Study finds significant increase in medical cannabis use in the US

With the majority of states now allowing medical treatment with cannabis, a new study has found a sharp increase in its use over the past decade.

The study, published this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that “the prevalence of US citizens using cannabis for medicinal purposes increased from 1.2% in 2013-2014 to 2.5% increased significantly in 2019-2020, with a [average annual percentage] of 12.9%.”

The authors also noted that “many of the sociodemographic and clinical subgroups showed similarly significant increases in cannabis use for medicinal purposes.”

“In the multivariable fitted model, living in a state where medical cannabis was legalized remained significantly associated with medical cannabis use,” the study authors wrote. “The study documents a sustained nationwide increase in the use of cannabis for a variety of medical purposes between 2013 and 2020, two decades after the first state passed legislation to legalize it.”

As the study authors noted, “the use of cannabis for medical purposes is legal in 39 states and the District of Columbia in the United States.”

California was the first state to legalize the treatment back in 1996, and in the nearly three decades since, medicinal cannabis has been embraced by dozens more, across party lines.

Last year, Mississippi became the last country to legalize medicinal cannabis treatment when Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed legislation into law.

In the past decade, more than 20 states — and the District of Columbia — have gone a step further and legalized adult-use recreational cannabis.

These policy changes served as the background for the study published this month, in which the authors said the “aim…was to assess temporal trends and correlates of medicinal cannabis use in the United States.”

“Since 2013, medicinal cannabis use has been assessed using a dichotomous question of whether medicinal cannabis use was recommended by a physician among those who had used cannabis in the past 12 months. A modified Poisson model was used to estimate the mean annual percentage change (AAPC) in medicinal cannabis use from 2013 to 2020,” they wrote explaining the methods used in the study. “The analyzes were repeated for key sociodemographic and clinical subgroups. The data was analyzed from September to November 2022.”

The authors said they used data “from [the] 2013-2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH).”

Licensing requirements for medicinal cannabis vary from state to state, but it is known to be a particularly effective treatment for chronic pain sufferers, for whom it can be a safer alternative to highly addictive prescription opioids.

A new UK study this month found a link between medicinal cannabis and improvements in health-related quality of life for patients with chronic illnesses.

The authors of that study said their research “suggests that [cannabis-based medicinal products] associated with an improvement in health-related quality of life in UK patients with chronic conditions” and that it “was well tolerated by most participants, but side effects were more common in female and cannabis-naïve patients”.

“This observational study suggests that initiating treatment with [cannabis-based medicinal products] is generally associated with improvement [health-related quality of life]as well as sleep and anxiety-related symptoms for up to 12 months in patients with chronic illness… Most patients tolerated the treatment well, but the risk [adverse events] should be considered before initiation [cannabis-based medicinal products]’ the researchers write in their conclusions.

They added: “Particularly in female and cannabis-naïve patients, there is an increased likelihood of experiencing side effects. These results may help inform current clinical practice, but more importantly, they underscore the need for further clinical trials to determine causality and provide guidelines for optimizing therapy [cannabis-based medicinal products].”