Risks vs. Benefits and Opportunity Costs in Cannabis Research
I’ve been reading a lot of studies on the long-term effects of using cannabis.
Most (all?) of the studies that have tracked how cannabis users fare over time focus on the risks of cannabis use.
One of the primary tools of economists is the Cost-Benefit Analysis. I was well-trained to view most situations through this lens. It occurs to me that most research on cannabis’s effects in users involve Risk Analyses without recognizing any of the associated Benefits. That type of analysis provides an extremely biased view of the situation.
Another lesson that was hammered into me was the fact that nothing exists in a vacuum. When considering an option, the first question is always: What’s the alternative (i.e., the opportunity cost)? Specifically, what would people do instead if they didn’t use cannabis, and what are the associated costs and benefits of that alternative option?
Taken together, Cost-Benefit Analysis and Opportunity Cost Analysis lead me to the fact that even when considering the most adverse use cases – adolescents who grow up in hostile environments – the most basic benefit of cannabis is harm reduction. Yet none of the studies consider this.
Or what about people who use cannabis for pain – what’s their alternative? Opioids? Simply living with chronic pain? Do researchers/physicians really think those are better options? Is that what those researchers/physicians would do if they had chronic pain?
Presumably many researchers fail to consider (perhaps because they have no understanding of the ECS) how much worse the outcomes for these disadvantaged adolescents or other cannabis users would be or would have been, if they had not used cannabis.
To be fair, much of this research was conducted before the ECS was discovered. However, in this case, why do these studies still carry so much weight among researchers and policy analysts? Shouldn’t good researchers (scientists, regulators) be updating their beliefs as new information is revealed?
And there’s plenty of more recent analysis that continues to examine the adverse effects of cannabis use on adolescents and other users. What’s the researchers’ excuse in these more recent cases?
