Study Links Medical Cannabis Laws to Fewer Missed Workdays

States that legalize medical marijuana tend to see fewer workers calling out sick, and the reductions are largest in physically demanding jobs, according to a new peer-reviewed analysis of more than three decades of federal labor data.

The study¹, published in the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, links the adoption of state medical cannabis laws to a 6.9 percent decline in health-related workplace absenteeism — the rate at which employees miss work because of illness, injury, or other medical problems. Researchers at the University of Southern Maine and the University of Georgia drew on U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics records covering more than 20 million workers between the ages of 18 and 61, spanning 1990 through 2025. The more telling result is not the headline number but where the effect concentrates.

Where the reductions cluster

Manual laborers missed work roughly 39 percent less often in states with medical cannabis laws, the study found, with industrial machine operators and health-service workers close behind at about a third each. By sector, durable-goods manufacturing recorded the steepest drop, at 31 percent, followed by agriculture at 16 percent. The authors describe the reductions as concentrated “in settings where therapeutic use is likely to be most relevant” — jobs where chronic pain, physical strain, and repetitive injury are common reasons for missing work.

That gradient is the study’s central argument. If medical cannabis were cutting absences mainly by helping workers manage pain, the benefit should be largest in the occupations that generate the most pain, and that is broadly what the data show. The reductions thin out in lower-strain work: food preparation and construction occupations showed declines closer to 10 percent, and business-services absenteeism fell about 8 percent.

What an observational study can show

The analysis is observational, not a clinical trial, and that distinction governs how far the findings reach. The study does not track whether the workers who stayed on the job actually used cannabis; it compares how absenteeism changed across states before and after they adopted medical cannabis laws. That natural-experiment approach, standard in health and labor economics, can surface a strong and consistent association and rule out some competing explanations, but it cannot on its own prove that cannabis access caused the decline. The authors are careful with their verbs, framing the relationship as one that medical cannabis laws “appear to” reduce rather than asserting cause.

The same caution applies to what the study did not find. Recreational legalization showed no statistically significant effect on health-related absenteeism. The estimate pointed in the same direction as the medical-law result, but, in the authors’ words, it “was not measured with sufficient precision to achieve statistical significance” — a statement about uncertainty in the estimate, not proof that recreational laws have no effect.

That split fits earlier work. A 2021 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, not peer-reviewed but built on a similar design, examined recreational laws and workers’ compensation among older adults and reached a parallel conclusion. It found sizable reductions in workers’ comp claims and in longer-term work-limiting disabilities, which it attributed to improved “work capacity” from an added form of pain management, yet it detected no significant change in short-term health-related work absences. Two analyses landing on the same split, with effects on longer-run health measures but not on recreational-law absenteeism, make that therapeutic reading harder to dismiss as noise.

Legalization and use are different questions

A separate and frequently cited body of evidence appears to point the other way, and the difference is worth being precise about. Studies that measure individual cannabis use rather than state policy have generally found that workers who report frequent use — and especially those with cannabis use disorder — miss more work, not less. The two results are not necessarily in conflict. A policy that broadens medical access across a whole population can coexist with heavy individual use that raises absenteeism, because they measure different exposures. MyCannabis has examined the related question of whether cannabis users face higher workplace injury risk, where the answer hinges on whether use happens on or off the job. A finding about legalization does not settle a question about use.

Why it matters for employers

Absenteeism is one of the more measurable economic signals in the long debate over medical cannabis, and the authors frame their question around its price tag: missed workdays cost U.S. employers an estimated $225 billion a year. The findings also arrive as federal policy moves the other way on a related front. A congressional committee recently advanced a bill to bar federal workers’ compensation programs from covering medical marijuana, even as the Trump administration pursues rescheduling.

What the study leaves open matters as much as what it reports. It cannot identify which conditions drove the reduction, whether cannabis displaced opioids or other treatments, or how dosing and product type figure in — the kind of mechanisms that clinical research on medical cannabis for chronic pain is still working through. What it adds is population-scale evidence that, in the trades where bodies take the most wear, workers in medical-cannabis states are showing up more often.

References:

^{1. Amendah, Eklou R.; Babiarz, Patryk; and Rabindran, Kavitha, “Cannabis Laws and Health-Related Workplace Absenteeism in the United States” (2026). Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15555240.2026.2680016}