San Francisco, CA: States that legalize marijuana use for either medical or adult use do not experience any subsequent rise in the public’s use of either tobacco or nicotine, according to longitudinal data published in the International Journal of Drug Policy.
Researchers affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco assessed trends in the use of tobacco and nicotine in a nationally representative cohort of 9,000 participants (ages 18 to 94) for the years 2017 and 2021.
They reported that the adoption of state-level legalization laws did not increase participants’ likelihood of using either tobacco or nicotine.
“The odds of tobacco/nicotine use and co-use with cannabis were not associated with cannabis legalization,” the study’s authors concluded. “Tobacco/nicotine use significantly declined (−1.9 percent); co-use of cannabis and tobacco/nicotine did not change significantly (+0.2 percent)” during the study period.
Researchers did report a modest increase in participants’ marijuana use (3.3 percent) following adult-use legalization, a finding that has been reported in prior analyses.
Full text of the study, “Cannabis legalization and changes in cannabis and tobacco/nicotine use and co-use in a national cohort of US adults during 2017-2021,” appears in the International Journal of Drug Policy.