Most Legal Marijuana States Had Fewer Vaping-Related Lung Injuries, Study Finds

States that have enacted marijuana legalization were generally less likely to see spikes in vaping-related lung injuries that occurred over the past year compared to states where cannabis remains prohibited, according to a new study. The paper, published Tuesday in the journal Addiction, seems to bolster arguments from reform advocates that legalizing and regulating marijuana mitigates the risk to consumers of using contaminated and potentially dangerous products. The study also concluded that apart from state policies, “neither higher adult vaping rates nor higher rates of recent cannabis use predicted increased” e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury, or EVALI. “If e-cigarette or marijuana use per se drove this outbreak, areas with more engagement in those behaviors should show a higher EVALI prevalence,” Abigail Friedman, the study’s author and an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, said in a press release. “This study finds the opposite result.” In fact, some of the earliest adopters of adult-use cannabis legalization ranked among the lowest in terms of reported lung injuries from the outbreak, with fewer than one in 100,000 cases for residents aged 12 to 64. The average state prevalence for these lung injuries was 1.4 cases per 100,000 residents in that age group. By contrast, none of the states with the highest rate of cases have recreational marijuana markets in place. “A negative relationship between EVALI prevalence and rates of pre-outbreak vaping and marijuana use suggests that well-established markets may have crowded-out use of riskier, informally sourced e-liquids,” the…

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