Are There Economic Costs of Marijuana Use?

Are There Economic Costs of Marijuana Use?

PI: Rosalie Pacula

Funded by: National Institute on Drug Abuse

This project is the continuation of work initiated under a previous grant from the same agency that identifies and quantifies some of the potential private and social costs associated with regular marijuana use so as to enlighten the ongoing debates regarding policy reform and the allocation of public dollars to treatment and prevention efforts. In a previous grant (NIDA Grant #R01DA12724), we took some important first steps in exploring the relationship between marijuana use and some specific behaviors of users that impose costs on society. The goal of this new three-year project is to build on our previous work and provide additional estimates of the incremental costs associated with marijuana use as they pertain to three specific areas:

1. the cost of treating dependent and abusive users in hospital settings,
2. the costs associated with marijuana-involved accidents, and
3. the costs associated with crime.

Information will be gathered from a variety of publicly available data sources, including the National Inpatient Survey (NIS), the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS), the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), the NASS General Estimates System (GES), and Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) to produce lower and upper bound estimates of the social costs of marijuana use in these three areas.