Alexander C Wagenaar
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 790928 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Alexander C Wagenaar |
| NOMBRES | Alexander C |
| APELLIDO | Wagenaar |
| FIRMA | WAGENAAR A C |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Minnesota |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1674-6774 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 152 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1994 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Primary Prevention of Drug Overdoses in Rural Low-Resource and Tribal Communities
Objectives. To determine the Connect intervention’s effectiveness in reducing substance use among rural and tribal adolescents in northeastern Oklahoma. Methods. We conducted a 2-arm cluster randomized trial from 2021 to 2024, with 10 high schools per condition. Results. At baseline, 919 students were enrolled (mean age = 15 years), and the majority were American Indian or White. Alcohol-use days during the past 30 days was reduced by 18% per sur…
Conceptual Confusion Leads Policy Evaluation Astray
A 2023 Cochrane review of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) of "physical interventions to...reduce the spread of respiratory viruses" 1 generated controversy and confusion in concluding that "wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratoryconfirmed influenza/SARS-CoV-2 compared to not wearing masks." 1 Some readers saw proof that "mask mandates were a bust," 2 while others pointed to the engineer…
Effects of State-Level Earned Income Tax Credit Laws on Birth Outcomes by Race and Ethnicity
Purpose: Health disparities persist in birth outcomes by mother's income, education, and race in the United States. Disadvantaged mothers may experience benefit from supplements to family income, such as the earned income tax credit (EITC). We examined the effects of state-level EITCs on birth outcomes among women with a high school education or less, stratified by race and ethnicity. Methods: A quasi-experimental multistate and multiyear differe…
Effects of changes in earned income tax credit
Poverty has numerous deleterious effects on health, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the major policy tool used to alleviate poverty in the U.S. We evaluate effects of four distinct changes in earned income tax credit law in Washington, DC on maternal behaviors and infant outcomes. An interrupted time-series design was used with 312 monthly measures from 1990 through 2015 analyzed in 2018 (total n = 225,933 births). States with no EITC …
Livingston et al. Respond
AffiliationsMelvin D. Livingston is with the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of North Texas Health Science Center, Fort Worth. Tracey E. Barnett is with the Department of Health Behavior and Health Systems, School of Public Health, University of North Texas Health Science Center. Chris Delcher is with the Department of Health Outcomes and Policy, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesv…
Effects of Alcohol Interventions on Other Drug Use in the Cherokee Nation
Objectives. To evaluate effects of 2 alcohol prevention interventions—Communities Mobilizing for Change on Alcohol (CMCA), a community organizing intervention designed to reduce youth alcohol access, and CONNECT, an individual-level screening and brief intervention approach—on other drug use outcomes. Methods. We conducted a community intervention trial with quarterly surveys over 3 years (2012–2015) of high school students living within the juri…
Recreational Cannabis Legalization and Opioid-Related Deaths in Colorado, 2000–2015
Objectives. To examine the association between Colorado’s legalization of recreational cannabis use and opioid-related deaths. Methods. We used an interrupted time-series design (2000–2015) to compare changes in level and slope of monthly opioid-related deaths before and after Colorado stores began selling recreational cannabis. We also describe the percent change in opioid-related deaths by comparing the unadjusted model-smoothed number of death…
Multilevel Prevention Trial of Alcohol Use Among American Indian and White High School Students in the Cherokee Nation
Objectives. To evaluate the effectiveness of a multilevel intervention designed to prevent underage alcohol use among youths living in the Cherokee Nation. Methods. We randomly assigned 6 communities to a control, Communities Mobilizing for Change on Alcohol (CMCA; a community-organizing intervention targeting alcohol access) only, CONNECT (a school-based universal screening and brief intervention) only, or a combined condition. We collected quar…
Effects of state-level Earned Income Tax Credit laws in the U.S. on maternal health behaviors and infant health outcomes
Using routine health information systems for well-designed health evaluations in low- and middle-income countries
Routine health information systems (RHISs) are in place in nearly every country and provide routinely collected full-coverage records on all levels of health system service delivery. However, these rich sources of data are regularly overlooked for evaluating causal effects of health programmes due to concerns regarding completeness, timeliness, representativeness and accuracy. Using Mozambique's national RHIS (Módulo Básico) as an illustrative ex…
Prescription and Illicit Opioid Deaths and the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program in Florida
Prescription and Illicit Opioid Deaths and the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program in Florida Affiliation Chris Delcher PhD, Yanning Wang MS, Alexander C. Wagenaar PhD, Bruce A. Goldberger PhD, Robert L. Cook MD, MPH, and Mildred M. Maldonado-Molina PhDChris Delcher, Alexander C. Wagenaar, and Mildred M. Maldonado-Molina are with Department of Health Outcomes and Policy & Institute for Child Health Policy, University of Florida College of Medici…
The Effect of an Increased Minimum Wage on Infant Mortality and Birth Weight
Objectives. To investigate the effects of state minimum wage laws on low birth weight and infant mortality in the United States. Methods. We estimated the effects of state-level minimum wage laws using a difference-in-differences approach on rates of low birth weight ( Results. Across all models, a dollar increase in the minimum wage above the federal level was associated with a 1% to 2% decrease in low birth weight births and a 4% decrease in po…
Effects of a 2009 Illinois Alcohol Tax Increase on Fatal Motor Vehicle Crashes
Objectives. We examined the effects of a 2009 increase in alcohol taxes in Illinois on alcohol-related fatal motor vehicle crashes. Methods. We used an interrupted time-series design, with intrastate and cross-state comparisons and measurement derived from driver alcohol test results, for 104 months before and 28 months after enactment. Our analyses used autoregressive moving average and generalized linear mixed Poisson models. We examined both p…
High Alcohol Concentration Products Associated With Poverty and State Alcohol Policies
Objectives. We examined the associations among zip code demographics, the state alcohol policy environment, and the retail outlet availability of multiple fruit-flavored alcoholic drinks in a can (MFAC). Methods. In a nationally representative sample of zip codes (n = 872), we merged data from 4 sources: publicly available marketing information from 2 major MFAC producers, the US Census Bureau, state alcohol regulatory agencies, and recent resear…
Developing Public Health Regulations for Marijuana
Until November 2012, no modern jurisdiction had removed the prohibition on the commercial production, distribution, and sale of marijuana for nonmedical purposes—not even the Netherlands. Government agencies in Colorado and Washington are now charged with granting production and processing licenses and developing regulations for legal marijuana, and other states and countries may follow. Our goal is not to address whether marijuana legalization i…
Effects of State Medical Marijuana Laws on Adolescent Marijuana Use
Objectives. Medical marijuana laws (MMLs) have been suggested as a possible cause of increases in marijuana use among adolescents in the United States. We evaluated the effects of MMLs on adolescent marijuana use from 2003 through 2011. Methods. We used data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and a difference-in-differences design to evaluate the effects of passage of state MMLs on adolescent marijuana use. The states examined (Montana, Rhode Is…
Critical Opportunities for Public Health Law
Although legal interventions are responsible for many sentinel public health achievements, law is underutilized as a tool for advancing population health. Our purpose was to identify critical opportunities for public health lawmaking. We articulated key criteria and illustrated their use with 5 examples. These opportunities involve significant health problems that are potentially amenable to change through law and for which an effective legal int…
Effects of Smoke-Free Laws on Alcohol-Related Car Crashes in California and New York
We examined effects of New York and California’s statewide smoke-free restaurant and bar polices on alcohol-related car crash fatalities. We used an interrupted time-series design from 1982 to 2008, with 312 monthly observations, to examine the effect of each state’s law on single-vehicle-nighttime crashes and crashes involving a driver with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 grams per deciliter or greater. Implementation of New York and Calif…
Effects of Alcohol Tax and Price Policies on Morbidity and Mortality
Objectives. We systematically reviewed the effects of alcohol taxes and prices on alcohol-related morbidity and mortality to assess their public health impact. Methods. We searched 12 databases, along with articles’ reference lists, for studies providing estimates of the relationship between alcohol taxes and prices and measures of risky behavior or morbidity and mortality, then coded for effect sizes and numerous population and study characteris…
Effects of beverage alcohol price and tax levels on drinking
Aims We conducted a systematic review of studies examining relationships between measures of beverage alcohol tax or price levels and alcohol sales or self‐reported drinking. A total of 112 studies of alcohol tax or price effects were found, containing1003 estimates of the tax/price–consumption relationship. Design Studies included analyses of alternative outcome measures, varying subgroups of the population, several statistical models, and using…
Effects of Alcohol Tax Increases on Alcohol-Related Disease Mortality in Alaska
Objective. We evaluated the effects of tax increases on alcoholic beverages in 1983 and 2002 on alcohol-related disease mortality in Alaska. Methods. We used a quasi-experimental design with quarterly measures of mortality from 1976 though 2004, and we included other states for comparison. Our statistical approach combined an autoregressive integrated moving average model with structural parameters in interrupted time-series models. Results. We o…
Public Opinion in Puerto Rico on Alcohol Control Policies
This article discusses the first study to assess public opinion of alcohol policies in Puerto Rico. In 2001, a telephone survey of 514 adults on the island assessed levels of support for 20 alcohol control policies covering five domains: (a) raising alcohol taxes, (b) restricting alcohol consumption in public places, (c) punishing adult providers of alcohol, (d) restricting youth access to alcohol, and (e) restricting marketing of alcohol. Result…
Can neighborhood associations be allies in health policy efforts? Political activity among neighborhood associations
We examined organizational characteristics and types of political actions of neighborhood associations, and factors influencing the amount of political activity among the associations. We hypothesized that four neighborhood characteristics (population size, income, educational level, and percentage of owner‐occupied households) and six organizational characteristics (budget, number of staff, size of board, newsletter publication, coalition involv…
Secondhand effects of student alcohol use reported by neighbors of colleges
Liability of Commercial and Social Hosts for Alcohol-Related Injuries
Legal standards for liability of commercial sellers and social providers of alcoholic beverages are affected by social norms concerning accountability and responsibility. Using a nationwide probability sample telephone survey of 7,021 U.S. residents, we conducted a randomized experiment in which each subject was asked to respond to multiple vignettes. The vignettes told stories of drinking situations, systematically varying dimensions concerning …
Project Northland
OBJECTIVES. Project Northland is an efficacy trial with the goal of preventing or reducing alcohol use among young adolescents by using a multilevel, communitywide approach. METHODS. Conducted in 24 school districts and adjacent communities in northeastern Minnesota since 1991, the intervention targets the class of 1998 (sixth-grade students in 1991) and has been implemented for 3 school years (1991 to 1994). The intervention consists of social-b…
The effects of community policies to reduce youth access to tobacco
OBJECTIVES: This study tested the hypothesis that adoption and implementation of local policies regarding youth access to tobacco can affect adolescent smoking. METHODS: A randomized community trial was conducted in 14 Minnesota communities. Seven intervention communities participated in a 32-month community-organizing effort to mobilize citizens and activate the community. The goal was to change ordinances, merchant policies and practices, and e…
Effects of state-level Earned Income Tax Credit laws in the U.S. on maternal health behaviors and infant health outcomes
The Effect of an Increased Minimum Wage on Infant Mortality and Birth Weight
Objectives. To investigate the effects of state minimum wage laws on low birth weight and infant mortality in the United States. Methods. We estimated the effects of state-level minimum wage laws using a difference-in-differences approach on rates of low birth weight ( Results. Across all models, a dollar increase in the minimum wage above the federal level was associated with a 1% to 2% decrease in low birth weight births and a 4% decrease in po…
Secondhand effects of student alcohol use reported by neighbors of colleges
Developing Public Health Regulations for Marijuana
Until November 2012, no modern jurisdiction had removed the prohibition on the commercial production, distribution, and sale of marijuana for nonmedical purposes—not even the Netherlands. Government agencies in Colorado and Washington are now charged with granting production and processing licenses and developing regulations for legal marijuana, and other states and countries may follow. Our goal is not to address whether marijuana legalization i…
Community Strategies for the Reduction of Youth Drinking
We review the core concepts and key propositions from several theories concerning youth alcohol use, and we integrate them into a single theory of drinking behavior. The resulting model illustrates the centrality of social interaction in influencing drinking and the critical importance of changing broader socioenvironmental conditions to achieve long-term reductions in youth drinking and associated problems. Two large-scale randomized community t…
Effects of State Medical Marijuana Laws on Adolescent Marijuana Use
Objectives. Medical marijuana laws (MMLs) have been suggested as a possible cause of increases in marijuana use among adolescents in the United States. We evaluated the effects of MMLs on adolescent marijuana use from 2003 through 2011. Methods. We used data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and a difference-in-differences design to evaluate the effects of passage of state MMLs on adolescent marijuana use. The states examined (Montana, Rhode Is…
Recreational Cannabis Legalization and Opioid-Related Deaths in Colorado, 2000–2015
Objectives. To examine the association between Colorado’s legalization of recreational cannabis use and opioid-related deaths. Methods. We used an interrupted time-series design (2000–2015) to compare changes in level and slope of monthly opioid-related deaths before and after Colorado stores began selling recreational cannabis. We also describe the percent change in opioid-related deaths by comparing the unadjusted model-smoothed number of death…
Multilevel Prevention Trial of Alcohol Use Among American Indian and White High School Students in the Cherokee Nation
Objectives. To evaluate the effectiveness of a multilevel intervention designed to prevent underage alcohol use among youths living in the Cherokee Nation. Methods. We randomly assigned 6 communities to a control, Communities Mobilizing for Change on Alcohol (CMCA; a community-organizing intervention targeting alcohol access) only, CONNECT (a school-based universal screening and brief intervention) only, or a combined condition. We collected quar…
Using routine health information systems for well-designed health evaluations in low- and middle-income countries
Routine health information systems (RHISs) are in place in nearly every country and provide routinely collected full-coverage records on all levels of health system service delivery. However, these rich sources of data are regularly overlooked for evaluating causal effects of health programmes due to concerns regarding completeness, timeliness, representativeness and accuracy. Using Mozambique's national RHIS (Módulo Básico) as an illustrative ex…
High Alcohol Concentration Products Associated With Poverty and State Alcohol Policies
Objectives. We examined the associations among zip code demographics, the state alcohol policy environment, and the retail outlet availability of multiple fruit-flavored alcoholic drinks in a can (MFAC). Methods. In a nationally representative sample of zip codes (n = 872), we merged data from 4 sources: publicly available marketing information from 2 major MFAC producers, the US Census Bureau, state alcohol regulatory agencies, and recent resear…
Effects of Smoke-Free Laws on Alcohol-Related Car Crashes in California and New York
We examined effects of New York and California’s statewide smoke-free restaurant and bar polices on alcohol-related car crash fatalities. We used an interrupted time-series design from 1982 to 2008, with 312 monthly observations, to examine the effect of each state’s law on single-vehicle-nighttime crashes and crashes involving a driver with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 grams per deciliter or greater. Implementation of New York and Calif…
Effects of Alcohol Tax Increases on Alcohol-Related Disease Mortality in Alaska
Objective. We evaluated the effects of tax increases on alcoholic beverages in 1983 and 2002 on alcohol-related disease mortality in Alaska. Methods. We used a quasi-experimental design with quarterly measures of mortality from 1976 though 2004, and we included other states for comparison. Our statistical approach combined an autoregressive integrated moving average model with structural parameters in interrupted time-series models. Results. We o…
Alcohol Policy
This paper compares alcohol policies under debate in U.S. state legislatures with policies that have been the focus of research attention. We reviewed the research literature to identify empirical studies of each policy and types of outcome variables analyzed. The two most evaluated alcohol control policies are the minimum legal drinking age and excise tax. Eight other policies had 20 or more studies evaluating them. The remaining alcohol policie…
Prescription and Illicit Opioid Deaths and the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program in Florida
Prescription and Illicit Opioid Deaths and the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program in Florida Affiliation Chris Delcher PhD, Yanning Wang MS, Alexander C. Wagenaar PhD, Bruce A. Goldberger PhD, Robert L. Cook MD, MPH, and Mildred M. Maldonado-Molina PhDChris Delcher, Alexander C. Wagenaar, and Mildred M. Maldonado-Molina are with Department of Health Outcomes and Policy & Institute for Child Health Policy, University of Florida College of Medici…
Public Opinion in Puerto Rico on Alcohol Control Policies
This article discusses the first study to assess public opinion of alcohol policies in Puerto Rico. In 2001, a telephone survey of 514 adults on the island assessed levels of support for 20 alcohol control policies covering five domains: (a) raising alcohol taxes, (b) restricting alcohol consumption in public places, (c) punishing adult providers of alcohol, (d) restricting youth access to alcohol, and (e) restricting marketing of alcohol. Result…
Can neighborhood associations be allies in health policy efforts? Political activity among neighborhood associations
We examined organizational characteristics and types of political actions of neighborhood associations, and factors influencing the amount of political activity among the associations. We hypothesized that four neighborhood characteristics (population size, income, educational level, and percentage of owner‐occupied households) and six organizational characteristics (budget, number of staff, size of board, newsletter publication, coalition involv…
Liability of Commercial and Social Hosts for Alcohol-Related Injuries
Legal standards for liability of commercial sellers and social providers of alcoholic beverages are affected by social norms concerning accountability and responsibility. Using a nationwide probability sample telephone survey of 7,021 U.S. residents, we conducted a randomized experiment in which each subject was asked to respond to multiple vignettes. The vignettes told stories of drinking situations, systematically varying dimensions concerning …
Primary Prevention of Drug Overdoses in Rural Low-Resource and Tribal Communities
Objectives. To determine the Connect intervention’s effectiveness in reducing substance use among rural and tribal adolescents in northeastern Oklahoma. Methods. We conducted a 2-arm cluster randomized trial from 2021 to 2024, with 10 high schools per condition. Results. At baseline, 919 students were enrolled (mean age = 15 years), and the majority were American Indian or White. Alcohol-use days during the past 30 days was reduced by 18% per sur…
Effects of Alcohol Interventions on Other Drug Use in the Cherokee Nation
Objectives. To evaluate effects of 2 alcohol prevention interventions—Communities Mobilizing for Change on Alcohol (CMCA), a community organizing intervention designed to reduce youth alcohol access, and CONNECT, an individual-level screening and brief intervention approach—on other drug use outcomes. Methods. We conducted a community intervention trial with quarterly surveys over 3 years (2012–2015) of high school students living within the juri…
Effects of a 2009 Illinois Alcohol Tax Increase on Fatal Motor Vehicle Crashes
Objectives. We examined the effects of a 2009 increase in alcohol taxes in Illinois on alcohol-related fatal motor vehicle crashes. Methods. We used an interrupted time-series design, with intrastate and cross-state comparisons and measurement derived from driver alcohol test results, for 104 months before and 28 months after enactment. Our analyses used autoregressive moving average and generalized linear mixed Poisson models. We examined both p…
Community Strategies for the Reduction of Youth Drinking
We review the core concepts and key propositions from several theories concerning youth alcohol use, and we integrate them into a single theory of drinking behavior. The resulting model illustrates the centrality of social interaction in influencing drinking and the critical importance of changing broader socioenvironmental conditions to achieve long-term reductions in youth drinking and associated problems. Two large-scale randomized community t…
Project Northland
OBJECTIVES. Project Northland is an efficacy trial with the goal of preventing or reducing alcohol use among young adolescents by using a multilevel, communitywide approach. METHODS. Conducted in 24 school districts and adjacent communities in northeastern Minnesota since 1991, the intervention targets the class of 1998 (sixth-grade students in 1991) and has been implemented for 3 school years (1991 to 1994). The intervention consists of social-b…
Civic participation by 18- to 20-year-olds as a predictor of support for alcohol control policies
Evidence is accumulating that federal, state, and local alcohol control policies effectively reduce alcohol consumption and subsequent alcohol-related problems among young adults (Toomey et al., 1993; Wagenaar & Farrell, 1989; Ritson, 1994; Anderson & Lehto, 1994). Increasing the legal age for consumption of alcoholic beverages from 18 years to 21 years has been associated with reduced traffic fatality rates (O'Malley & Wagenaar, 1991) and with a…
The effects of community policies to reduce youth access to tobacco
OBJECTIVES: This study tested the hypothesis that adoption and implementation of local policies regarding youth access to tobacco can affect adolescent smoking. METHODS: A randomized community trial was conducted in 14 Minnesota communities. Seven intervention communities participated in a 32-month community-organizing effort to mobilize citizens and activate the community. The goal was to change ordinances, merchant policies and practices, and e…
Communities mobilizing for change on alcohol
Communities Mobilizing for Change on Alcohol (CMCA) is a 15-community randomized trial designed to develop, implement, and evaluate a 21⁄2 year community organizing intervention to change policies and practices of major community institutions. Pre- and post-data were collected via: surveys of high school students, surveys of youth age 18–20, surveys of alcohol retailers, alcohol purchase attempts, content analyses of media coverage, arrest and ca…
Communities mobilizing for change on alcohol
Communities Mobilizing for Change on Alcohol (CMCA) is a 15-community randomized trial designed to develop, implement, and evaluate a 21⁄2 year community organizing intervention to change policies and practices of major community institutions. Pre- and post-data were collected via: surveys of high school students, surveys of youth age 18–20, surveys of alcohol retailers, alcohol purchase attempts, content analyses of media coverage, arrest and ca…
The Value of Interrupted Time-Series Experiments for Community Intervention Research
Alcohol Policy
This paper compares alcohol policies under debate in U.S. state legislatures with policies that have been the focus of research attention. We reviewed the research literature to identify empirical studies of each policy and types of outcome variables analyzed. The two most evaluated alcohol control policies are the minimum legal drinking age and excise tax. Eight other policies had 20 or more studies evaluating them. The remaining alcohol policie…
Liability of Commercial and Social Hosts for Alcohol-Related Injuries
Legal standards for liability of commercial sellers and social providers of alcoholic beverages are affected by social norms concerning accountability and responsibility. Using a nationwide probability sample telephone survey of 7,021 U.S. residents, we conducted a randomized experiment in which each subject was asked to respond to multiple vignettes. The vignettes told stories of drinking situations, systematically varying dimensions concerning …
Can neighborhood associations be allies in health policy efforts? Political activity among neighborhood associations
We examined organizational characteristics and types of political actions of neighborhood associations, and factors influencing the amount of political activity among the associations. We hypothesized that four neighborhood characteristics (population size, income, educational level, and percentage of owner‐occupied households) and six organizational characteristics (budget, number of staff, size of board, newsletter publication, coalition involv…
Secondhand effects of student alcohol use reported by neighbors of colleges
Public Opinion in Puerto Rico on Alcohol Control Policies
This article discusses the first study to assess public opinion of alcohol policies in Puerto Rico. In 2001, a telephone survey of 514 adults on the island assessed levels of support for 20 alcohol control policies covering five domains: (a) raising alcohol taxes, (b) restricting alcohol consumption in public places, (c) punishing adult providers of alcohol, (d) restricting youth access to alcohol, and (e) restricting marketing of alcohol. Result…
Effects of beverage alcohol price and tax levels on drinking
Aims We conducted a systematic review of studies examining relationships between measures of beverage alcohol tax or price levels and alcohol sales or self‐reported drinking. A total of 112 studies of alcohol tax or price effects were found, containing1003 estimates of the tax/price–consumption relationship. Design Studies included analyses of alternative outcome measures, varying subgroups of the population, several statistical models, and using…
Effects of Alcohol Tax Increases on Alcohol-Related Disease Mortality in Alaska
Objective. We evaluated the effects of tax increases on alcoholic beverages in 1983 and 2002 on alcohol-related disease mortality in Alaska. Methods. We used a quasi-experimental design with quarterly measures of mortality from 1976 though 2004, and we included other states for comparison. Our statistical approach combined an autoregressive integrated moving average model with structural parameters in interrupted time-series models. Results. We o…
Effects of Alcohol Tax and Price Policies on Morbidity and Mortality
Objectives. We systematically reviewed the effects of alcohol taxes and prices on alcohol-related morbidity and mortality to assess their public health impact. Methods. We searched 12 databases, along with articles’ reference lists, for studies providing estimates of the relationship between alcohol taxes and prices and measures of risky behavior or morbidity and mortality, then coded for effect sizes and numerous population and study characteris…
Effects of State Medical Marijuana Laws on Adolescent Marijuana Use
Objectives. Medical marijuana laws (MMLs) have been suggested as a possible cause of increases in marijuana use among adolescents in the United States. We evaluated the effects of MMLs on adolescent marijuana use from 2003 through 2011. Methods. We used data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and a difference-in-differences design to evaluate the effects of passage of state MMLs on adolescent marijuana use. The states examined (Montana, Rhode Is…
Critical Opportunities for Public Health Law
Although legal interventions are responsible for many sentinel public health achievements, law is underutilized as a tool for advancing population health. Our purpose was to identify critical opportunities for public health lawmaking. We articulated key criteria and illustrated their use with 5 examples. These opportunities involve significant health problems that are potentially amenable to change through law and for which an effective legal int…
Effects of Smoke-Free Laws on Alcohol-Related Car Crashes in California and New York
We examined effects of New York and California’s statewide smoke-free restaurant and bar polices on alcohol-related car crash fatalities. We used an interrupted time-series design from 1982 to 2008, with 312 monthly observations, to examine the effect of each state’s law on single-vehicle-nighttime crashes and crashes involving a driver with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 grams per deciliter or greater. Implementation of New York and Calif…
Developing Public Health Regulations for Marijuana
Until November 2012, no modern jurisdiction had removed the prohibition on the commercial production, distribution, and sale of marijuana for nonmedical purposes—not even the Netherlands. Government agencies in Colorado and Washington are now charged with granting production and processing licenses and developing regulations for legal marijuana, and other states and countries may follow. Our goal is not to address whether marijuana legalization i…
Effects of a 2009 Illinois Alcohol Tax Increase on Fatal Motor Vehicle Crashes
Objectives. We examined the effects of a 2009 increase in alcohol taxes in Illinois on alcohol-related fatal motor vehicle crashes. Methods. We used an interrupted time-series design, with intrastate and cross-state comparisons and measurement derived from driver alcohol test results, for 104 months before and 28 months after enactment. Our analyses used autoregressive moving average and generalized linear mixed Poisson models. We examined both p…
High Alcohol Concentration Products Associated With Poverty and State Alcohol Policies
Objectives. We examined the associations among zip code demographics, the state alcohol policy environment, and the retail outlet availability of multiple fruit-flavored alcoholic drinks in a can (MFAC). Methods. In a nationally representative sample of zip codes (n = 872), we merged data from 4 sources: publicly available marketing information from 2 major MFAC producers, the US Census Bureau, state alcohol regulatory agencies, and recent resear…
Using routine health information systems for well-designed health evaluations in low- and middle-income countries
Routine health information systems (RHISs) are in place in nearly every country and provide routinely collected full-coverage records on all levels of health system service delivery. However, these rich sources of data are regularly overlooked for evaluating causal effects of health programmes due to concerns regarding completeness, timeliness, representativeness and accuracy. Using Mozambique's national RHIS (Módulo Básico) as an illustrative ex…
Prescription and Illicit Opioid Deaths and the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program in Florida
Prescription and Illicit Opioid Deaths and the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program in Florida Affiliation Chris Delcher PhD, Yanning Wang MS, Alexander C. Wagenaar PhD, Bruce A. Goldberger PhD, Robert L. Cook MD, MPH, and Mildred M. Maldonado-Molina PhDChris Delcher, Alexander C. Wagenaar, and Mildred M. Maldonado-Molina are with Department of Health Outcomes and Policy & Institute for Child Health Policy, University of Florida College of Medici…
The Effect of an Increased Minimum Wage on Infant Mortality and Birth Weight
Objectives. To investigate the effects of state minimum wage laws on low birth weight and infant mortality in the United States. Methods. We estimated the effects of state-level minimum wage laws using a difference-in-differences approach on rates of low birth weight ( Results. Across all models, a dollar increase in the minimum wage above the federal level was associated with a 1% to 2% decrease in low birth weight births and a 4% decrease in po…
Recreational Cannabis Legalization and Opioid-Related Deaths in Colorado, 2000–2015
Objectives. To examine the association between Colorado’s legalization of recreational cannabis use and opioid-related deaths. Methods. We used an interrupted time-series design (2000–2015) to compare changes in level and slope of monthly opioid-related deaths before and after Colorado stores began selling recreational cannabis. We also describe the percent change in opioid-related deaths by comparing the unadjusted model-smoothed number of death…
Medicine (27 obras) · Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes (20 obras) · Environmental health (19 obras) · Psychology (16 obras) · Political science (14 obras) · Demography (13 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Alcohol (11 obras) · Economics (11 obras) · Public health (11 obras)