Marijuana Laws in Maine: Impact on Suicide Rates
Marijuana has been claimed by many to help treat mental health disorders. In this project, I decided to dive into the data on how the change in marijuana laws has affected the state of Maine in terms of their mortality rates based upon Intent/Injury classification of suicide from the CDC’s Detailed Mortality Dataset, for the years 1999 and 2000, as well as 2016 and 2017, seeing how Maine became the fifth state in the country to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes in 1999, and for recreational purposes in the year 2016. (Source)
Suicide Rates are Disproportionate in 6 out of the 14 Counties in Maine
Upon analyzing the data, I found that there were 6 counties that disproportionately been affected by suicide, in terms of mortality rate with injury/intent of suicide. Because of this, I really wanted to look into which of these counties was impacted the most — positively or negatively.
Maine Legalizes Medical Marijuana in 1999
In 1999, Maine legalized medical marijuana, becoming the fifth state in the nation to do so.
Unfortunately, in the dataset, there weren’t all fourteen counties for years 1999 and 2000. This being said, the 5 counties that were available for both years were the top five in terms of suicide mortality rate for the entire dataset.
I found it very interesting interesting how suicide rates across the board, drastically declining by about 41.3% in Cumberland County, but increased by 19.5% in Androscoggin County. Overall, in the sample of five counties shown above, there was a 19.2% decrease in suicide rates between these years.
Recreational Marijuana Makes a Different Impact
When recreational marijuana was legalized, there was a 24% jump in suicide rates in the same counties: from ~1.61 per 10,000 in terms of population, to 2 for every 10,000. In fact, Cumberland County, which between 1999 and 2000 had a 41.3% decrease in reported suicides, this time had a 33.1% increase between 2016 and 2017!
In fact, for reach one of the five counties shown, only one had a decrease in suicide rates; Androscoggin County went down just shy of 9.4% between these years.
This is Not Conclusive of Any Trends, However it Deserves Attention
While there isn’t any real reason to say that recreational marijuana alone increased suicide rates, this definitely needs more attention. I am looking forward to looking further into other states, to see if any related trends are prevalent with law changes in similar time periods in them as well in the near future!
View the Jupyter notebook here, or follow my process with my builds with Lambda on my Github!
