Recreational marijuana legalization and prescription opioids received by Medicaid enrollees

The liberalization of marijuana laws has been a worldwide momentum in recent years. Following medical marijuana legalization in over half states in the US and a few countries in Europe and America, in 2012, Colorado and Washington in the US first passed laws to legalize marijuana use by adults aged 21 or older. Since then, recreational marijuana legalization has been adopted in eight states and DC where one fifth of US population live (Lawatlas, 2018). These state-wide laws emboldened other jurisdictions in the world to enable recreational marijuana market, with Uruguay and Canada passing country-level legalization in 2014 (Miroff, 2017) and 2017 (Austen, 2017), respectively.

Source: Drug and Alcohol Dependence - October 25, 2018 Category: Addiction Authors: Yuyan Shi, Di Liang, Yuhua Bao, Ruopeng An, Mark S. Wallace, Igor Grant Tags: Full length article Source Type: research