Report Publish Date: December 2021
This journal article describes a study examining the effect of medical and recreational marijuana laws on maternal and infant health.
Overall, the hospitalization of pregnant people with marijuana use disorder increased by 0.3 percentage points within three years of statewide recreational marijuana laws going into effect. At the same time, hospitalizations of pregnant people with tobacco use disorder declined by 0.4 percentage points.
Recreational marijuana laws did not have a statistically significant effect on infant health. Medical marijuana laws had no effect on the health of pregnant people or infants.
The authors conclude that marijuana liberalization policies have little to no negative effect on maternal and infant health.
Though marijuana remains a controlled substance under federal law, 36 states and the District of Columbia have passed medical marijuana laws. Nineteen of those states now have recreational marijuana laws. More pregnant women have a positive attitude toward marijuana use during pregnancy than in the past, the authors of this journal article write. During pregnancy, women may use marijuana to reduce symptoms such as nausea; at the same time, marijuana use may be associated with some adverse pregnancy outcomes.
The researchers wanted to know how marijuana liberalization in states has affected maternal and infant health.
The authors used 2007–2018 hospital discharge data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), a network of databases sponsored by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. They also used data from states that do not participate in HCUP. Thirty-four states were included in the study. The researchers also used microdata from the National Vital Statistics System Natality Files.
“This study provides the first population-level estimates of the association between [recreational marijuana laws] and perinatal health.”
—Angélica Meinhofer, Weill Cornell Medicine; Allison E. Witman, University of North Carolina; Jesse M. Hinde, RTI International; and Kosali Simond, Indiana University
“Understanding the comparative effectiveness of marijuana liberalization policies across subpopulations can enhance their design as well as that of public health interventions to help mitigate any adverse outcomes,” the authors write.
We studied the effect of marijuana liberalization policies on perinatal health with a multiperiod difference-in-differences estimator that exploited variation in effective dates of medical marijuana laws (MML) and recreational marijuana laws (RML). We found that the proportion of maternal hospitalizations with marijuana use disorder increased by 23% (0.3 percentage points) in the first three years after RML implementation, with larger effects in states authorizing commercial sales of marijuana. This growth was accompanied by a 7% (0.4 percentage points) decline in tobacco use disorder hospitalizations, yielding a net zero effect over all substance use disorder hospitalizations. RMLs were not associated with statistically significant changes in newborn health. MMLs had no statistically significant effect on maternal substance use disorder hospitalizations nor on newborn health and small effects could be ruled out. In absolute numbers, our findings implied modest or no adverse effects of marijuana liberalization policies on the array of perinatal outcomes considered.
Journal of Health Economics, December 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2021.102537
This study and report was conducted and created by the following people:
