Williams Jenny, Bretteville-Jensen Anne Line
Department of Economics, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Norwegian Institute for Alcohol and Drug Research (SIRUS), Norway.
J Health Econ. 2014 Jul;36:20-32. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2014.03.006. Epub 2014 Mar 28.
A key question in the ongoing policy debate over cannabis' legal status is whether liberalizing cannabis laws leads to an increase in cannabis use. This paper provides new evidence on the impact of a specific type of liberalization, decriminalization, on initiation into cannabis use. Our identification strategy exploits variation in the timing of cannabis policy reforms and our estimation framework marries a difference-in-difference approach with a discrete time duration model. Our results reveal evidence of both heterogeneity and dynamics in the response of cannabis uptake to decriminalization. Overall, we find that the impact of decriminalization is concentrated amongst minors, who have a higher rate of uptake in the first five years following its introduction.
在当前关于大麻法律地位的政策辩论中，一个关键问题是大麻法律的自由化是否会导致大麻使用量增加。本文提供了新的证据，证明一种特定类型的自由化——非刑罪化——对开始使用大麻的影响。我们的识别策略利用了大麻政策改革时间上的差异，我们的估计框架将差分法与离散时间持续模型相结合。我们的结果揭示了大麻使用量对非刑罪化反应中的异质性和动态性证据。总体而言，我们发现非刑罪化的影响集中在未成年人中，他们在非刑罪化实施后的头五年内使用率较高。
