Researchers Published More Than 35,000 Studies On Marijuana Over The Past Decade, NORML Analysis Shows
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Researchers worldwide published more than 4,000 scientific papers related to marijuana in 2024, according to a new analysis by the advocacy group NORML. It’s the fourth consecutive year see that level of output.
All told, since the beginning of 2014, there have been more than 35,000 published papers about cannabis, the group said, largely reflecting “researchers’ newfound focus on marijuana’s therapeutic activities as well as investigations into the real-world effects of legalization laws.”
“Despite the perception that marijuana has yet to be subject to adequate scientific scrutiny,” NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said in a blog post about the research, “scientists’ interest in studying cannabis has increased exponentially in the past decade, as has our understanding of the plant, its active constituents, their mechanisms of action, and their effects on both the user and upon society.”
“It is time for politicians and others to stop assessing cannabis through the lens of ‘what we don’t know,’” Armentano continued, “and instead start engaging in evidence-based discussions about marijuana and marijuana reform policies that are indicative of all that we do know.”
To tally the papers, NORML conducted a keyword search of the National Library of Medicine’s resource PubMed.gov. In total, the advocacy group said on Monday, PubMed now cites “over 49,500 scientific papers on marijuana dating back to the year 1840.”
Of those, more than 70 percent were published in the past decade, NORML found. More than 90 percent, the group said in its post, were published since 2002.
Published papers on cannabis are up compared to the trailing 10-year period analyzed last year, during which 32,000 publications came out. But the one-year record from 2022 appears to still be standing. More than 4,300 papers on cannabis were published that year.
Among the papers published in the past year are reports finding that marijuana legalization decreased opioid overdose rates, that cannabis can help manage certain types of pain—in some cases as well as morphine—and that medical marijuana can “significantly improve the quality of life” in patients with autism, treatment-resistant epilepsy and other conditions.
Other research looked into the effects of legalization on prescription drug rates, finding for example that medical marijuana access in Utah helped reduce opioid use by pain patients and that adding cannabis to state-level prescription drug monitoring programs lessened doctors’ prescribing of scheduled narcotics.
Yet other research studied the chemical components of cannabis, including lesser-known compounds such as minor cannabinoids and terpenes. One study found that the cannabinoid cannabigerol (CBG) has the “potential to modulate multiple physiological processes,” which could give it “therapeutic power to alleviate various conditions, including cancer, metabolic, pain, and inflammatory disorders, among others.”
That study followed separate research published this summer into the lesser chemical components of marijuana, which found that minor cannabinoids may have anticancer effects on blood cancer.
Another study published earlier this year looked at the “collaborative interactions” between cannabinoids, terpenes, flavonoids and other molecules in the plant, concluding that a better understanding of the relationships of various chemical components “is crucial for unraveling cannabis’s complete therapeutic potential.”
A more recent study, meanwhile, found that while it’s “plausible” that terpenes produced by cannabis are responsible for modulating a marijuana high, it’s still “unproven.”
Other recent research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) found that a citrusy-smelling terpene in marijuana, D-limonene, could help ease anxiety and paranoia associated with THC. Researchers similarly said the finding could help unlock the maximum therapeutic benefit of THC.
This is just a small sampling of 2024 studies that have looked at marijuana from numerous scientific, political, economic and cultural angles as more states enact legalization and congressional lawmakers work to advance federal reform.
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