Notable coverage of notable marijuana reform public health issues in Nov 2017 issue of Preventive Medicine

I have just seen that the November 2017 issue of Preventive Medicine has a series of articles on the “potential health impacts of legalizing recreational marijuana use,” and that series is described in an editorial introduction this way:

Legalization of marijuana use has gained considerable momentum in the U.S. with 28 states plus the District of Columbia (DC) legalizing medical marijuana use and 8 states plus DC legalizing recreational marijuana use, with similar liberalization of laws occurring in Canada and other countries (NYTimes, April 13, 2017).  Such actions clearly have tremendous public health implications and it is important that those implications be considered using the best available scientific evidence.

In this Special Issue we invited policy makers from Colorado (Ghosh et al., 2017, in this issue), the first U.S. state to legalize recreational marijuana use, Vermont (Chen and Searles, 2017, in this issue), a state currently considering legalization of recreational use, and the U.S.’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (Weiss and Wargo, 2017, in this issue) to provide a federal perspective on the health implications of legalizing recreational marijuana use.

In addition to policy makers we invited contributions from scientific experts in the health impacts of marijuana use to address the implications of legalizing recreational marijuana use, including potential impacts on the epidemiology of marijuana use and risk perceptions among youth and adults (Carliner et al., 2017, in this issue), emergency medicine (Wang et al., 2017, in this issue), addiction risk (Budney and Borodovsky, 2017, in this issue), adolescent risks and potential interventions (Schuster et al., 2017; Walker, 2017, in this issue), and maternal and child health (Mark and Terplan, 2017, in this issue).

Here are just some of the titles of some of the notable article in the issue:

• “Lessons learned after three years of legalized, recreational marijuana: The Colorado experience”
• “Cannabis use, attitudes, and legal status in the U.S.: A review”
• “Marijuana and acute health care contacts in ColoradoOriginal Research Article” 
• “The potential impact of cannabis legalization on the development of cannabis use disorders”
• “Legalization of cannabis: Considerations for intervening with adolescent consumers”