Legal Access to Marijuana and Motor Vehicle Fatalities in the United States, 1990--2019

Abstract

In the past 25 years, several states and the District of Columbia have implemented statewide marijuana laws. By employing difference-in-differences model and using the data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), this paper focuses on the effects of policy changes that legalize the use of medical and recreational marijuana on motor vehicle fatalities. The results show that legalization of medical marijuana laws are associated with a decrease in traffic fatalities by 6.87 percent, while there is no statistically significant change in traffic fatalities rate after the legalization of recreational laws, which is consistent with the literature.

Keywords: marijuana, traffic fatalities, accidents, marijuana laws

JEL Classification: I12, I18, R41, K42