Cannabis Consumption Increases Older Employees’ Productivity
[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]T[/dropcap]he perception that medical cannabis consumption adversely affects productiveness has been vaporized by a new study that shows medical cannabis use benefits older workers.
The study was published in the spring 2019 issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and suggests that medical cannabis laws improve employment prospects of older Americans as well as their health.
It used data from the 1992-2012 Health and Retirement Study, which tracked health and labor market outcomes for 100,000 survey respondents older than 51. Older working adults can be hindered at work from arthritis and back pains. For those who had access to medical cannabis, they reported a 4.8 percent decrease in reported pain and a 6.6 increase in responses of “very good or excellent health.” Full-time employment also increased five percent for those who consume medical cannabis.
“Our study is important because of the limited availability of clinical trial data on the effects of medical marijuana,” said Lauren Hersch Nicholas, assistant professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health Policy and Management. “While several studies point to improved pain control with medical marijuana, research has largely ignored older adults even though they experience the highest rates of medical issues that could be treated with medical marijuana.”
The study’s authors hope that the information will help inform policymakers about medical cannabis benefits and the efficacy of the medicine for older Americans for conditions that may not be covered under the wide variety of state laws in the U.S. It also supports more research into the use as an effective medical treatment.
“The heterogenous effects of MMLs by age exhibited in our paper and others in the literature suggest that policies that more closely target access to legitimate medical users only could maximize benefits and minimize harms of these laws,” the study reads. “Age is an easily observed characteristic that could potentially be used in policy design, i.e., to set higher ages for legal access. More comprehensive medical examinations could also better identify qualifying patients, especially among younger adults, where underlying rates of disease are lower.”
