States' deadliest drug, according to the latest
official data.
"As
you know, the opioid epidemic has been surging in recent years," lead
author Nathan Chan, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,
told AFP.
"So
what that means is that everyone's affected, it's just that these states that
have legalized are not as adversely affected as those that haven't."
The act of
legalizing itself is not what produces the gains -- rather, states that have
legal access via dispensaries saw the largest reductions in mortality, Chan and
his colleagues Jesse Burkhardt and Matthew Flyr at Colorado State University,
wrote.
The study
did not look at what factors were at play, but Chan suggested it could be that
a growing number of people are self-medicating and "dealing with pain
through marijuana use, and therefore they're less likely to take on addictive
opioids."
The findings
are likely to be welcomed by the nascent legal marijuana industry but also
treated with some degree of caution before they are replicated in other
studies.
Some
previous work on the topic has even found the opposite result: that cannabis
use increases, rather than decreases non-medical prescription opioid use.
Chan
however said that these papers, predominantly authored by doctors and not by
economists, had failed to adequately differentiate between a positive
correlation and causation, an important distinction to uncover given that
certain drug users gravitate toward multiple drugs.
Moving
forward, Chan said he would like to work on pinpointing the mechanism by which
the gains were achieved and test out his substitution theory.
An
alternative hypothesis is that marijuana legalization improves a state's
economic activity and produces other effects on crime, incarceration,
employment, and long-term health, all of which may be linked to opioid
overdoses.
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