Like other states, minorities are disproportionately represented in the California's state prison system, particularly for drug offenses. Unlike other states, California has had a policy of mandatory diversion to drug treatment for non-violent drug offenders since mid-2001 (Proposition 36)....

In this study we reconsider the relationship between heavy and persistent marijuana use and high school dropout status using a unique prospective panel study of over 4500 7th grade students from South Dakota who are followed up through high school. Propensity score weighting is used to adjust...

Every major national tobacco legislation proposed in the past two years has called for significant increases in the price of cigarettes as a way to discourage youths from smoking. One argument used to oppose these bills is that increases in the price of cigarettes would cause youths to...

Recent studies have shown that efforts to curb alcohol use by increasing the price of alcohol and limiting youth's access have succeeded, but they may have had the unintended consequencce of increasing marijuana use. This possibility is troubling in light of a recent government report that shows...

User sanctions influence the legal risk for participants in illegal drug markets. A change in user sanctions may change retail drug prices, depending on how it changes the legal risk to users, how it changes the legal risk to dealers, and the slope of the supply curve. Using a novel dataset with...

This research analyzes the contemporaneous and intertemporal relationship between the demands for alcohol and marijuana by youths and young adults. A general theory of multi-commodity habit formation is developed and tested using data from the 1983-1984 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey...

Workplace drug testing programs are becoming increasingly more common although there is little research demonstrating that they have any effect on drug use by employees. This paper analyzes the deterrence effect of a particularly aggressive workplace drug- testing policy implemented by the...

This paper sheds light on previous inconsistencies identified in the literature regarding the relationship between medical marijuana laws (MML) and recreational marijuana use by closely examining the importance of policy dimensions (registration requirements, home cultivation, dispensaries) and...

Opioid abuse, as measured by deaths involving opioid analgesics and substance abuse treatment admissions, has increased dramatically since 1999, including a 20% increase in opioid-related mortality between 2005 and 2006. This paper examines whether the introduction of the Medicare Prescription...

In 2001, use of the STRIDE data base for the purposes of analyzing drug prices and the impact of public policies on drug markets came under serious attack by the National Research Council (Manski et al., 2001; Horowitz, 2001). While some of the criticisms raised by the committee were valid, many of...