Areas With Higher Veteran Populations Have More Medical Marijuana Doctors, Federally Funded Study Shows
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A newly published study funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) examines county-level data about medical marijuana patients and clinicians in seven U.S. states, focusing mostly on demographic trends.
One finding, for example, suggests a strong association between military veteran populations and higher rates of medical marijuana authorizing clinicians. Authors wrote that “may reflect veteran efforts to expand MC [medical cannabis] access and higher prevalence of qualifying conditions for MC licensure among veterans,” for example chronic pain or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The report was published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open. It was authored by a five-person team from the University of Michigan Medical School, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education in Tennessee.
Researchers analyzed 2022 data on medical marijuana patients and authorizing clinicians from 262 counties across seven states—Delaware, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Utah and West Virginia—comparing that data with county-level demographic information on factors like income, race and ethnicity as well as percentages of veterans and people unemployed, uninsured, living in poverty and disabled.
Overall, there were an average of 75.5 medical cannabis patients per 10,000 residents, meaning registered patients in those states made up about 0.8 percent of the population. There were also 1.4 authorizing clinicians per 10,000 residents, on average.
There were higher rates of patient registration in counties with higher incomes as well as those with higher uninsured rates. There were comparatively lower medical marijuana patient rates in counties with higher populations of people from minority racial and ethnic groups as well as counties with higher unemployment.
As far as the presence of clinicians able to recommend medical marijuana, meanwhile, concentrations were higher in counties with greater median household incomes as well as those with more military veterans. Clinicians were scarcer in counties with high unemployment percentages and areas with high male-to-female population ratios.
“Some factors aligned between patient and clinician models, such as higher county-level household income and lower unemployment,” authors noted. “However, future research is needed to under stand discrepancies between models, such as associations between uninsurance percentage and MC patient rate as well as between SVI [social vulnerability] and authorizing clinician rate.”
Future study, the team’s report says, will also “help more accurately target appropriate substance use resources and education related to cannabis in communities with the most need.”
Other research published this week in JAMA Network Open, meanwhile, found that while the frequency of marijuana use among adults in Canada increased slightly in the years following nationwide legalization, problematic misuse of cannabis in fact saw modest decreases.
“Fundamentally,” authors of that study wrote, “these results do not suggest increased adverse outcomes for adults who were actively using cannabis before legalization.”
“From a public health standpoint, these results are mixed,” they added, “as increased use might be considered harmful, while decreased misuse is a positive outcome.”
Governments and public health experts have been working to track consumer behavior as laws around marijuana continue to change. In the U.S., a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report recently broke down federal data on cannabis use among thousands of U.S. adults, finding that while smoking marijuana remains the most common way to consume it, methods such as eating, vaping and dabbing are growing in popularity.
Overall in 2022, 15.3 percent of adults reported current marijuana use, while 7.9 percent reported daily use. Among users, most (79.4 percent) reported smoking, followed by eating (41.6 percent), vaping (30.3 percent) and dabbing (14.6 percent).
About half of all adults who used marijuana (46.7 percent) reported multiple methods of use—most typically smoking and eating or smoking and vaping.
Rates of both vaping and dabbing—as well as cannabis use in general—were higher in young adults than the general adult population.
An earlier analysis from CDC found that rates of current and lifetime cannabis use among high school students have continued to drop amid the legalization movement.
Another recent federal report, published by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), found that consumption among minors—defined as people 12 to 20 years of age—had fallen slightly in the past year. Despite methodological changes that make comparisons over time difficult, it also suggests that youth use has fallen significantly in the past decade.
A separate poll recently found that that more Americans smoke marijuana on a daily basis than drink alcohol every day—and that alcohol drinkers are more likely to say they would benefit from limiting their use than cannabis consumers are.
U.S. adults who drink alcohol are nearly three times as likely to say they’d be better off reducing their intake of the drug compared to marijuana consumers who said they’d benefit from using their preferred substance less often, the survey found. Further, it found that while lifetime and monthly alcohol drinking among adults was far more common than cannabis use, daily marijuana consumption was slightly more popular than daily drinking.
An earlier report published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs that found that secondhand harm caused by marijuana use is far less prevalent than that of alcohol, with respondents reporting secondhand harm from drinking at nearly six times the rate they did for cannabis.
Yet another 2022 study from Michigan State University researchers, published in the journal PLOS One, found that “cannabis retail sales might be followed by the increased occurrence of cannabis onsets for older adults” in legal states, “but not for underage persons who cannot buy cannabis products in a retail outlet.”
The trends were observed despite adult use of marijuana and certain psychedelics reaching “historic highs” in 2022, according to separate data.
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Photo courtesy of Mike Latimer.
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