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The National Institute on Drug Abuse has awarded a two-year grant of $485,000 to William Paterson University health economics professor Rahi Abouk, director of the University’s Cannabis Research Institute, and David Powell, a professor in Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, to conduct a research study on cannabidiol policy and its impacts on broader substance use.
Longtime research collaborators, Abouk and Powell’s project will study how medical cannabidiol (CBD) access, through policy changes and dispensary openings, alters opioid use, alcohol use patterns, and poisoning deaths involving alcohol and opioids.
“Since 2014, eighteen states have enacted CBD laws without broader marijuana legalization despite limited evidence of the public health impacts of this approach,” says Abouk, an associate professor in William Paterson’s Cotsakos College of Business. He and Powell seek to fill in that gap with their work.
Substance use in the United States is evolving, the opioid crisis is ongoing and understanding how policy changes are affecting the narrative is key, Abouk explains. CBD access continues to expand in the United States with rates of use higher than marijuana, “but we have little evidence of the public health impacts of this expansion.”
In their previous research, Abouk and Powell have found that marijuana policies have been shown to impact alcohol use, deter opioid misuse, and reduce opioid-related deaths. They hypothesize that CBD policies may have similar effects and are especially interested in the possible role for alternative pain management availability to impact opioid use and curb overdose death rates.
As part of their work, they plan to study the demographics of CBD dispensary access to examine granular geographic effects.
