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SHADAC and CRC Brief Provides Pre-Legalization Data on Minnesota’s Cannabis Landscape
January 30, 2024:Even before legalization, cannabis use was rising in Minnesota
Cannabis policy in the United States has evolved during the past decade. After voters in Colorado and Washington approved ballot measures to legalize cannabis in 2012, other states began to follow suit. In 2023, Minnesota became the 23rd state to legalize adult use of non-medical cannabis. By the end of that year, more than half of the U.S. population lived in states that had legalized non-medical use of cannabis.
The debate around and the act of legalization have intensified Minnesota’s focus on the potential public health implications of cannabis. Proponents of cannabis often argue that legalization was long overdue — that legal prohibitions on the substance caused more harm than good, and that it is substantially less harmful than other legal substances. Meanwhile, some opponents of cannabis raise concerns that legalization could cause serious harm to both those who use it and those who abstain.
While we can venture guesses about the positive or negative consequences of cannabis legalization, there is great uncertainty as to how those will play out. To some degree, Minnesota can look to the experiences of states that have legalized cannabis earlier. But different states may have different results, as variation in factors such as demographics, culture, policy, and other issues may influence different outcomes.
The longtime legal status of cannabis has made research on the topic challenging, so there remain many unanswered questions about the potential risks and benefits of the substance, let alone how legalization might influence that calculus. One starting point for anticipating the potential implications of cannabis legalization, however, is to assess the situation prior to that policy change.
To help inform conversations on cannabis policy in Minnesota, staff from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health’s State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) and the Cannabis Research Center (CRC) analyzed data from the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). Using that survey, we report pre-legalization baseline data on several issues and commonly cited concerns associated with cannabis legalization:
- Prevalence of cannabis use (in both adults and youth)
- Rates of symptoms of cannabis abuse and dependence, also commonly called cannabis use disorder or addiction
- Self-reported incidence of driving under the influence of cannabis
In our issue brief, we present data for both the U.S. overall and Minnesota specifically. We also present data on those same measures for alcohol — providing comparison benchmarks for another substance that is commonly used and has long been legal. Finally, we present some trend data on the prevalence of cannabis use for Minnesota, as well as the prevalence of cannabis use in the first states to legalize cannabis, Colorado and Washington, where legal sales began in 2014.
Ultimately, the data returned findings that may be useful in better understanding Minnesota’s cannabis landscape prior to legalization and offer a starting point for understanding where we may be headed.
For instance, we found that even before legalization, cannabis use was increasing in Minnesota over several years — just as it had in other states that have legalized cannabis. But despite that overall increase in cannabis use pre-legalization, recent use prevalence remains relatively low: while almost half of Minnesotans aged 12 and older reported having tried cannabis at least once in their lives, recent use (i.e., in the past 30 days) was much less common at only 10%. In fact, recent alcohol use was substantially more common than cannabis use for both adults and youth. Adults were roughly five times as likely to report using alcohol in the past 30 days compared to cannabis, and youth were roughly twice as likely to report using alcohol in the past 30 days compared to cannabis.
By providing data and information on the cannabis landscape prior to legalization in this issue brief, our hope is that policymakers and other Minnesotans will be able to better assess and understand the issues surrounding of this historic policy change.
