Employment and Disability Among Canadian Medical Cannabis Patients

• Author: Andrew Davis
• DOI: 10.1177/0022042619832542
• Date: 01 July 2019
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0022042619832542

Journal of Drug Issues

2019, Vol. 49(3) 465 –476

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0022042619832542

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Article

Employment and Disability

Among Canadian Medical

Cannabis Patients

Andrew Davis1

Abstract

Do patients increase or decrease their employment after starting prescription medical cannabis?

I exploit a novel panel database of more than 4,000 medical cannabis patients to analyze

connections between medical cannabis treatment and changes in employment and disability

status, finding a mild increase in employment and small reductions in unemployment and labor

force participation. Patients taking antiepileptic medications at the time of cannabis prescription

do significantly better than average, whereas patients taking nerve modulators do somewhat

worse. Other factors such as age, sex, prior use of cannabis, or characteristics of prescription

cannabis do not strongly correlate with labor market changes.

Keywords

cannabis, medical cannabis, medical marijuana, employment, labor supply, disability

Introduction

Medical cannabis is currently a topic of intense interest within the medical and population health

communities as a large number of countries and jurisdictions move forward on relaxing restric-

tions on either medical or recreational cannabis. A rapidly growing literature, starting with the

medical effects of marijuana, is consequently branching out to consider a broader range of

impacts and effects of cannabis liberalization.

Labor force status is not generally considered in strictly medical studies, but is of immediate

concern to policy makers for a variety of reasons, including sustainability of disability programs

and medical services and other fiscal reasons such as tax revenues. It also serves as a proxy for

general well-being and ability to engage in a variety of activities.

This article investigates whether Canadian medical cannabis patients change their labor

supply after being prescribed medical cannabis. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only

article that directly observes both medical cannabis usage and labor force status over time in a

large sample (N > 4,000).

I find that employment increases marginally after prescription of medical cannabis, which

may be especially notable as the labor supply of patients with chronic illnesses may, in general,

trend downward over time.1 Patients taking antiepileptic medications on initial prescription of

1Department of Economics Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Andrew Davis, Department of Economics, Acadia University, 15 Highland Dr., Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada B4P 2R6.

Email: andrew.davis@acadiau.ca

832542JODXXX10.1177/0022042619832542Journal of Drug IssuesDavis

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