Rosalie Liccardo Pacula is the Co-Director of the Drug Policy Research Center and Faculty with the Pardee RAND Graduate School, teaching graduate courses in Health Economics and Cost-Benefit Analysis. She got her Ph.D. in Economics from Duke University in 1995 and spent her first three years at the University of San Diego before coming to RAND. Her research has focused on a range of mental health and substance use health policy issues, criminal justice issues, and financing issues, including the impact of mental health parity on health care utilization and insurance offerings made by employers; the impact of state budget volatility on the provision of drug treatment services and access to substance abuse treatment; the impact of state and federal policy on alcohol and illicit drug markets; demand for alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs; methodological issues in measuring the size of illicit drug markets and illicit drug prices; and the impact of substance abuse and mental health co-morbidities on health care utilization and the cost of care. She has conducted a substantial amount of work evaluating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of national, state, and local public policies at diminishing substance use and abuse as well as their social costs, including crime, productivity losses, treatment, child welfare, and other problems. She wrote a book in 2003 with Wayne Hall entitled “Cannabis Use and Dependence: Public Health and Public Policy” published by Cambridge University Press and is considered one of the foremost experts on marijuana policy in the United States. Other work has been published in the top economics, health economics, and international journals. Dr. Pacula’s has been a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1997, participating in both the Health Economics and Children Program. From 2003 through 2007 she was a member of the National Institute of Drug Abuse’s Health Services Scientific Review Committee (NIDA-F) and prior to that served for two years on National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s Health Services Review Committee.
Articles
Altered State? Assessing How Marijuana Legalization in California Could Influence Marijuana Consumption and Public Budgets, RAND Occasional Paper OP315 (2010)
Marijuana Use and High School Drop Out: The Influence of Unobservables, Health Economics (2010)
In this study, we reconsider the relationship between heavy and persistent marijuana use and high...
Risk and Prices: The Role of User Sanctions in Marijuana Markets (with Beau Kilmer, Michael Grossman, and Frank Chaloupka), The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy (Contributions) (2010)
User sanctions influence the legal risk for consumers who engage in illegal drug markets. If...
Do Citizens Know Whether Their State Has Decriminalized Marijuana? Assessing the Perceptual Component of Deterrence Theory (with Robert MacCoun, Jamie Chriqui, Katherine Harris, and Peter Reuter), Review of Law & Economics (2009)
Deterrence theory proposes that legal compliance is influenced by the anticipated risk of legal sanctions....
Alcohol and marijuana use among college students: economic complements or substitutes? (with J Williams, Frank J. Chaloupka, and Henry Wechsler), Health Economics (2004)
Contributions to Books
Drug Prevention and its Impact on Substance Use, Earnings and Educational Outcomes, Targeting Investments in Children (2010)
What does it mean to decriminalize cannabis? A cross-national empirical examination, Advances in Health Economics and Health Services Research (2005)
Although frequently discussed as a singular policy, there is tremendous variation in the laws and...