Capturing Heterogeneity in Medical Marijuana Policies: A Taxonomy of Regulatory Regimes Across the United States

摘要

BackgroundThere is considerable movement in the U.S. to legalize use of cannabis for medicinal purposes. Twenty-three U.S. states and the D.C. have laws that decriminalize use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Most prior studies of state medical marijuana laws and their association with overall marijuana use, adolescent use, crime rates, and alcohol traffic fatalities, have used a binary coding of whether the state had a medical marijuana law or not. Mixed results from these studies raise the question of whether this method for measuring policy characteristics is adequate.