As cannabis proponents around the world celebrate 4/20, a new report from the Colorado Department of Public Safety discovered that hospital visits because of marijuana have risen and that more and more adolescents are beginning to use marijuana. However, the higher acceptance of recreational marijuana is diminishing the significance of these results.
Colorado was the first state ever to legalize recreational cannabis in 2014. Since that time, emergency room visits related to cannabis have risen by almost thirty percent, according to the study. From 2014 to the middle of 2015, 956 out of every 100,000 emergency room visits (which is about one out of every 1,000) were related to cannabis use, versus 739 per 100,000 from 2010 all the way to 2013. In a similar manner, emergency room visits related to cannabis use increased from 803 per 100,000 (from 2001 to 2009) to 2,413 per 100,000 from January 2014 through June 2015.
Also, as the amount of people looking for treatment for cannabis abuse was pretty much constant for the first year of legalization, those that did look for treatment were using much more marijuana than usual. The report indicates that more than a third of hospitalized patients (35.6%) in drug treatment centers announced near daily use of cannabis in 2014, versus 33.5% in 2013, 32.2% in 2012 and 30% in 2011. The report states:
“The decreasing social stigma regarding marijuana use could lead individuals to be more likely to report use of surveys and to health workers in emergency departments and poison control centers, making marijuana use appear to increase when perhaps it has not.”
“It is too early to draw any conclusions about the potential effects of marijuana legalization or commercialization on public safety, public health, or youth outcomes,” Jack Reed, the statistical analyst who authored the report, writes, “and this may always be difficult.”
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