NCJ Number
164353
Date Published
1993
Length
11 pages
Annotation
Between 1973 and 1978, 12 States with collectively over one- third of the U.S. population enacted laws that decriminalized the possession of marijuana; this article uses standard metropolitan statistical area data on hospital emergency room drug episodes collected by the Drug Abuse Warning Network to measure the effect of changes in drug penalties on substance abuse crises.
Abstract
The data examined drug mentions in hospital emergency room (ER) episodes between 1975 and 1978. A drug mention occurs when medical staff at a reporting ER detect drug use in an ER patient, although substance abuse need not be the cause of, or even related to, the ER visit. Section 1 of this article describes the medical and demographic data collected for this study. Section 2 outlines a statistical model used to identify the effect of marijuana decriminalization on hospital emergency room drug episodes. Section 3 presents the results of estimation of this model. All regression specifications confirm that decriminalized cities experienced a statistically significant increase in marijuana mentions as well as a significant reduction in the mention of other drugs relative to nondecriminalized standard metropolitan statistical areas. Although possible biases in the data preclude firm conclusions, the results suggest that some substitution occurs toward less severely penalized drugs when punishments are differentiated. If lenient marijuana laws cause shifts toward marijuana use and away from the use of alcohol and other drugs, and if changes in alcohol regulations can cause similar shifts in drug use, policymakers should justify their preferences for the use of these alternative intoxicants by comparing their social costs. Cost could include medical emergencies, lost productivity, actual money spent on substances, and the cost of drug-related crime. 7 tables and 19 references