Marijuana Legalization and College Student Use

Since November 2012, four states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational marijuana. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what role legalization has on outcomes of college undergraduates. We use multiple years of survey data from the National College Health Assessment to show that students at Washington State University experienced a large increase in the likelihood of marijuana use after legalization. The effect is robust to multiple specifications. Females and minority students experience the largest increases. Using a difference-in-differences design based on legal age (21 or older), we find evidence that some legal-age students waited to start using marijuana until after legal sales of the drug began at the end of 2014. Finally, we investigate the effects of legalization on alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use and find that consumption of alcohol and tobacco declined after legal sales of marijuana began.