Priscillia Hunt

Words Can Be Deceiving: A Review of Variation among Legally Effective Medical Marijuana Laws in the United States

Abstract When voters in two US states approved the recreational use of marijuana in 2012, public debates for how best to promote and protect public health and safety started drawing implications from states’ medical marijuana laws (MMLs). However, many of the discussions were simplified to the notion that states either have an MML or do not; little reference was made to the fact that legal provisions differ across states. This study seeks to clarify the characteristics of state MMLs in place since 1990 that are most relevant to consumers/patients and categorizes those aspects most likely to affect the prevalence of use, and consequently the intensity of public health and welfare effects. Evidence shows treating MMLs as homogeneous across states is misleading and does not reflect the reality of MML making. This variation likely has implications for use and health outcomes, and thus states’ public health.

The Impact of Legalizing and Regulating Weed: Issues with Study Design and Emerging Findings in the USA

Evaluations of the impact of medical and recreational marijuana laws rely on quasi- or natural experiments in which researchers exploit changes in the law and attempt to determine the impact of these changes on outcomes. This chapter reviews three key issues of causal inference in observational studies with respect to estimating of impact of medical or recreational laws on marijuana use-intervention definition, outcome measurement, and random assignment of study participants. We show that studies tend to use the same statistical approach (differences-in-differences) and yet find differential impacts of medical marijuana laws on adult use in particular. We demonstrate that these seemingly conflicting findings may be due to different years of analysis, ages of the study sample in each year, and assignment of jurisdictions to the control group versus treatment group.

Continuous quality improvement (CQI) in addiction treatment settings: design and intervention protocol of a group randomized pilot study

BackgroundFew studies have designed and tested the use of continuous quality improvement approaches in community based substance use treatment settings. Little is known about the feasibility, costs, efficacy, and sustainment of such approaches in these settings.Methods/DesignA group-randomized trial using a modified stepped wedge design is being used. In the first phase of the study, eight programs, stratified by modality (residential, outpatient) are being randomly assigned to the intervention or control condition. In the second phase, the initially assigned control programs are receiving the intervention to gain additional information about feasibility while sustainment is being studied among the programs initially assigned to the intervention.DiscussionBy using this design in a pilot study, we help inform the field about the feasibility, costs, efficacy and sustainment of the intervention. Determining information at the pilot stage about costs and sustainment provides value for designing future studies and implementation strategies with the goal to reduce the time between intervention development and translation to real world practice settings.

From the bottom to the top: a more complete picture of the immigrant-native wage gap in Britain

This paper investigates wage assimilation of foreign-born male workers in Britain over the period 1993 to 2009. Using Labour Force Survey data, the paper employs a methodology (Blinder-Oaxaca quantile regressions) to decompose the immigrant-native wage differential at the mean and across the conditional wage distribution. Although immigrants earn more on average than natives, mean results mask that immigrants at the bottom (top) of the distribution earn less (more) than natives. Over the period investigated, the pro-UK-born unexplained component of the wage gap was greater at the bottom of the distribution and has shifted towards the centre of the distribution.Jel codesJ15, J16, J31, J71

Continuous quality improvement in substance abuse treatment facilities: How much does it cost?

Continuous quality improvement (CQI) has grown in the U.S. since the 1970s, yet little is known about the costs to implement CQI in substance abuse treatment facilities. This paper is part of a larger group randomized control trial in a large urban county evaluating the impact of Plan-Study-Do-Act (PDSA)-CQI designed for community service organizations (Hunter, Ober, Paddock, Hunt, & Levan, 2014). Operated by one umbrella organization, each of the eight facilities of the study, four residential and four outpatient substance abuse treatment facilities, selected their own CQI Actions, including administrative- and clinical care-related Actions. Using an activity-based costing approach, we collected labor and supplies and equipment costs directly attributable to CQI Actions over a 12-month trial period. Our study finds implementation of CQI and meeting costs of this trial per facility were approximately

A Practical Introduction to Methods for Analyzing Longitudinal Data in the Presence of Missing Data Using a Marijuana Price Survey

2000 to

The Short- and Long-Run Effects of Private Law Enforcement: Evidence from University Police

10,500 per year (

An introduction to Monte Carlo simulations in criminal psychology: applications in evaluating biased estimators for recidivism

4500 on average), or

Breaking Down Barriers: Experiments into Policies That Might Incentivize Employers to Hire Ex-Offenders

10 to

Bridge to Opportunities: How One Probation Agency Developed a Program Designed to Connect Probationers to High-Wage Jobs

60 per admitted client. We provide a description of the sources of variation in these costs, including differing intensity of the CQI Actions selected, which should help decision makers plan use of PDSA-CQI.