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YEAR-END SUMMARY: In 2024, researchers all over the world published more than 4,000 scientific papers on cannabis.

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YEAR-END SUMMARY: In 2024, researchers all over the world published more than 4,000 scientific papers on cannabis.

2025-01-02

On New Year's Eve, NORML, a social advocacy group, reported that researchers worldwide had published over 4,000 scientific papers on cannabis in 2024. This was the fourth year in a row that they'd published that many papers. Since 2014, there have been more than 35,000 papers published on cannabis, which shows how confident scientists are in the medical potential of cannabis and the trend toward legalization.

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"Despite the perception that marijuana has not received enough scientific scrutiny," said Paul Armentano, NORML's Associate Director, in an article about the study. "Scientists' interest in studying marijuana has grown a lot over the past decade. They're learning more about the plant, its active ingredients, how they work, and their effects on users and society.

"It's time for politicians and others to stop looking at cannabis through tinted glasses," Armentano continued, "and instead start having evidence-based discussions about cannabis and cannabis reform policies that demonstrate what we know."

To count these papers, NORML searched PubMed.gov, a resource of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, which now cites a total of "more than 49,500 scientific papers on marijuana, with the earliest included papers dating back to 1840."

NORML found that more than 70 percent of these articles came out in the last decade, and more than 90 percent were published after 2002.

Some of the papers from the last year say that marijuana legalization reduces opioid overdose rates, that marijuana can help manage certain types of pain, and that medical marijuana "significantly improves the quality of life" for people with autism, treatment-resistant epilepsy, and other disorders.

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Other studies have looked into how legalization affects prescription drug prices. For example, medical marijuana in Utah has helped reduce opioid use among pain patients, and adding marijuana to a state-level prescription drug monitoring program has reduced physician prescriptions for scheduled narcotics.

But other studies have looked at the chemical makeup of marijuana, including some of the lesser-known compounds like minor cannabinoids and terpenes. One study found that a chemical in marijuana called cannabigerol (CBG) might be able to help with a bunch of different health problems, like cancer, metabolism, pain, and inflammation.

This study comes out just after another one this summer that focused on the smaller chemical parts of marijuana. That study found that a little bit of cannabinoids might be able to fight cancer in the blood.

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Other studies have looked into how legalization affects prescription drug prices. For example, medical marijuana in Utah has helped reduce opioid use among pain patients, and adding marijuana to a state-level prescription drug monitoring program has reduced physician prescriptions for scheduled narcotics.

But other studies have looked at the chemical makeup of marijuana, including some of the lesser-known compounds like minor cannabinoids and terpenes. One study found that a chemical in marijuana called cannabigerol (CBG) might be able to help with a bunch of different health problems, like cancer, metabolism, pain, and inflammation.

This study comes out just after another one this summer that focused on the smaller chemical parts of marijuana. That study found that a little bit of cannabinoids might be able to fight cancer in the blood.