The difference between medicinal and recreational marijuana has always been arbitrary. For example, after legalizing recreational cannabis, California initially required each cultivated seedling to be designated by growers as either a recreational or medicinal cannabis plant. From that point onward, each plant and its products maintained its designation all the way through retail sale. This process existed despite the fact that growers were free to designate any given seedling however they wished, depending on whatever they predicted their market would most need. Eventually, California relented to the fact that marijuana is marijuana. The same product sold for recreational users is sold to medicinal users. Today, the designation of whether a cannabis product is sold for one or the other purpose is made at the point of sale, with taxes forgone when a customer qualifies as a medicinal user. The fact that the same strains of cannabis are sold for both recreational and medicinal purposes has raised the question of whether medicinal users meet the criteria for Cannabis Use Disorder at the same or a different rate as recreational cannabis users.
This question has now been answered by meta-analyses of multiple studies of the rate of CUD among both recreational and medicinal cannabis users. Meta-analyses combine data from all available well-designed studies to assess the strength of scientific evidence and summarize reasonable conclusions. This methodology was used on the highest quality journal articles surveying CUD rates for both recreational and medicinal users to calculate overall estimates of risk.
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