Economics - Research Publications

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The Impact of Cannabis & Cigarette Use on Health

WILLIAMS, JENNY ; Skeels, Christopher L. ( 2006-09)

Chronic daily cannabis use has been shown to have long term harmful health effects,which in turn is expected to reduce labour market productivity. The evidence is less clear on thehealth impact of less frequent consumption, which is the more typical mode of use, and previousempirical studies fail to find robust evidence of an adverse impact of these modes of use on labourmarket productivity. This paper attempts to shed some light on this issue by directly estimating theimpact of cannabis consumption in the past week and past year on health status using information onprime age individuals living in Australia. We find that cannabis use does reduce self-assessed healthstatus, with the effect of weekly use being of a similar magnitude as smoking cigarettes daily. Moreover,we find evidence of a dose-response relationship in the health impact of cannabis use, with annual usehaving roughly half the impact of weekly use.