Marijuana Liberalization Policies and Perinatal Health

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 hospitaliz...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc
Main Authors Meinhofer, Angélica, Witman, Allison E, Hinde, Jesse M, Simon, Kosali I
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 01.01.2021
Subjects
Drug use
Hospitalization
Liberalization
Marijuana
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Summary: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 changes in newborn health. MMLs had no significant effect on maternal substance use disorder hospitalizations nor on newborn health and fairly 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.