Too High to Work? Frequent Cannabis Users More Likely to Absentee, Study Finds – NBC 7 San Diego
A UC San Diego researcher and a colleague from New York University have published the results of a new study linking work absenteeism to cannabis use.
According to the report, published Monday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, more than 46,000 full-time workers from 2021 to 2022 participated in a study that found that “recent and frequent cannabis use and cannabis use disorder (CUD) were associated with greater work absenteeism.”
The study, authored by Kevin H. Yang, MD, a third-year resident in the department of psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine, and Joseph J. Palamar, PhD, MPH, associate professor in the department of population health at New York University Grossman School of Medicine.
What is CUD? It’s when people persist in using cannabis even though their use has a “significant negative impact on life and health,” according to Yale Medicine, and “costs Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance an estimated $4.7 billion annually in medical costs,” according to the study released Monday.
On Monday, NBC 7 spoke with Yang, who was in Big Bear, where the Alabama native and third-year resident in the UC San Diego School of Medicine’s department of psychiatry was vacationing when AJPM released its co-authored report.
“I have no control over that,” Yang said with a laugh, referring to this week’s free time.
A lot of drug research is going on at UC San Diego, Yang told NBC 7, with researchers interested in cannabis use, which has increased dramatically over the past 10 years, given changes in legalization and increased permissiveness in society.
“We’re looking at public health, different aspects of cannabis use and psychedelic use, looking at both the positive and negative aspects of such use from a public health perspective,” Yang said.
Data from the new study shows that 15.9% of full-time workers had used cannabis in the past month, and 6.5% of them “met the criteria” for drug use. During this period, “the average number of days missed due to illness was 1.47 for those who were not drug addicts but had used cannabis in the past month.” This figure was significantly lower (0.95%) for those who had never used the drug before.
The researchers said the number of days missed from work was self-reported by the study participants. Yang said their analysis did not look at the total number of people who used cannabis in the previous month, “so it’s not clear whether that number is higher or lower than the general population. That’s not something we looked at.”
Although occasional cannabis use was associated with work absences, people with CUD had “a 1.30 to 2.87 times higher incidence of work absence or skipping compared to those without CUD,” the researchers’ analysis shows.
Thus, the average number of days a person suffers from CUD could be as high as 4.22 working days per month (1.47 x 2.87 = 4.22).
The researchers concluded: “People who have recently used cannabis frequently and who have a substance abuse problem are more likely to miss work.” Some of that time is due to illness or injury related to cannabis use, the study found, and, potentially compounding the problem, “people who are injured or have had health problems may turn to cannabis to self-medicate, potentially exacerbating the cycle of absenteeism.”
Yang said their analysis revealed a pattern of behavior among cannabis users (work absenteeism) and did not necessarily demonstrate that this behavior was specifically caused by cannabis use. In other words, the study shows that cannabis users miss work more often than employees who do not use the drug.
“This is unfortunately something that we need to do more research on to better understand the direction of the phenomenon,” Yang said Monday. “The study is a cross-sectional study, so we’re looking at it at a point in time. It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg question: Does cannabis use cause these people to miss work, or are people who are more likely to miss work more likely to use cannabis as a result? So we don’t have answers to those questions. The study can’t answer that question, but it certainly suggests that we need to do more research, potentially looking at longitudinal studies and also qualitative studies, where we interview these patients, to see why they’re missing work and why they’re using cannabis.”
And how does getting too stoned at work compare to, say, alcohol abuse? Researchers say workers with a severe alcohol use disorder (ABD) are nearly two to three times more likely to miss three or more days of work per month than those without the disorder.
The researchers said in their conclusion that their findings “support the implementation of workplace drug prevention and treatment policies.”
