The Schedule III Shift: Cannabis Regulation, Research, and Risk

ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA, PH.D. holds the Elizabeth Garrett Chair in Health Policy, Economics & Law in the Health Policy and Management Department at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. Dr. Pacula also co-Chairs the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Forum on Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders, is a Senior Editor at Addiction, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Trained as an applied micro economist, Dr Pacula has been conducting evaluations of state public health policies and programs targeting risky behaviors by youth, mental health treatment, and substance use disorders for more than twenty-five years, applying advanced statistical methods appropriate for causal inference and working collaboratively with legal teams to improve measurement of meaningful aspects of policies influencing outcomes in these markets. Much of her published work focuses on the market for legal and illicit addictive intoxicants. In 1998 she joined the RAND Corporation as a research economist, where she spent the next 21 years working with colleagues in RAND Health and the Drug Policy Research Center evaluating state, federal and international public health policies and law enforcement strategies targeting risky behaviors, mental health, and substance use disorders. Over the years, she has done contract work for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, European Commission, UN Office of Drugs and Crime, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, as well as other state and national government agencies assisting in development of new methods to measure the size of illegal markets and the impact of alternative forms of regulation on them. She has been consistently funded by the NIH to evaluate cannabis, opioid, and alcohol policies since she completed her dissertation, and currently serves as the Co-Director of the RAND-USC Schaeffer Opioid Policy Tools and Information Center of Excellence (OPTIC), a P50 Research Center in its 8th year focused on identifying effective policies at reducing the harms from the opioid crisis by improving data and methods used to identify cost-effective strategies. She moved to USC’s Price School of Public Policy and Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics in 2019, where she continues her work on addiction policies and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in health economics and health policy.