Trends in Self-Reporting of Marijuana Use; a Retrospective Study

Objectives: To investigate trends in self-reporting of marijuana use before and after recreational legalization of marijuana use, among patients attending the dental clinics, at the School of Dental Medicine, University of Nevada Las Vegas (SDM, UNLV).
Methods: A retrospective keyword search of the clinical notes of patient charts in axiUm™ was performed using the search keywords “marijuana”, “cannabis”, and “drug”. The inclusion criteria encompassed patients who were ≥ 21 years seen at UNLV School of Dental Medicine and self-reported use of Marijuana between the years of 2015/2016 and 2017/2018. The demographics and data were analyzed to determine whether the use of marijuana was medical or recreational in nature, as well as if the patients reported to current or former use and were analyzed using a Chi-square test.
Results: 653 patients reported the use of any type of marijuana (257 in 2015/2016 and 396 in 2017/2018). Average age of the reporting patients was 43 years; 61.7% of them were male while 38.3% were females. Eighty patients reported the use of medical marijuana (2015/2016) while in 2017/2018, only seventy-five patients reported its use. The recreational reporting was significantly high in 2017/2018 (N=321) when compared to the reported cases in 2015/2016 (N=177).
Conclusions: The trends in self-reporting of marijuana were significantly higher after legalization of recreational marijuana in the State of Nevada.