Policing cannabis and drug related hospital admissions: Evidence from administrative records

Abstract

a b s t r a c tWe evaluate the impact of a policing experiment that depenalized the possession of small quantities of cannabis in the London borough of Lambeth, on hospital admissions related to illicit drug use. To do so, we exploit administrative records on individual hospital admissions classified by ICD-10 diagnosis codes. These records allow the construction of a quarterly panel data set for London boroughs running from 1997 to 2009 to estimate the short and long run impacts of the depenalization policy unilaterally introduced in Lambeth between 2001 and 2002. We find that the depenalization of cannabis had significant longer term impacts on hospital admissions related to the use of hard drugs, raising hospital admission rates for men by between 40 and 100% of their pre-policy baseline levels. The impacts are concentrated among men in younger age cohorts. The dynamic impacts across cohorts vary in profile with some cohorts experiencing hospitalization rates remaining above pre-intervention levels three to four years after the depenalization policy is introduced. We combine these estimated impacts on hospitalization rates with estimates on how the policy impacted the severity of hospital admissions to provide a lower bound estimate of the public health cost of the depenalization policy.Crown

Reducing Binge Drinking? The Effect of a Ban on Late-Night Off-Premise Alcohol Sales on Alcohol-Related Hospital Stays in Germany

“…There is a discussion in the literature whether illicit drugs and alcohol are substitutes or complements (see e.g. Williams et al 2004;Crost and Guerrero 2012;Conover and Scrimgeour 2013;Kelly and Rasul 2014). Our estimates might provide additional insights into this debate as the ban can be regarded as an exogenous reduction in excessive alcohol consumption for adolescents and young adults.…”

“…We estimate equations (1) and (2) by weighted least squares, where the weights are given by the county's population of the analyzed age in order to obtain the accurate overall effect for Baden-Württemberg. Draca et al (2011) and Kelly and Rasul (2014) apply similar weighting procedures on their aggregated data. Table 1 reports the results from basic difference-in-differences models.…”

Reducing binge drinking? The effect of a ban on late-night off-premise alcohol sales on alcohol-related hospital stays in Germany

“…49 In order to code drug-related hospitalizations, we follow Kelly and Rasul (2014) in relying on the codes for mental and behavioral disorders due to using opioids (F11), cannabinoids (F12), cocaine (F14), and hallucinogens (F16), as well as on the code for poisoning by narcotics and psychodysleptics (T40). The codes X42, X62 and Y12 do not appear in our data set.…”

Clearing the haze: the complexities and challenges of research on state marijuana laws

“…These types of surveys often do not allow detection of changes in use, particularly among established regular or heavy users. Such surveys often lack information about the broad variety of outcomes related to marijuana use that are relevant to understanding the impact of policies, such as negative personal consequences, direct health effects, healthcare utilization, and economic and societal costs, including effects on school performance and employment …”