Abstract
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s Alcohol Policy Information System (APIS) is, for the first time, adding legal data pertaining to recreational cannabis use to its current offerings on alcohol policy. Now that Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and the District of Columbia have legalized aspects of recreational cannabis, and more states are considering it, there is an urgency to provide high-quality, multi-dimensional legal data to the public health community. This article introduces the Cannabis Policy Taxonomy recently posted on APIS, and explores its theoretical and empirical contributions to the substance abuse literature and its potential for use in policy research. We also present results of interviews with public health experts in alcohol and cannabis policy, which sought to determine the most important variables to address in the initial release of cannabis policy data. From this process, we found that pricing controls emerged as the variable singled out by the largest number of experts. This analysis points to a host of vital policies that are of increasing importance to public health policy scholars and their current and future research.
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Notes
APIS data have been used extensively in scholarly research. To date, APIS staff have tracked 146 articles published in peer reviewed journals (see: http://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov/peer-reviewed_publications_using_apis_data.html), and many more uses and examples of APIS data and concepts are available in scholarly and popular books, doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, white papers, training documents for practitioners and activists, and news articles (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism).
Alcohol distribution in the U.S. is three-tiered and consists of producers, distributors, and retailers. Producers may sell products to wholesale distributors who may then sell them to retailers. Finally, retailers may sell to consumers. The impetus for this system, put in place after Prohibition, was to regulate the alcohol industry so that vertical integration of the three tiers was prohibited. The intention was to prevent abuses (e.g., counterfeit and dangerous products), and to promote responsible competition and effective collection of taxes on alcohol (Bonnie & O'Connell, 2004).
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of the public health scholars who were consulted in the course of this project and the manuscript reviewers whose close reading of it greatly improved the final version. This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. HHSN275201300002C.
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All procedures performed involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendment or comparable ethical standards.
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Klitzner, M.D., Thomas, S., Schuler, J. et al. The New Cannabis Policy Taxonomy on APIS: Making Sense of the Cannabis Policy Universe. J Primary Prevent 38, 295–314 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10935-017-0475-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10935-017-0475-6