Following last month’s endorsement of drug decriminalization by the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians has published a policy paper calling for the decriminalization of possession of small amounts of cannabis for personal use and for evidence-based medical education on the health effects of cannabis and cannabinoids, among other recommendations. These American College of Physicians recommendations come at the same time that a federally-funded study conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California has found that marijuana helps people stay off opioids or reduce their use, maintain treatment, and manage withdrawal symptoms. These USC findings add to a substantial body of scientific literature indicating that access to marijuana can offset the harms of the opioid epidemic. And recently, a study published in the Journal of Applied Econometrics has found that legalizing medical marijuana has a “positive impact” on child development by increasing parenting time, especially to children under the age of six, a period characterized by enhanced long-run returns to parental investment. This finding of a positive impact through increased parenting time comes as researchers at the University of Kentucky have found that over the past decade of expansion of cannabis legalization and decriminalization, cannabis use by young people in the United States has not increased. As the Drug Enforcement Agency contemplates rescheduling, medicine and science continue to offer support for an expansion of cannabis legalization and decriminalization in this country.
