The Economic Burden of the American Opioid Crisis and Its Relationship with State-Level Marijuana Legislation

Abstract

In 2017, there were 46,000 opioid overdose deaths in the United States, capping a six-fold increase in such deaths since 1999. Opioid dependency and opioid use disorder has plagued the United States, reaching a climax in 2017 when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared it a public health emergency. As the American public begins to understand the risks associated with taking prescription opioids for long-term pain, they have started looking elsewhere for their pain management needs. One such alternative is marijuana, a federally illegal drug that is now being recognized for its therapeutic qualities and is beginning to be legalized at the state level. With some studies reporting a consumer preference for marijuana over opioids based on efficacy and lack of side effects, there is a debate surrounding the possibility that states that adopt marijuana legislation have lessened the ramifications of the opioid crisis. In this analysis, I measure the effect marijuana legislation has had on the economic cost per capita of the opioid crisis. I run three sets of regressions, using states that had marijuana legislation as of 2017 as a natural treatment group and those that didn’t as a natural control group. The results show an ambiguous relationship between marijuana legislation and the economic cost of the opioid crisis, but show some evidence to suggest that dispensary access to marijuana can play an important role in reducing the cost of the crisis.