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Marijuana legalization and drug abuse as a cause for entry into foster care

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Abstract

In recent years, many states have legalized marijuana for medical use, recreational use, or both. At the same time, parental drug abuse is now the second most frequent reason for a child’s placement into the foster care system. We investigate the causal link between these two facts. Do states that legalize marijuana use experience an increase in foster care entries related to drug abuse? We utilize multiple difference-in-difference approaches to exploit the state level variation in recreational and medical marijuana laws. Our findings suggest that when states permitted recreational marijuana use, there was no corresponding change in the number of foster care entries related to drug abuse, relative to control states. For the legalization of medical marijuana, we find a roughly 20 percent decrease in the number of cases associated with parental drug abuse in the second year after legalization, followed by a roughly 30 percent decrease in the third and fourth years. We isolate this effect as coming from states with relatively strict tetrahydrocannabinol limits. While we find fewer entries related to parental drug abuse, there is no convincing evidence that total removals decreased.

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Notes

  1. For example, Anderson and Sabia (2022) show no association between recreational legalization and adolescent use while Coley et al. (2021) find that recreational legalization reduces adolescent use. Conversely, Rusby et al. (2018) report that recreational legalization has no effect on the number of adolescent users but increases use among those that already used marijuana prior to legalization.

  2. For a thorough meta-analysis on the effects of marijuana use and the difficulty in conducting research, see Caulkins et al. (2015).

  3. Foster care may or may not improve child outcomes. See Doyle (2007, 2008) and Gross and Baron (2022).

  4. We begin our analysis in 2007 due to missing parental drug abuse data for certain states, notably New York, in years prior. We end our analysis in 2019 due to COVID considerations.

  5. Of the 663 observations (51 states over 13 years), two values of the parental drug abuse variable and 38 values of the teenage drug abuse are equal to zero.

  6. For the Census population data, we use consistent race variables as calculated by SEER:

    Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program under the National Cancer Institute.

  7. For brevity, we only show the statistics for the four most cited reasons for entry into foster care and the three most referenced race categories (omitting “other”).

  8. \({e}^{-0.357}-1=-0.300\)

  9. \({e}^{-0.239}-1=-0.213;{e}^{-0.362}-1=-0.304;{e}^{-0.396}-1=-0.327\)

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C.C., B.E., and C.T.W. contributed to forming the idea, writing the manuscript, and reviewing the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Economics and Finance, Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville, GA, USA

    Cullen T. Wallace, Chris Clark & Brent Evans

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  1. Cullen T. Wallace
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Wallace, C.T., Clark, C. & Evans, B. Marijuana legalization and drug abuse as a cause for entry into foster care. Rev Econ Household (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-024-09704-x

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