Sunday, May 18, 2025
5/18/2025
Understanding cannabidiol policy and its impacts on broader substance use - PROJECT SUMMARY Substance use in the United States is evolving. Some of these changes are due to the ongoing opioid crisis while other changes are results of federal and state policy changes. In particular, marijuana access continues to be further legalized throughout the United States, changing behaviors related to alcohol and opioid use. While we have developed an adequate research base on the implications of medical and recreational marijuana laws, researchers have generally ignored the recent growth in cannabidiol (CBD) access, including the legalization of medical CBD in 18 states since 2014 that do not otherwise permit medical or recreational marijuana. CBD access continues to expand in the US with rates of use higher than marijuana, but we have little evidence of the public health impacts of this expansion. This project will study these recent laws and discuss how they fit into the broader marijuana policy landscape in the United States. In addition, we will study how medical CBD adoption impacts CBD use, opioid use, alcohol use, and opioid- and alcohol-related poisonings. Marijuana policies has been shown to impact alcohol use; additionally, they have been found to deter opioid misuse and reduce opioid-related deaths. We hypothesize that CBD policies may have similar effects. In particular, this project is interested in the possible role for alternative pain management availability to impact opioid use and curb overdose death rates. These relationships are important to quantify as CBD use continues to increase. We will also collect information on CBD dispensary locations, study the demographics of CBD dispensary access, and examine more granular geographic effects of CBD access. We will make information on CBD policies and CBD dispensary locations public to promote research in this area. More recent research on the impacts of medical and recreational marijuana laws often contradicts earlier findings. One possible reason for these inconsistent results over time is because the literature ignores recent medical CBD policies. If CBD policies have similar effects as marijuana policies, then including CBD-adopting states as “comparisons” in a difference-in- differences framework will bias the estimates in the opposite direction. This project will conclude by re-analyzing recent findings in the medical and recreational marijuana literature while accounting for CBD adoption. This analysis has the potential to reconcile these literatures by accounting for a policy which has been generally ignored.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).