Volume 4, Issue 1

While 15 states and the District of Columbia provide allowances for medical marijuana, little is known about the individuals who seek a physician’s recommendation to use marijuana. This study provides descriptive information about 1,655 applicants in California who sought a physician’s recommendation for medical marijuana, the conditions for which they sought treatment, and the diagnoses made by the physicians. It presents a systematic analysis of physician records and questionnaires obtained from consecutive applicants seen during a three-month period at nine medical marijuana specialty practices operating throughout the state. The analysis yields insights that may be useful for future research on medical marijuana and marijuana policy, including: 1) very few of those who sought a recommendation had cancer, HIV/AIDS, glaucoma, or multiple sclerosis; 2) most applicants presented with chronic pain, mental health conditions, or insomnia; and 3) half of the applicants reported using marijuana as a substitute for prescription drugs.

Price data for cocaine in Europe reported in the World Drug Report of 2010 are analyzed with the aim of inferring patterns of transnational cocaine flows across the continent. The concepts of market integration and price gradients are combined to identify the existence and directionality of flows, on the basis of which a geographic characterization of the movement of cocaine is constructed. The findings are broadly consistent with anecdotal data on cocaine flows reported in the World Drug Report. The methodology is, therefore, a simple and promising methodology that can supplement existing efforts by researchers and policy-makers to identify trouble spots with a view to managing the growing cocaine problem in Europe and drug problems in general.